When Trash Becomes Art. Trash rubbish mongo

A rather unusual series of reflections on the role of trash in the visual arts.
"Does trash have symbolic value? It has been said that trash represents risk and fascination, impending disaster and seduction, the beauty of the ugly and the memory of man... Recognizing the inherent worth of trash and assigning it a value through the use of art is therefore a significant phenomenon, albeit a complex and somewhat convoluted one. The very paradoxes contained in the nature of garbage smudge the lines of demarcation between beauty and ugliness, good and bad, useful and useless. And as much, they bear disturbing witness to humanity's need to nurture its own legacy." -Lea Vergine The result of painstaking research by Lea Vergine, this volume explores the meaning of the "trash" phenomenon in contemporary art from the early 20th century (Boccioni, Carrà, Depero, Picabia, Schwitters), through the Sixties and Seventies (Burri, Kounellis, Fontana, Vautier, Rotella, César, Arman, Manzoni, Pistoletto, Beuys, Spoerri), and up to the present (Cragg, Parmiggiani, Boltanski, Sherman, Bourgeois, Serrano, Cattelan). It examines the challenge launched by these artists, who use waste as a material for creating art.
In an era marked by great concern about the environment, the artistic use of the discarded object expresses the alienation and distress that appear to be eroding the wantonly consumeristic social model represented by the West. Recovering and preserving refuse is a means of trying to hold on to it, of making it survive by saving it from a void, from being nothing, from the dissolution to which it is destined; it is about the desire to leave a mark, a trace, a clue for those who remain, hence touching a dimension that is psychological as well as political.