Anahid Mishek

Ominously, the dumpster has become a moral problem, a stand-in for larger catastrophes that a mind can only grasp for a whispering moment before its totality fades away. Instead, our psyches have become ossified in obsessive nods toward the big Other— theorized by Lacan as a virtual, collective fabric that drapes itself around us, that offers texture to our social rituals and interactions, that slips away like silk when we try to lift the curtain. Instead, we can only confront the big Other’s proxies: we are told we must recycle, that our trash must be sparing and responsible, and that these acts around the dumpster and its friends are to save us. From what it saves us is only theoretically clear; from whom is not to be named; and who has decided such things cannot ever truly be presented to us to be questioned.

The private shame of not engaging in this collective illusion can only be called nonsense, absurd in its personalization of a ghostly superstructure that we cannot directly confront. But here, I am inviting us to confront this stand-in, this dumpster that is innocuous and sinister all at once. Perhaps we truly must, as Zizek tells us, begin to feel at home in our garbage.

And so, here we confront the anxieties of trash. Do we recycle? Compost? Abscond altogether? Here, however, throwing away is a utilitarian action, an opportunity for collective catharsis around a subject that is too often thought of as a personal choice, a personal moral failing or accomplishment of how we treat our trash.

These plates I invite you to break and throw away with me are to be the site of these anxieties. These breakables, to me, evoke the cliche of the breaking-of-plates as a sign of passion and emotional energy, whether it be in domestic anger or cultural wedding bliss. It is an instrument that also, all at once, seems to connect our most primal need to eat and our social impulse to civilize ourselves.

The pottery you see here before you was made by a studio wherein I touched each of these pieces at some point down the assembly line, true; my hands literally held the clay; but it is not entirely clear whether you will be breaking my work, nor what my relationship to these objects are. I did not, after all, conceptualize its design. My role, in this specific case, was purely mechanistic, in that my body was offered temporarily in exchange for wages. I am to judge whether my work is successful in name only, mechanistically only: did my body follow directions well? Did I replicate the prescribed design accurately? I am denied “the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt.” That the artist is supposed to have an inexplicable, almost divine imprint on what is produced only highlights a certain perversity in this sort of economic arrangement.

And so-- the role of the dumpster in this show is perhaps an enormous soup canteen: sloshing around with these anxieties and other urgent disasters that loom too large and at the same time not at all, and a moment of succor and collective confrontation.

Written with the help of Shiva Mishek.

Thank you to Wynne Noble for donating these pieces.