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  The problematic of waste has become central to socioeconomic life – and to such an extent that a new field of study has been devoted to it: rudology. Derived from the Latin rudus (‘rubble’), this science deems waste an object of analysis enabling one to understand the economic sphere and social practices by focusing on processes of devalorization generated by human activity, as well as reprocessing technologies. Rudology examines social facts starting with marginal traces; as such, it rejoins Bataille’s method of exploring the depths of collective psychology and Benjamin’s efforts to reconstitute the ideological cathedral of the nineteenth century by way of scattered fragments gathered in the Parisian arcades.

  Among twentieth-century art movements – at least before the Situationist International – surrealism certainly offered the aesthetic project with the greatest theoretical virulence against the reign of the useful (Bataille’s criticisms notwithstanding). The surrealist oeuvre – although the very term was redolent of labour and money for artists – presents itself as a residue of oneiric activity, that is, as coming from a spiritual regime that resists any and all social recuperation. The surrealist irrational represents a declaration of war on the practical world and Reason, which it consigns to the camp of drudgery and toil. On this score, the movement led by André Breton acknowledged its debt to Dadaism. At the same time, it added a wilfully nostalgic iconography deliberately turned towards the remains of the past – fed by frequent excursions to the flea markets at the gates of Paris. Accordingly, the obsolete represents the main ferment for the wonder the surrealists prized, as Benjamin stressed. Needless to say, he appreciated their interest in outmoded trinkets, illustrations of the fashions of the past, and dusty boutiques. In turn, the Situationist International – which found support for its theories in comic books and kungfu films – conferred titles of political nobility on ‘low culture’: if artistic forms are alienated, their effects can only be simulated by détournement of popular images that do not bother to hide the fact that they reflect the dominant ideology. In this, both the surrealists and the Situationists were the direct descendents of the realism inaugurated by Courbet, who never failed to draw inspiration from the popular productions of his day – e.g., almanacs, engravings, and songs.15

  Art, Labour and Waste

  Since Courbet, relations between the artist and the universe of labour have shaped the evolution of art – as has the relationship between art and waste. Art has always been ‘informed’ by the system of production, but artistic modernity such as it appeared at the end of the nineteenth century demanded that the relationship be problematized pictorially: spurred by the competition offered by photography, art found itself demoted to a mere supplement – if not to a socially obsolete activity. Starting from here, one can understand the projects of modernist painters from Strzemiński to Ed Ruscha, whose pictorial practices sought objective means to transfer coloured matter from the paint tube to the canvas. Hereby, ‘objective’ means ‘suited to a logic of production calibrated on production in general’ – methods contemporary with the economic system and structures in which they have evolved. In other words, artists have responded to the specific questions that arose in their times or reformulated older questions by means of the tools at their disposal.

  From the second half of the nineteenth century on, art has constantly problematized its relationship with social production, whether by endorsing ‘art for art’s sake’ or by making peace with the system of production in one way or another. At one end of the landscape, Andy Warhol teamed up with the industrial universe by openly identifying himself with a ‘machine’, specifically, the camera. At the other end, Robert Filliou sought to be the citizen of a great ‘république géniale’ made up of idle and contemplative ‘bistro geniuses’. Whatever the position – from frontal opposition to a mimetic bearing – it is determined by an equation dating from the inception of modernity: art, expelled from the social body, or threatened by this fate, has constituted a mere appendix of society, a supplement of the system of production whose legitimacy always stands in doubt. In an ornamental or unproductive capacity, art turns into an oxygen tank for a functionalist system; by pretending to be socially useful or to belong to a democratic ontology, it seeks to make its necessity felt by clinging as closely as possible to processes of production and debates within the community.

