AdEx Collection

AdEx0009: Fintan Dawson

Museum of Contemporary Rubbish has teamed up with Advertising Exhibitions on a new rubbish collection.

Alice has written a brief inviting artists to contribute to a special collection by uploading images of their rubbish related to their practices to the AdEx Gallery.

ARTISTS' RUBBISH BRIEF

Rubbish is the rejected, redundant, broken, misprinted, off-cut, used up and consumed. We all produce rubbish from biological matter (see Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit (1961)) and daily waste like coffee cups, train tickets and newspapers, to household items like furniture and electrical goods that are eventually updated, replaced with a newer, shinier model or break beyond repair. Everything has a limited lifespan, including our own bodies which will too become waste scattered as ashes or buried in the ground one day.

As artists, we often use and re-use materials that other people may regard as rubbish; the found object and the Duchampian readymade are part of many contemporary practices. Some artists work directly with rubbish which is the subject of my current research project (see http://contemporaryrubbish.wordpress.com/ ) and many artists hoard particular materials that have potential to be used in the future.

Artists' rubbish is a specific kind of waste that provides a window into the creative process of each practice. Offcuts are the negatives of production that offer up scraps of detail of the processes involved and misprints and failed experiments provide intrigue into the artist's intention and what would pass the high standards we set ourselves. An empty cup of coffee drank over a chat with another artist might symbolise a breakthrough moment or an empty pack of paracetamol might symbolise too much indulgence at all those previews. Each redundant and rejected object has a narrative about its significance to practice and how it became to be classified as rubbish.

Our rubbish says a lot about us. Criminal investigators, unethical journalists and identity thieves root through people's bins to find evidence of activity and valuable information. Rubbish can also be given new value by others. Cases have been recorded of thefts from artists' studio bins of the likes of Robert Rauschenberg where the contents have been put up for sale without permission and, in 2010, Michael Landy produced Art Bin at South London Gallery where he invited the public to dispose of works of art as a “monument to creative failure.”

Andy Warhol famously never threw anything away that would later become the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Working materials, source materials, a personal collection of thousands of collectibles and ephemera, 608 Time Capsules (dated collections of material from the artist's daily life), the full run of Interview magazine, approximately 4,000 audiotapes scripts, diaries, and correspondence form these archives.

Artists' own detritus has been the subject of practices such as Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro's Deceased Estate (2004), Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), Richard Dupont's Assisted Head (2011), Amanda Ross-Ho's Restraining Order (2005), David MacRaild's Need Not Want Not (2005) (see DETRITUS), David Shapiro's Consumed (2003), Tom Friedman's Untitled (Eraser Shavings) (1990) (see LEFTOVERS), Marc Quinn's Self (Blood Head) (2006), Hans Schaubus's Remains of the Day (2011) (see REMAINS), as well my own project for HOARD (2012) collecting every item of rubbish from my art practice during 2012 that would have otherwise been thrown away. These artworks deal specifically with artists' shit (detritus/leftovers/remains) – as opposed to other people's shit; providing an autobiographical dimension to the materiality of waste.

As an artist/curator/writer/researcher in artists' uses of rubbish, interested in all of the above and more, I am inviting contributions to a new Artists' Rubbish project for Advertising Exhibitions.

Read the full brief here and contribute to the gallery: http://advertisingexhibitions.co.uk/brief.html