Turning Trash into Treasures

Everywhere you go, it lurks. It stinks up your dorm, and your roommate never takes it out. It is slowly taking over the world. But for some Harvard students, the refuse of a dorm room is more than just a call for DormAid. Around campus, various groups are using trash to create “green art” in the form of sculpture, cartoons, and clothing. These trash crafts represent a way to bring awareness to the wasteful ways of Harvard students, even as some use green products in their quest to create great art.


MOTHER (NATURE) WOULD BE PROUD

This fall, a Resource Efficiency Program (REP) initiative to encourage students to exchange incandescent bulbs for more environmentally friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) was almost too successful. Students flocked to exchange their gauche bulbs for the trendier CFLs, leaving REP sitting on thousands of the old-fashioned ones. Obviously, a program dedicated to resource efficiency couldn’t hide the stack behind the trash like the rest of us. What to do?

A figurative light bulb popped above the head of Adams House REP Prabhas Pokharel ’09, whose artistic vision was “inspired by the situation.” REP’s proposal plans to turn the exchanged incandescent bulbs into a human-sized sculptural interpretation of a CFL. For those of you who haven’t exchanged your bulbs yet, think of a gigantic spiral.

The group plans to unveil the tour de force at the Arts First festival this May. According to Joyce Lin ’08, head of the Cabot House REP, University Operations Services is “extremely anal” about where the sculpture is placed. (This is presumably because the risk of broken glass is so high—eco-terrorism, anyone?).

Pokharel admits that while the CFL sculpture is meant to be artistic, it is more about delivering an environmental message than an artistic statement. Pokharel says he’s unsure whether the sculpture will be a good piece of art, technically speaking. But it doesn’t have to be.

“Art puts environmental consciousness in the stream of thought, complementing other messages,” says Pokharel, noting that he would be happy “if [the sculpture] gets one person psyched about environmental issues.”

On a lighter note, the Campus Energy Reduction Cartoon (CERtoon) contest proves that green art does not necessarily have to be composed of green materials. The program rewards enviro-artists with goodies ranging from an iPod nano to gift certificates to Harvard Square shops and restaurants.

REP co-captain Hayley J. Fink ’08 says that CERtoon “helps [students to] think critically about issues they wouldn’t think about before in a creative way...it’s another avenue to reach people.” The winning cartoons are then displayed in Houses and printed in The Crimson.


L’ART POUR L’ART

Lowell House art tutor and MIT architecture graduate student Kevin M. Moore holds art workshops that work on incorporating a “diversity of media,” including recycled content. He is quick to point out that garbage art can be judged solely on its artistic merits, independent of any environmentally conscious message it might send.

“Very well known artists have contracts with particular manufacturers...recycled mobile phones, hair dryers, irons, ironing boards,” says Moore. “Artists are [always] looking for cheap materials.”

Meredith M. Lanoue ’06-’07, a budding green artist, eagerly waits for Cambridge trash day every week to gather the materials for her art.

“Right now I have a box of CD cases that I took out of someone’s trash,” says Lanoue. “It takes a lot of self control. I’ll go by someone’s trash and it’ll take me talking to myself, convincing myself to not take some of the stuff back.”

Currently, she is working on a sculpture to raise awareness of how much people throw out that also addresses sustainable building design. Lanoue hopes to “challenge definitions of ‘disposable’ and what is trash.” She also recently submitted a proposal to get funding for student garbage art projects.

“My goal is to make [garbage art] aesthetically pleasing so that someone who looks at it and could care less that it’s made from recycled material could still appreciate it for it’s artistic value,” says Lanoue. “I hope most people that deal with the project would get at least the artistic side if not the environmental side alone.”

Students have even used green issues as the basis for their senior theses. According to an April 26, 2006 article in The Crimson, Jane H. Van Cleef ’06 opened a store in Inman Square that sold a line of self-designed, water-resistant clothes and accessories as part of her visual and environmental studies thesis. She called it The Climate Change Preparedness Center.

Perhaps the most zealous trash warrior is Alex K. Pasternack ’05, a former Environmental Action Committee publicity chair, who put on a garbage art (pronounced gar-BAJ or alternatively spelled gARTbage) show for Earth Day 2005. Speaking from his home in Beijing, he talked about his fascination with garbage and desire to challenge other people. “It’s not out of sight, out of mind. Interestingly, it’s in sight, out of mind,” Pasternack says.

Pasternack is hopeful for the future of art and garbage, citing the past success of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 work Fountain, which was “essentially a toilet bowl that he found in the garbage. A mass-produced urinal. He put his name on it and it went into a museum...he questioned ‘what exactly is art?’”

One piece of Harvard gartbage that he fondly remembers is a sculpture a student produced using cigarette butts and chewing gum. “They were cigarettes she had smoked and gum she chewed to stop smoking. The thing smelled awful; it smelled like a combination of menthol and some kind of chemical weapon,” recalls Pasternack. In a cruel example of Mother Nature not knowing what’s good for her, on the actual day of Pasternack’s show, rain dampened student turnout and forced them to throw out much of the trash art; this time it would not be resurrected.


ONE MAN’S TRASH…

Whatever their motivations, green artists are often on the cutting edge of social issues and avant-garde art. According to Moore, these projects are doing exactly what art should do—making a profound impact on society.

“At least it’s appealing trash, at least there’s a purpose,” says Lin. “Why throw it away if we can put it to some use?”

Perhaps one man’s trash can be another man’s profound artistic statement.