The stuf expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners. Hook it to the intellect, , its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, placing the ass into the head, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying, "look at this shit." In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf, it served some diagnostic purpose, to look at what you had done, face your fear. To know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.
And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, an eternal life (with benevolent steward), art is a practice of purgatorial attempts to suspend its object from the trash, place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin.
Like the drug lord, smuggling these objects into blessed afterlife requires you shape an object into what will pass inspection, get through of the security gates of better opportunity, disguise your wares to get there. But whereas the drug lord cares not the for Virgin Marys he casts his product into, Art must believe in desire for its object. Composition is the artist's magic benediction for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. A sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself, that a world simply would like to rid itself of. Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.
For Jane Bennett the pathologic hoarder expresses a heightened sensitivity to the world of objects
(and not some vestigial evolutionary trait gone haywire post-scarcity.) For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3. The cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, the injection molded plastic eyes must identified with, kept indefinitely, inert experienced with connection. (And perhaps the mass production doll replacing the handmade one coincides with a turn from paganist expression to materialist hoarding expression.) Anyway, Art, who feels something towards garbage, attempts smuggling their components out of the trash. The "warm" items of refuse attempt their own repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. Art recasts the trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love, for fear the prying eyes of men who seek to ruin them.
In the real world, this is now a waste management issue called "aspirational recycling" in which "people set aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren't." It's a real problem with systemic effects. No longer just trash flooding our excretory paths
but hopes clogging our recycling. We don't want plastic in our blood. And these headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash.
Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground where they would become trash. Which they, temporarily, suspend from.
Art performs this same relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in our carousels.
See too:
Yellowing Conceptual Art,
Yuji Agematsu,
Dozie Kanu,
Jessi Reaves,
Darren Bader,
Gedi Sibony,
Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg,
Dylan Spaysky,
Ser Serpas,
B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA,
Marianne Berenhaut at Island,
stuf stuf everywhere,
