This exhibition is not about waste. Unwanted junk reclaimed by artists and reinvested with value has a long history in western culture most notably Dada artist Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-mades'. His notorious Fountain, 1917, a porcelain urinal entered into an exhibition under the alias R. Mutt, questioned how western society assigns value. Many artists continue this investigation redeeming the detritus of urban existence through techniques of assemblage, repetition and patterning to create aesthetic value and question understandings that inform definitions of art. But this is not an exhibition about waste. It is an exhibition about consumption.

Cultural commentator Clive Hamilton, argues we cannot solve the waste problem without first solving the consumption problem.2 Consumption in western societies is frenzied and voracious. As a global community we are already consuming more resources than the planet can generate. Last year the UN Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook report announced we are now in a state of ecological deficit, using more resources than the planet can provide.3 Australians are particularly rampant consumers. According to a recent United Nations report if everyone in the world were to live like Australians it would take 7 planet Earths to provide all the resources and absorb all the pollution.4 Even worse we are amongst the most wasteful citizens on the planet and one of the greatest generators of landfill per capita in the world despite massive recycling programs.5 According to Hamilton we have admitted to spending over $10 billion every year on goods we do not use: clothes and shoes we never wear, CDs we never listen to, DVDs we never watch and food we never eat and each year in Australia nearly 20 million tonnes of waste goes to landfill.6

Consumption is at the core of waste. Capitalist society's cycles of production and consumption generate unnecessary waste. Just as Shakespeare observed in the sixteenth century 'fashion wears out more apparel than the man,'7 redundancy and the waste it generates is essential to fashion. Consumerism is inherent in how we position ourselves in capitalist societies. Barbara Kruger's revealing twist on Descarte, 'I shop therefore I am,' provocatively underscores the role consumption plays in the social construction of self. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard claimed that objects within capitalist societies are the carriers of indexed social signification.8 When we purchase an object we seldom consume a material object that satisfies a utilitarian need - although this may be the rationalization for the purchase - rather we consume a symbolic meaning in which the consumer places him/herself in a communication structure where exchange occurs.9 In other words the objects we consume enable us to exchange messages about the social categories to which we belong, the categories to which we claim belonging and the categories which we refuse.10 Objects mediate our social relationships. John Frow argues that it is through the display and uses of things that we manoeuvre in subtle games of social exchange,11 and the ability of objects to do this lies in the context of the brand name. A car is a car but a Mercedes participates in an economy of desire because it signifies a particular set of values in western society: power, success and affluence. This is why fashion and advertising are such a powerful force of renewal and inevitably of waste.

Consumer waste, or as Stephen Muecke floridly described it, 'the shit end of capitalism,' provides the source material for the artists in this exhibition .12 The detritus of the twenty-first century lies forlorn on the gallery floor, pinned to its walls or, in the case of Katrina Carter, hangs from the ceiling, raining rubbish. German philosopher Walter Benjamin was particularly interested in the debris of materialist culture because for him, it is the posthumous existence of the object that enables the final period of judgement. In the faded lustre of the deceptive surface the object is freed from consumer desires to speak out against intended meaning.13 The ruin is the form in which the wish-images of the past, all the hopes and aspirations assigned to objects in consumer culture, appear as rubble and shattered dreams in the present.14 It is in the contradictions of this moment, when the commodity presents as both 'fetish and fossil', that the object is exposed as a trickster. In the frisson its lies are revealed.

According to Susan Buck-Morss, Benjamin was counting on the shock of this recognition 'to jolt the dreaming collective into a political "awakening" - to experience a "lighting flash" of truth.'15 Pamela Kouwenhoven plays upon such a tension in a work from her Charge it, series. Made from used battery cases she found piled up in an abandoned railway carriage at a scrap-metal yard, YUASA-X-PRESS, 2006, sparks reflection upon our reckless consumption of commodities and the natural resources required to produce them. Playing upon the double meaning in consumer culture where to 'charge it' relates to the easy credit that facilitates impulse buying, the work also evokes the way we increasingly compartmentalise our lives in 'cells' of high rise buildings. According to Paul James, Director of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT, more people now live in cities than at any other time in history. In fact more than 50% of the world's population can be found congested together in urban clusters.16 Cities are great consumers of energy while at the same time disconnecting us from the natural environment. The faded colours of Kouwenhoven's apartment cells: the ochres, yellows, dull whites and greys, are vaguely familiar substituting for the land we have covered with bricks and mortar. But embedded in the work is another paradox. High rise apartment living is often the bastion of the rich, increasingly seen as offering a trendy alternative to the old Australian dream of the quarter acre block. But around the world such buildings sometimes fall into disrepair becoming the favelas, or slums of the disempowered.17 Fashion dictates where and how we live, and fashion dictates we must move on leaving things to become ragged behind us. There is an eerie muteness in the empty compartments of Kouwenhoven's battery cells. Where once there was so much energy and force, literally driving everyday activity, there is now an empty stillness. Evocative of a city after collapse, or perhaps in the aftermath of a disaster, the hollow crevices echo what was and what may yet come to be.

