Trash has had a place in avant-garde art since the early twentieth century, when Marcel Duchamp introduced the idea of the readymade: any slightly modified, often discarded, manufactured object selected and displayed as an art work. From 1959, Gustav Metzger began writing manifestos for what he called “auto-destructive art,” art that resulted from its own destruction, an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist public art form committed to social and political justice (Wilson 143). For many art historians and cultural critics, the subject of trash and art is associated with discrete art objects or installations made from waste material sourced from junk shops or the street that are transformed into works of art through their alteration and presentation in a gallery, where anything can become a commodity.
One perspective on art and trash that considers these questions can be found in the work of the social anthropologist Michael Thompson. Writing in the late 1970s, he addressed the status of art and rubbish in relation to production and consumption. His categories of “durables” (valued objects held in museums), “rubbish” (discarded objects), and “transients” (objects in circulation that are not yet classified as either durables or rubbish) identified different states of value granted to objects, states that were changeable and dynamic and could be created and destroyed.
https://nanocrit.com/issues/issue7/trash-trash-art
“to think about what they don’t want to think about” because disposal breaks the connection between object and consumer, vanquishing waste from the consumer’s mind by making it appear to disappear.
Another more recent work that brings together a unique chronicling of waste, the process of decay, and more recent forms of environmental art can be found in Joshua Sofaer’s The Rubbish Collection at the Science Museum, London (16 June–14 September 2014), part of the museum’s Climate Changing program.
One iconic historic reference to this idea is the Daily Mirror’s 1976 headline, “WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH,” an attempt to capture the public outrage at The Tate Gallery’s (now Tate Britain’s) purchase of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966), a purchase funded by British taxpayers during an economic slump.
The headline labeling the work as rubbish played with the idea that it was both trash and trashy, even though it was made out of new materials—firebricks—and nothing else. Recently turned into a painting by the collective Claire Fontaine, this iconic headline set the stage for establishing Equivalent VIII, which came to be known as “The Bricks,” as the epitome of “rubbish,” low quality contemporary art.