JUNKULTURE

Out with the newspapers, the coffee cans, and rubber tires, out with last year's fashions, and the old couch, out with the coleco vision, the beta, the vinyl. Trash, trash, trash...

...But when you throw it out, it doesn't disappear. (That's scientific). It's ironic that in the drive to be new and improved, we can simultaneously turn the planet into an old dump.

(Click For Sandford and Son Theme)

I think that the real problem is that our definition of junk is too BIG. We're throwing out completely useful objects and then paying for new ones to replace them. We do it mostly in the name of aesthetics. New junk looks better than old junk (we think).

The problem is also that our definition of art is too small.

To recap: Junk=big, Art=small.

Bad balance. But don't fret because there's a solution: Take the junk and make it into art, thereby making the junk smaller and the art bigger. Simple. Use up some junk. Have some fun. And don't spend a dime... in fact, when you are done, take your new art junk and SELL IT to people who are looking for something new, like a plastic sofa. Art junk is modern.

TRASHFORMATIONS

Everywhere, people are making useful new things out of formerly useless junk. They can't help it. Trash from the consumer culture has become an unnatural resource. Visit the recycled, re-seen exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art in New Mexico to get the big picture. Or see the smaller picture here: Indian water urns made from old tires, briefcases made from coffee cans, a mexican shrine to adam and eve framed in apple juice tins, ceremonial headresses that incorporate lightbulbs, dustpans fashioned from license plates and my personal favourite: the hamcan violin.

Elsewhere, like atSpoon River, they make jewelery out of old cutlery. Interesting Ideas is another cool site to visit if you want to narrow the gap between junk and art and roadsigns. Also, check out Cybele's Earrings - whether you like them or not, she has found a truly original use for birth control pill dispensers.

GREEN ACRES(Click for Green Acres Theme Song)

Of course, not everything to be made out of junk is going to be art. A lot of it is just going to be useful. One of the most useful and utterly artless uses of junk is compost. Kitchen junk, food junk, yard junk all combined to make a pile of thick, black, dirt. It's simple, it's natural, and occaisionally, it's wierd. Perfect food for plants, compost is sometimes poetic but rarely is it art.

Another one of the most useful things you can make out of junk is a house. Really. People do it all over the world. A great proportion of them don't have a choice, but on this continent people are building homes out of junk because they want to. Homes constructed from old tires are energy efficient, cheap to build, and don't actually look like a pile of old tires.

STOP (curbside) RECYCLING

Recycling programs work like this. We are building recycling centres like the one in Nanaimo everywhere. They are great resources. But let's not get the idea that putting our blue boxes out by the curb once a week is going to keep us from living in a trash heap. Recycling is at the end of the REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE chain, not an end in itself. Paul Palmer wrote an article comparing the resources expended in destroying and recycling a glass bottle as opposed to the resources expended in cleaning that bottle out and refilling it. He argues that the true value of any object is in it's form and utility, not in it's matter. Palmer thinks the preponderance of recycling programs isn't linked to an effort to conserve resources but to the profits of waste disposal companies.

THE POLITICS OF REDUCING and REUSING

There's no way around it, the shopping mall is a hotbed of politics. Read Kevin F's mini-manifesto entitled Your economic vote, learn how powerful you are, and get good tips on how to light your home with canola oil. Also, visit ADBUSTER'S Culture Jammer's Headquarters, the people who made international buy nothing day their own and then gave it to us.