  In 1964, the Service Technique provincial of Liège, Belgium, hired Jacques Charlier. He was joined by one André Bertrand, who had the job of conducting photographic surveys to assess the state of the municipality’s public works. In an artistic capacity, Charlier took these pictures ‘out of context’, along with other documents – attendance registers, groups portraits of administrators, and dossiers – and made them the raw material of his exhibitions. The series of black-and-white photographs he assembled in vast, rectangular displays is called Professional Landscapes. They show trenches dug for pipes, details of roadwork, and abandoned intersections … The observer senses allusions to the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who, from 1959 on, systematically documented (through frames at fixed intervals and photographs in black and white) industrial architecture, blast furnaces and water towers. Charlier, however, was critical of their enterprise. The Bechers, in his eyes, effaced political reality through overly ‘aestheticizing’ presentation. The constructions they photographed, he explained, are neither sculptural nor ‘anonymous’: ‘They are, after all, industrial facilities made by construction workers, … designed by engineers, … owned by factory bosses. All these people have a name, … a story. Concealing them … is part of the usual process of artistic appropriation.’16 As Charlier was pursuing his project, Joseph Beuys made the same argument about artistic appropriation as expropriation apropos of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal: the worker who dug up the kaolin used to manufacture it was every bit as much a ‘creator’ as the person who came along, signed it, and put it on display. Both performed a ‘putting-into-form’ (Gestaltung) that ‘acts on all the fields of forces within society and all contexts of labour’.17 Like Beuys, Charlier insisted on the artist’s duty not to conceal the process of production or isolate the object aesthetically – in other words, to view himself within a greater system of production, not above it or standing on the sidelines.

  Thirty years later, in 1993, Maurizio Cattelan exhibited a piece entitled Lavorare è un brutto mestiere (‘Work Is a Dirty Job’) at the Venice Biennale. The artist rented the space to an advertising agency, which then used it for one of its campaigns. Cattelan’s gesture exemplifies how the artist’s relationship to the working world has changed from top to bottom. He or she has become one ‘professional’ among others, ready to enlist different trades; the artist has abandoned, if nothing else, any symbolic claim that s/he is revealing structures of production in exchange for a kind of realism (verging on cynicism in this case) that inserts his/her work into the ordinary flux of production. In other words, the world of labour (workers, factories …) no longer constitutes an outer symbolic referent for artistic practice, as held for the avant-gardes of the 1960s and ‘70s: henceforth, it forms the substrate of a post-Fordist mental space governed by the binary salary/capital, which has been diverted from context, as it were.

  Cattelan presents the artist as the symbolic occupant of an exhibition space from which an income may be drawn. The system of production itself finds use as a readymade. The worker is transformed into a proletarian through the passage from the world of being to that of having: under capitalism, labour power, which constitutes a source of free energy a priori, becomes an item of exchange. When Joseph Beuys declared that everyone is an artist, he voiced a magical equation that materialized the objectives of Marxism in the here and now: a classless society where everyone is in the position to realize his or her human essence. In contrast, when Maurizio Cattelan illegally sublets his exhibition space, he traces a connection between the artist and the undocumented immigrant – one without either ‘being’ or ‘having’, who survives by seizing the chances life of
fers. This is the very essence of Cattelan’s work: to exploit opportunity, to constitute a purely opportunistic aesthetic. In turn, artists from Africa such as George Adéagbo or El Anatsui, when they recycle old newspapers or bottle caps, offer a response to Cattelan’s sarcastic praise of ‘bare life’ from the point of view of garbage collectors …

