The window looked out on a brick wall and down into an alley full of New York air, the kind fit for cats and garbage.
Flannery O’Connor, “Judgement Day,” 1965
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) … When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s.
The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.
Pope Francis, “On the Environment,” 2015
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, “On Creative Destruction,” c. 1980
Art is a demon. A demon that drags you along. Its not something you can stop, even if you should. Maybe you go insane. Your wife leaves, your kids run away. You throw yourself away to be an artist.
Ushio Shinohara, From Cutie and the Boxer, 2013
It is an art of contingency that traces a new lineage in which the pauperism of Arte Povera is rediscovered but tuned into a society that is far from poor. The work of many sculptors at the beginning of this century, in fact, depicts a society that is so dramatically suffering under the weight of toxic waste that it is now forced to turn garbage into an art form.
Massimiliano Gioni, “Ask the Dust” from Unmonumental, 2007
nickkahler reblogged
Eben Goff, Flood Cubes, Los Angeles, CA, c. 2013 (via watershedplus)
'Artist Eben Goff exposed the detritus filled waterways of Los Angeles by bolting metal frame onto the bed of the channelised Ballona Creek, in southwestern Los Angeles County. The constructions caught hold of floating matter that passed by for a week.'
UGO Architecture and Design, Let's Talk About Garbage Proposal, Dharavi + Derona, India, 2013 (via dprbarca)
"The land (and people living there) has been put up for sale by the city authorities.... In order to address social negativity, perhaps it is necessary to provide a reflection of it instead of fake philanthropy and naive do-gooders."
UGO's solution is a bifurcated Unite d'Habitation, programmatically distributed with one side of the double-loaded corridor as residential, the other as commercial / reclamation space.