BEAUTIFUL GARBAGE; appertisers scavenged from the trash.
Writer : Commissioner. Neil Berecry Brown
No garbage in nature
No beauty in nature
Only nature
Nature is a reciprocal relationship of use within a complete cycle of interdependence.
Nature re-uses, recycles, passes-on. ‘Waste’ is of value. It is a medium of exchange: the cash economy of the organic world.
‘Garbage’ only exists as a product of humans’ cognitive thinking; which allows discrimination, judgement and the attachment of significance.
Humans therefore ‘own’ garbage. It is part of them; they can’t throw it away. So it is with beauty.
Yet we discriminate, construct dichotomies; beauty – desired and valued, garbage – rejected and denigrated; and attach significance to the judgement.
But significance floats. Unattached it can be an experience of universal significance; of being; of oneness; an awareness of belonging to something immense, a greater “nature” unknowable in its vastness.
This is the object of many religious practices and philosophical disciplines; achieving intense awareness of undifferentiated being.
Significance, experienced as an emotion, can also be fetishised, attached to objects, qualities, appearance, causes, religion etc., when ego distorts the view and dichotomous beauty and garbage enter the eye and mind.
That’s not garbage - that’s Art!
We are all made from cosmic dust: detritus from the birth of the universe. We are all made of garbage – dirt – specks of dust and grains of grain of sand; molecules and atoms that are infinitely re-arrangable into new realities; into new mysteries, asking old questions. Dancing new dances, like the play of children and artists.
Garbage lessons.
A pervasive theme in myth and literature is of unrecognised beauty being found within characters that are unwanted, discarded, worthless, and outcast – ‘garbage’.
The stories told are of transformation: alchemy. Psychologically they are about the finding of inner worth. They give us insight; let us see that inner -or true - nature is a continuation of the nature that is often thought of as environment, or external nature.
Is this a role for art: to create ‘realities’ in the imaginary space between nature and nature; dissolve the barriers between cultural categories of seemingly contradictory qualities – ‘beautiful’ and ‘garbage’; perhaps to posit cognitive dissonance as a form of harmony?
“Garbage saved my life” – Genetic Garbage – Junk DNA.
Mutations randomly produced in the process of sexual reproduction may be the biological tropes that allow a life form to continue.
The malformed Mole Rat or Stick Insect – the ugly one – may become the norm of a new species better adapted to changed circumstances – the archetype of beauty.
They may be the Marilyn Munroes of the future Flying Scaly Mole Rats and the Fat Hairy Amphibious Stick Insects.
(file under “beauty”)
Beauty brings joy; an aesthetic emotion. It elicits empathy; love without carnal desire.
Beauty embodied is a manifestation of an ideal, it represents perfection, completeness, wholeness; or is an image of desire fulfilled.
It represents freedom from need, expectation, and anxiety; those things that are its opposite, its dark side, and that are at the same time implicit in it.
That’s my opinion: I am talking garbage.
To say that someone is “talking garbage”, is not to say that what is said is nonsense, but rather that the listener thinks what is said is wrong- ‘not the truth’.
It is not to say that the listener making the judgement cannot understand what is being said , but rather that they disagree.
Understanding nonsense may be what passes for truth in art.
Ultimate globalisation occurs when there is nowhere left to dump our waste.
Bon appetit!