  In Courbet, but still more explicitly in Georges Seurat, one can already see the opposition labour/leisure: Sunday stands as a figure for what the working week, its complicitous counterpart, has left over. The mechanical stiffness of the people strolling in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1883) inaugurated the theme of dehumanized leisure. Here, the Parisian suburb takes on the aspect of a vast no-man’s-land where it seems that machines are performing gestures of rest and amusement: Seurat was painting the crowds at the amusement parks in the course of emerging. More than a century later, John Miller took a series of untitled photographs, all made between noon and two o’clock, during the lunch break. Reversing Jacques Charlier’s gesture in Paysages professionnels, Miller showed that ‘time off’ is now a component of the working world, which alone lends it meaning. Free time belongs to the universe of what production has discarded – except when it can be channelled towards leisure that generates new profits. All that remains, then, is the switch between ‘on’ and ‘off’ in time entirely devoted to the returns of capital. Today, the proletarian is defined as the consumer-of-the-world, pure and simple; his original patch of land – which Fordist-era factories provided so that he would employ free time in a useful manner – has assumed the immense dimensions of the ‘world of leisure’. For all that, however, the concept invented by nineteenth-century industry has not really changed: more than ever, free time remains indexed to the world of work. Entertainment represents the logical continuation of employment for pay – which is evident in capitalism’s horror at unproductive waste. In other words, the postmodern notion of leisure, conceived as a supplement to working life, simply prolongs work – just as recycling extends industrial production by recreating value at the very heart of a wasteland.

  In 1995, Pierre Huyghe founded L’Association des temps libérés, the theoretical prelude to his exploration of leisure as a concrete force. The same year, Philippe Parreno presented the installation Werktische: he asked ten people to come and pursue their favourite hobbies on Labour Day. Rirkrit Tiravanija, in turn, has encouraged visitors at expositions to sit at a table and share a meal. Do these daily activities amount to work, then, or leisure – or do they dissolve into a spectacle?

  A series of pieces by John Miller, executed between 1990 and 1993, comprises cheap junk – plastic toys, gadgets and worthless objects – summarily assembled on a board and coated in a brownish substance, a kind of impasto as solid as it is repugnant. Here, Miller engages in dialogue with Marxist theories on the waste of production, pushing the idea that the sphere of utility has of art to its logical extreme: an excremental tide. Seemingly at the aesthetic antipodes of Miller, Jeff Koons pursues comparable aims, but by systematically reversing the codes of value. Taking children’s toys, cheap trinkets or department store packaging, Koons effaces their provenance by coating them with ostentatious codes of wealth: luxurious materials (chromed steel, porcelain), profuse ornamentation, impeccable finishes and monumental dimensions. If Koon’s work proves seductive, this is because it stems from a world where waste seems inconceivable – where sumptuousness coats everything and surplus value is the golden rule of aesthetics: a standardized, rapid and efficient operation loudly transforming the slightest trifle into a gem. In this universe of intense lights, display windows, gift-boxes and advertising, nothing exists outside of the shopping mall. And if Koon’s work proves fascinating and disconcerting despite the heavy-handed formal contrivances, this is because his imagery is consensual from the get-go. From Michael Jackson to stuffed animals, the object must be inoffensive and popular, while at the same time provoking a vague sense of emotional culpability. Koons exploits an intermediary zone between waste and popular culture, to which everyone seems tied by uneasy affections.

  Gabriel Orozco lays hold of debris of another kind, unmediatized by commerce. It seems that a constant, centripetal motion animates his works. The artist occupies the centre, like a magnet drawing to itself the most shapeless of perishable matter. One of his earliest pieces, My Hand is the Memory of Space (1991), presents this image literally: a series of ice-cream cones spreads over the gallery floor, starting at the hollow imprint of the artist’s hand. The economy of means Orozco employs is translated into gestures of impression (tattooing, brands, incisions or stamps applied to different media and materials) and set up by photographic framing. In the process, Orozco marks the forms he finds on the street or in nature – essentially ephemeral and fortuitous – as sculptures. More or less the entirety of his work derives from a vast array of waste, from animal fossils to demolition material; it includes stones, branches, industrial refuse (Penske Work Project, 1998) and, still more emblematically, lint from dryers (Lintels, 2001); all that remains is dust and fibre … Pinched Stars (1997) – a mass of shapeless and ‘dripping’ sculptures in aluminium on the ground – takes the question of art as an expelled object head-on. Orozco acknowledges that they seem ‘clumsy or intricate, like a piece of shit. It’s very scatological in the end.’18 That said, the tension pervading his work opposes nature and culture in a world fashioned entirely by industry. His oeuvre draws a zone in escheat, urban and deserted at once, where human beings exist only through the prints they have left behind, signs of retreat – like ghosts wandering in a suburb the size of the globe. All that remains, then, are two poles that overlap without cease: data-processing and archaism. On the one hand, one finds fractal geometry, design software and complex materials such as polyurethane and synthetic polymer. On the other hand, there are cacti, bones, vegetable matter and ancestral practices involving terra cotta and graphite. Between the two stands the human being, at the mercy of both orders.

  ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, by Walter Benjamin, draws a parallel between work on the assembly line and games of chance, both of which must be taken up again and again. The next morning, the previous day’s efforts are gone, and the roulette wheel has stopped spinning; the gambler, like the labourer, has to start from scratch.

  The hand movement of the worker at the machine has no connection with the preceding gesture for the very reason that it repeats that gesture exactly … Each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it.19

  As the negation of experience – that is, of what has been acquired, and therefore bare of all waste – the lottery of our times excludes unprofitable accumulation a priori. A universe from which all waste has been definitively evacuated, relegated to an obscure underground, and made forever invisible and subsidiarized (filialisé): this is the repression underlying the phantasmagoria of the age. On the one hand, it amounts to a world without remainder – arranged as a factory for living, incessantly ‘cleaned’ by design. On the other, it is riddled with emissions, favelas and suburbs; obsessively, it pushes the nomadic, the migrant, the filthy and the obsolete outside the city gates. It is only right to be scandalized by such a list, which lumps together human beings and objects; that said, what distinguishes the contemporary register of downgrading (déclassement) is that it does not bother with details.

  Precisely here, the age-old tension between art and labour resurfaces, but on a different level than in modernism. In contrast to the latter, contemporary art does not deny the existence of waste as such: now, nothing and no one can be deemed non-integrable. The vigour of the work of art stems from participating in both categories, circulating freely between the universe of products and the world of waste, simultaneously constituting a remainder and a value; it exploits its sociocultural utility and its dysfunctional quality by turns. Art’s social function involves reconciling these two worlds by giving them a meaning.
And if art gives rise to so many controversies, it is because this social function provides the object of a precarious consensus – one up for grabs again and again.

  Today, filmmakers, artists and writers depict a world invaded by filth, corroded by social precarity, crowded with industrial objects designed for obsolescence, and saturated with ephemeral information. A popular image occurs in WALL-E, the Pixar Studios film about a robot busy cleaning a planet Earth filled with the detritus its erstwhile inhabitants have left behind. The contemporary cultural archive teems with proliferating and burdensome matter. Museum holdings are problematic: the mass of art objects produced every year defies anyone and everyone’s capacity for memorization or judgement. As such, the question of waste – and the principles governing its elimination – will be posed in two ways in the future: in terms of centrifugal movement, which concerns apparatuses of power, and in terms of the centripetal dynamic animating countervailing artistic forces.

  Modern art brought attention to bear on objects excluded by the dominant idealism. Georges Bataille shed light on the repulsive remainder left behind by the Hegelian totality; Walter Benjamin explored tiny pieces of debris from collapsed social edifices; Louis Althusser valorized aleatory surges of history; cultural studies focused on products and productions left over by the dominant culture. The analysand and the madman, the proletarian and the undocumented worker, labourers breaking stones, and ordinary people – all found a place in this counter-narrative, this great movement seeking to bring those expelled by ideology, deported from symbolic power, back to the centre of life and culture. From Courbet to Orozco, a realist mode of conceiving art has refused the existence of the inassimilable and waste, contested the division performed by ideological state apparatuses, and promoted a nominalist vision in which the singular, the exception, reigns.