“'One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure': Identifying A Politics of Creative Reuse"

• In Event: What We Do With What Remains: The Politics of Reimagining the Past and Resignifying the Present

Abstract

A culture of discard defines much of contemporary life in the United States. As much as we are
driven to buy new things whenever we want them, we are conditioned to dispose of things we no
longer need whenever, and however, we please. Much of what we ostensibly recycle—in
particular, our clothing, plastic waste, and e-waste—finds its way to countries in the Global
South, including Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand,
Kenya, and Ghana. There, the remnants of American consumption fester. Dyes, plasticizers, and
toxic metals pollute waterways, diminish air quality, and sicken the workers tasked with
extracting anything of value from our waste. Out of our sight, our things affect myriad people
who exist out of our minds.
How might recognition of the political and ecological effects of our consumption and discard
transform our understanding of American pasts, presents, and futures? By acknowledging
patterns of resource extraction and waste disposal at home and abroad, we can begin to connect
trends of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperial expansion that subjugate people in
the imperial core and on its peripheries alike. Drawing theoretical inspiration from works by
philosophers Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, this paper contends with ideas of interdependency,
precarity, responsibility, recognition, and a “down to earth” politics that moves beyond national
borders in favor of a more grounded engagement with people, things, and ideas, despite our
perceived personal and political differences. Through this empathetic frame of commonality and
relation, it proposes a refiguring of our discarded objects as bearers of significant value for
people living under the pressure of the American empire. In short, it takes seriously as a political
strategy the proverb, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Within this frame, this paper uses as a case study works by Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005), a blind
Tennessee artist known for his anthropomorphic “scarecrow” figures made from food packaging,
construction debris, and other things he was able to find on the streets of Memphis. While
Bolden was concerned with scaring the birds away from his yard, his assemblages came to be
valued as art by collectors, dealers, and curators interested in engaging with and synthesizing
Black “vernacular” cultural practices in the contemporary South. Bolden, like other “self-taught”
Black artists, including Lonnie Holley, Bessie Harvey, and Missouri Pettway, used discarded
objects out of necessity. An ethic of reuse and resignification that defines their collective works
has parallels across the African diaspora, particularly in works by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui
(1944-) and Ethiopian artist Elias Sime (1968-). Anatsui’s shimmering bottle top sculptures and
Sime’s sleek e-waste assemblages, like Bolden’s scarecrows and other works by Black
“vernacular” artists, posit an aesthetics and ethics of reuse that this paper fashions as a political
and ecological response to American consumer culture. Such works are complicated in turn by
their entry into the art market, where their material/use value as trash is transformed into an
immaterial and mystical art value.

Author

• Joshua Massey, Bard Graduate Center