5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
These Artists Want You to Stop and Smell the Waste
Few artworks have made me feel as small as 'Burial,' a video by the Lithuanian artist Emilija Skarnulyte. Immersed in the floor-to-ceiling projection in a dark, shiny room at MoMA PS1, you might begin to empathize with the hazmat suited workers shown breaking down a Chernobyl-style nuclear reactor with blowtorches, slicing massive turbines into chunks small enough to move. Other people probe this rubble with Geiger counters. (It's a burial, but the body is still warm.) The figures are swallowed by the space, by the machinery, by the scale of their task, which began in 2004 and will take 25 years — longer than the plant, in Ignalina, Lithuania, produced power.
The 14 international artists collected for 'The Gatherers,' a group show organized by PS1's chief curator, Ruba Katrib, navigate a deluge of waste that makes the environmentalism of the 1970s seem quaint. They offer a global perspective — just two are American, and several are making their U.S. museum debut. The visceral videos, assemblages and sculptures on view describe waste as an overwhelming system, blooming and cycling as man-made objects rush through our lives.
If you don't want heavy metals in your soil or microplastics in your brain, these artist's aren't here to soothe you. Instead, they make abstract levels of consumption — facts too daunting to comprehend — tangible and concrete. They want you to stop and smell the waste.
'Flower of Life,' a kinetic sculpture by the Bosnian artist Selma Selman, consists of a claw from a junkyard crane, its fingers reaching up like malevolent steel petals. It whines open, pauses, then grinds closed, evoking the regrowth inherent in the gritty work of recycling. Selman would know: Her family runs a scrapyard. Likewise, partly sunk into the nearby drywall is Selman's 'Nail,' a single large framing nail made of solid gold sourced from castoff circuit boards (above the illustrative installation 'Motherboards,' a pile of e-waste). Metals like gold and steel can be reshaped and reused indefinitely. But extracting them is noxious. Old electronics often end up in fetid mounds, where workers smash them with hammers.
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