thinking of trash!!

Fifty years ago, junk was junk, not “antiques” or “collectibles.” Almost anything could be had at the Flea Market for virtually nothing. It was like the unconscious mind of Capitalism itself: it contained the rejected or repressed surplus of objects, the losers, the outcast thoughts. There, in a real place, the sewing machine met the umbrella on

What was more, he expected it to do so at the high tide of American materialism, when all the agreements about doctrine and symbol that had given the religious artists of the past their subjects had been cancelled. Rothko would have needed a miracle to bring this off, and the miracle, naturally enough, did not happen. But his efforts to make it do

But its effect has not been (as artists in the twenties hoped) to convey us towards the heart of reality, wherever that organ may be, but rather to insulate and estrange us from reality itself, turning everything into disposable spectacle: catastrophe, love, war, soap. Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.

If one buys a half-pound of bacon in a supermarket, one gets an ounce and a half of cardboard and plastic wrapping with it. If one stocks up on toilet items in a drugstore, razor, blades, shaving soap, lip-salve, they leave a pyramid of packaging behind. If an electric iron goes on the fritz, who takes it to the repairman? It is easier to get a new

During the fifties, some American artists began to realize what the Dadaists in Europe had known about three decades before: that there might be a subject in this landscape of waste, this secret language of junk, because societies reveal themselves in what they throw away.

A remarkable passage in one of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, written from The Hague five years before Schwitters’ birth, sets the context for this saint of reclamation: This morning I visited the place where the streetcleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful!

certainly no artist before van Gogh would have carried the pathetic fallacy to such a pitch. 2.3Schwitters took it even further. Instead of painting junk, he transposed it into art – the thing in itself, tatty, stained, peeling, rusty, bent, torn, crumpled, but capable of redeeming itself through infinite combination, under the collaborative hand