The Recycled Artist-in-Residency (RAIR) program in Philadelphia gives artists access to the waste stream from the Tri-State area and each day, a steady onslaught of 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks unload thousands of pounds of detritus. Lots and lots of stuff from foreclosed office parks, estates from the recently deceased, and demolished buildings—an unfathomable mass of furniture, loved and unloved trinkets, carpets and computer screens, books and raw concrete, cardboard, and plywood—gets sorted and crushed into a toxic dust through grinding steel machines. To attempt to make sense of the immensity and materiality of trash that flows through this waste center is a Sisyphean task, practically impossible, but one that Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales have fulfilled with sensitivity and great beauty in their collaborative exhibition Waste Scenes, on view at Oregon Contemporary December 20, 2024–March 9, 2025, and curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin.
The exhibition centers on a two-channel video installation comprised of a large projected film and its chunky cathode ray tube television counterpart. Language, and most importantly, its failure offers an entry point into the work. Dialogue occurs between people and things and between the inanimate objects themselves both within the world of the film and within the gallery space.
Originally conceived as a live opera, Waste Scenes employs the talents from the Philadelphia Voices of Pride chorus and singer Dan Schwartz, who act like bardic guides, bringing the viewer from one realm to the next as the film drifts between different theatrical stagings of waste. Actors Parker Sera and Bellisant Cocoran-Mathe punctuate the two-channel film with moments of often inscrutable dialogue lifted from the found “literature” of the waste stream— outdated real estate licensing manuals, out-of-print books on psychology, human resource training documents from defunct businesses—creating moments reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett play, where form consumes content. The ironic positing of the installation-as-theater is further reinforced by the pile of movie posters designed by Kristian Henson near the gallery entrance, a gesture at once reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the “single-use” ephemera you might find in the trash.
Language, whether sung or spoken, fails repeatedly in the film. The dialogue between actors offers a window into the post-capitalist relationship between our species and its material waste. Schwartz, donning a hard hat and highlighter construction vest, stands on a metal catwalk under a spotlight over the deteriorating remains of recycled raw materials; his voice lifts in a mournful song. The small TV next to the projection responds with unusual images of clock numbers, historic figures, and landscapes. A woman sits behind a desk in a run-of-mill office staged amidst the rubble of a garbage dump. Her blouse and hair get soaked from the driving rain as she files paperwork; scenes from a 1980s instructional video on succeeding in business play on the small TV nearby. A returning comedic character is the large crane, whose rickety jaws enter haphazardly to crush objects and destroy sets. Chao and Schmidt-Arenales recovered furniture from the waste stream and restaged pieces into familiar built spaces: a corporate office with a filing cabinet and desk lamp, a waiting room with innocuous framed art on the walls, a mundane living room with a fake plant. The crane then appears and swiftly crushes these set pieces into a pulp, at once humorous and violent. In one moment from the film, Schwartz attempts to match the whining tone of the crane in a dissonant chorus, as if to make peace with the machine through mimicry, speaking its language. These scenes reveal the lonely truth about the inanimate things in our lives; their meaning comes solely from our projected relationship to them. Though the objects, large and small, live with us and carry significance through memory, they ultimately join the vast waste stream, just as we join the earth in death too.
As a viewer of Waste Scenes as it has been staged in the gallery, I felt as if I had arrived in the middle of overlapping conversations occurring simultaneously. Benches stationed in front of the film are surrounded by archival inkjet recreations of materials the artists recovered and repurposed for the film: a copy of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, the cover of a “de-escalation” VCR tape presumably from bygone training about conflict management, old vinyl record covers, and a Kodacolor puzzle box. On one of the walls, seemingly unrelated words like “ladder,” “turkey,” and “needle” have been painted, like a trash pile, into a blob of overlapping letters, emphasizing the deterioration of meaning through accumulation, of noise to signal. Another wall drawing (as we later learn from the film, was taken from a manual on psychology found in the waste stream) shows a terrier, whose legs, face, and body having been deconstructed to no longer indicate “dog”—another metaphor for the waste stream’s ability to strip things from their thingness, for the incredible way in which objects lose their meaning when removed from context. The framed prints felt somewhat sterile and tidy compared to the dusty, refuse-filled drama projected on the nearby screen, chattering incessantly next to its analog miniature. In an ironic twist, I later discovered a printed price list for those works and bemusedly considered the ramifications of this gesture. An object thrown in the trash discovers a new life, and quite literally, a new monetary value through its reification as a work of art. In other words, perhaps an unintended extension of work’s meaning, the price list highlights the way in which the art market can transform, for example, The Closing of the American Mind, a discarded book on the failure of the American school system, and through its artistic recuperation, become an inkjet print, framed and shiny behind glass, its new value both monetary and cultural. This strange lifecycle grimly reminds me that no space is safe from capitalism’s long, insidious tendrils.
Images and words, characters and scenes appear and reappear in a continuous self-referential way throughout Waste Scenes, like a Möbius strip. What appears on the small TV as a scene might be referenced again in the projected film. The actors in the film quote lines from the reproductions of found books hung on the walls. Just as the viewer grasps at a conclusion or narrative, it is quickly frustrated and abandoned. At its best, art has the ability to hold up a mirror to ourselves, so we may see ourselves most clearly. Chao and Schmidt-Arenales have created a world of connotative slippages to more clearly show us how waste operates, and more disturbingly, how art operates too. A culture of consumption, dominated by capitalism and our status as consumers, produces a disturbingly shortened window of use for objects in our lives, including art objects. Context creates value, for words, for art, for things in our lives. Waste Scenes reminds us of the lightning fast way in which we consume things fosters a disturbing breakneck pace in which history— and context—can be forgotten.
Waste Scenes: Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales
Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR
December 20, 2024 to March 9, 2025