Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Reading Response: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.

The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.

The man who never threw anything away tells the story of a landlord digging through the apartment of a tenant who collected the rubbish that other people threw away. His entire apartment was filled will trash, filed in an ordered system with notes on the origin and nature of specific pieces of trash.

As the landlord and his niece continue to explore the apartment they discover a series of essays on garbage written by the tenant. In them, he explores the idea that the past is defined by the objects we live behind. He describes the whole world as enormous garbage dumb that holds everything we throw away.

The author, through the voice of an eccentric, collector voices the opinion that objects we discard tell us a lot about the value we place on our past. He also questions whether anything has any objective value considering the fact that everything eventually becomes trash. He points out that there difference between a building and pile of rubble is only a matter of time.

It's historical proven that the value of material objects is relative. The value of the US dollar alone has changed drastically since it was first introduced as the official currency. You might say that gold's value has remained virtually unchanged over the centuries, but that is only under normal circumstances. To a starving man, gold is not nearly as valuable as food.
The relative nature of material value is an interesting concept for an artist. Art is all about emphasis. A painting, poster, or sculpture, no matter what the subject, is about taking something out of it's normal context and placing it in a different one, thus assigning it a different significance or value than it had before. We can see this most plainly in the work of artists like Duchamp, who created striking artworks simply by taking something (sometimes a piece of garbage)and taking it out of it's normal context, placing a higher value on it than other people perceived.

We all have different concepts of material value. As artists, we take images and objects and change their value. In order to do our job properly we always have to question whether or not something is really garbage.

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