Doing your (p)art
by Simon Handby in At home on 07.04.08
It sounds obvious, but one of the best ways to deal with rubbish is to not create it in the first place. Sadly, until retailers pull their fingers out and cut down on the amount of free junk that comes with much of what we buy, we’re stuck with piles of stuff to recycle.
For most of us, this means filling up a kerbside box or sorting stuff into bottle banks during the weekly supermarket trip, but we keep coming across artists with a better idea.
Six months ago we wrote about photographic artist Chris Jordan, who created huge montages to illustrate the scale of America’s waste problem. Not long afterwards, we heard of Anne Cohen, who was creating art from the unwanted fliers and junk mail posted through her front door.
To be fair, Anne’s completed spike covered in junk mail looks less like art, and more like, well, a spike covered in junk mail, but it’s the thought-provocation that counts.
One packaging habit that we’re finding it hard to kick is the plastic bag. But while we’re stuck with them, be thankful that we have artists like Joshua Allen Harris to make crazy art installations from discarded ones.
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