Refusal Becomes an Expressive Medium

Since the dawn of the last century, artists have had a particular relationship with objects that were considered waste. 

Although the aesthetic canons of the works of art produced did not yet consider their use, the artists had begun to look with interest at the most banal objects, waste, bearers of symbolic messages , such as the passage of time and its transformations.

In the twenties of the twentieth century, with the industrial push and a widespread mechanization of production, we started talking about reuse and ecology with greater vigor than in the past.

The vision by the artists of rejection as a work of art was not univocal. There were those who considered the object waste as a piece of life, used and abandoned, therefore as an intimate view of man, and who had exposed man-made waste as if it were a challenge, a cry for an art without Borders.

Beyond any personal consideration on the attributions of the artistic value of the individual expressive manifestations, there is no doubt that refusal, in any form, had become an expressive, strong means of contemporary art.

After centuries of impositions, about the aesthetic canons to follow, where the artists were driven to search for the most precious materials for their works and to develop pictorial and figurative skills of the highest level, something changed.

It was at the beginning of the last century that the artist sought liberation from any classical aesthetic canon , placing the idea at the center of the project and no longer the quality of the work expressed in the artist's manual skills in the classical sense.

Illustrious names such as Picasso and Braque also interpreted this new artistic flow, introducing in their works pieces of real objects with which they formed messages imprinted on the canvases.

Then came the Futurists of Marinetti who saw in the industrialization and in the entrepreneurial and scientific modernism of the time the artistic divide with the past.

Then came the Dadaists of Huelsenbeck , a movement that wanted to combat the idea of aesthetic rigidity, artistic reason and the stinging canons of the past.

A continuous search for a new, provocative and mocking art, where the work was not confined to the canvas, through drawing and color, but was materialized through objects and conceived as an exhibition space itself.

After the Futurists, the Dadaisi and the Surrelaisti, other artistic movements, they looked with increasing interest to the refusal, throw-away objects that assumed an artistic meaning and a profound means of expression.

The works included used plates, glasses, cutlery, car bodies, heaters, brooms, even a pile of garbage placed in a room, a work exhibited in Paris in 1960 by Arman.

The waste in a room is the expression of the contemporary nature of our society, of consumerism and of the industrial production that prevails, which acts as a sap for the people but which does not convince the artists.

There are many artists who have made works to remember such as Giovanni Anselmo, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Christian Boltanski and many others who have used waste elements for their works, such as newspapers, rags and food waste.

The search for artistic expression, through objects used or destined for the landfill, has continued to the present day through, for example, the works of Vik Muniz , a Brazilian artist who was born in Sao Paulo in 1961.

Muniz came into contact with the catadores, the men and women who rummage in the largest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho, at the gates of Rio , where refusal becomes a means of family sustenance and currency for survival.

The peculiarity of the artist's works lies in the sumptuous mix of drawing, objects from waste and elements of nature, recalling his land and the battered Amazon.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.