Tag: waste

“On Found Poetry” by John Robert Colombo.  From Open Poetry, (ed. Gross & Quasha, 1973)

• Found art is the most conservation-minded of the arts, for it recycles the waste of the past and reuses it in a surprisingly different way, thereby giving the original a new lease on life. “Collage seems to me the one medium most suited to the age of conspicuous waste,” painter Harold Town wrote, “and it’s marvellous to think of the garbage of our age becoming the art of our time.”

• An especially valuable function of found art and found poetry in particular is its ability to make us respond aesthetically to the universe around us, not just to those separate parts of the world called works of art. It is possible to act as if the universe itself were an immense piece of art, a collage perhaps. But does this spell the doom of art? As the Czech poet Miroslav Holub wryly observed, “There is poetry in everything. That is the biggest argument against poetry.”

If the world is to be laid waste, as Revelations predicts, if it is to return to the tohu bohu, the formless void with which Genesis opens, then waste itself is to become universally abundant; nothing is to become everything, lessening will become synonymous with universal expansion. At the end of history, the Bible predicts, as at the beginning, a wasted, blasted nothingness will become extremely, absolutely plentiful.

Source: muse-jhu-edu.weblib.lib.umt.edu

stuart brisley

And for today… nothing, 1972

Performance

Gallery House Goethe Institute, London

Performance duration: App 2 hours each day for 2 weeks.

I lay in a bath of black water in the bathroom of Gallery House for approximately 2 hours each day for two weeks.

In the wash basin and on a ledge next to the bath I laid out some offal. During the two weeks the offal decayed, flies laying eggs and maggots hatching out to feed.

There was a low light in the bathroom so it was difficult to see exactly what was in there. The door was left ajar. The only sign of movement was that of a body rising and falling in the water when breathing in and out. The stench of offal was overpowering.

I made a film based on this work entitled Arbeit Macht Frei (16mm 20 mins). The film is in black and white and colour. It reflects the total rejection of what lay behind the title – the words enshrined on every Nazi concentration camp, translates as Work Makes Free. It is a deliberation on death.