Graham Hay's sculpture, Pending, 2006, comments upon the way we package and consume knowledge. Hay is somewhat bemused by the promises of a paperless office and observes that we have instead created 'paper cocoons'.18 Our desks overflow with paper, while plastered notes, photos and invitations cover the furniture, calendars, books and files pad the walls. Hay's compressed paper sculpture is made from discarded annual reports from the company Woodside Petroleum and topographical maps made by the Royal Australian Army Survey Corps. Since European settlement maps have been an integral part of laying claim, taking possession and asserting ownership of land. The topographical maps of the RAA participate in the generation of knowledge providing maps and charts for training and military operations of the Australian Defence Force. Military forces are also ravenous consumers swallowing up and spitting out the debris of combat. As the White House knows war is good for the economy - it keeps the wheels of production turning. The topographical maps have been sculpted into a globe - the pale blues and greens evocative of the ocean and land masses they charted. This is held up by a spiral of the Woodside reports. Woodside is Australia's largest publicly owned oil and gas exploration and production company with a net worth in excess of $14 billion. A major supplier of energy to Asia it has a contract with the State Energy Commission of Western Australia to supply energy to industries and homes. As with most multi-nationals its mission is sustained growth and shareholder wealth.19 While business continues to see the bottom line only in terms of immediate economic gains the brakes on consumption of high energy products is unlikely to be entertained. Yet implicit in Hay's work is the notion of redundancy. The Survey Corps was disbanded in 1996 and the annual reports from 2000 are now outdated. Knowledge is just as susceptible to the cycles of desire and waste as any commodity.

Glenys Hodgeman also uses paper, in particular greeting cards to comment upon the emotional investment involved in the exchange of objects as gifts. Hodgeman's interest lies in the private life of paper. Messengers of joy, pain, hope, solace and encouragement greeting cards help navigate our relationships. Hodgeman's work, Open heart, Cardiology series, 2006-07, comprises greeting cards donated by friends and scavenged from op shops intricately cut into figures that speak of the personal wishes they carry. While some are more cryptic, employing figures from Tarot cards or Hindu religion, others such as the figure of Christ on the cross, poignantly provokes reflection upon the contradictions inherent in this time of year. Christ is cut from a red card that bears the inscription 'Merry Christmas'. Red is a colour we have learnt to associate with Christmas, but it is also the colour of blood. Christmas has developed a reputation as a time of wanton over-consumption when many all over the world come together in a shopping orgy, recklessly purchasing gifts for others they neither need nor want. The meaning of Christ is lost in this frenzied consumerism. By depicting Christ making the ultimate sacrifice - the gift of life - Hodgeman reveals her broader interest in the sociology of gift-giving which stemmed from her experience as coordinator of an organ donation program. From this experience Hodgeman became aware of the complex system of shared obligations and social bonding inherent in gift-giving. The exchange of presents is motivated by a desire to strengthen or establish social ties which bind individuals together beyond the material value of the objects exchanged.20 For Hodgeman the packaging of the gift, the paper and the ribbon, are important signifiers of emotion and intent in this complex transaction.

Vin Ryan is interested in packaging, in particular the multiple uses of cardboard boxes. Used to contain everything from cornflakes to plasma TV screens, soap powder to refrigerators, the cardboard box, while essentially utilitarian also exists in economies of desire. 'Andy Warhol reminds us that it is not commodities that we worship, but the printed material that encloses them.'21 Yet this desire is certainly transitory, extinguished the moment we remove its contents. Ryan's cardboard has been collected from beggars around the streets of Melbourne. Used to create makeshift shelter then cut or torn into signs requesting help, they make statements about needs both perceived and actual. Clive Hamilton notes the phenomenon of the 'suffering rich' manifest in a general feeling of deprivation among much of the middle class in Australia. According to one survey nearly two-thirds of Australians reported they cannot afford to buy everything they really need.22 But needs for many now include plasma TV screens. This contrasts most resoundingly with the experience of real deprivation starkly brought home to us in the simple messages Ryan has collected.

Mona Ryder's installation, Head hunters, 2007, from her Corporate body series, looks at the way we package the body and society's reliance on symbols to communicate. Desirability and status are reflected through our external facades in the clothes we wear. Deploying a surrealist aesthetic, Ryder's work foregrounds the eroticisation of modern consumer artefacts and clothing in particular. The recycled ties, sculpted into serpentine forms, are phallic symbols arranged like chess pieces in the macho games played by business executives. But phallic power, like the snake in the grass, can be dangerous and underpinned by hidden intent. Beneath each tie, where the manufacturer's label normally appears, Ryder has sewn her own label: 'Trust Me'. Ryder is particularly interested in the slick campaigns that large advertising companies create to bedazzle and beguile the public into buying what they don't need. For Ryder '[a]dvertising executives are the modern sorcerers and shamans, wielding their illusion to encourage acquisition of the very latest technology particularly household electrical appliances, computers and cars. Throw out rather than repair, replace and be fashionable.'23 Ryder's installation is underpinned by the tribal. The predatory nature of advertising and business has its complement in shopping. The finely honed hunting skills of our ancestors are played out in the shopping mall. We hunt for bargains and sale times bring out the competitive instinct to swoop and grab before the next person bags the booty.

Giuseppe Romeo's mirror works entwine the illusory quality of the looking glass with the language of consumption. Just as the mirror privileges the surface, desire is played out on the surface of the commodity. Through the commodity we seek fulfilment of our aspirations. Early last century Walter Benjamin bemoaned the custom of inserting mirrors, instead of canvases into the expensive carved frames of old paintings.24 Romeo uses Ikea frames with their pretensions of Modernist aesthetics. But where we are accustomed to seeing artworks as embodying the artist's desires, in Romeo's work it is our own desires that are mirrored back to us. Mirrors, as Walter Benjamin notes, enable an artificial expansion.25 It is through the mirror that we apprehend ourselves not just as image, but as an amplified image; it is an ideal self that is reflected back. But Romeo confounds the servile flattery by scrawling in black soot slogans inspired by advertising. While some are familiar, others are sinister, together and individually they are all menacing. Romeo's mirrors are like bricks in a façade built to conceal the reality of who we are, but the language of consumption parodies the false front of inducements to buy. Through the mirror Romeo puts the viewer right back into the sordid picture of narcissistic consumption and directly implicates such vanity with the environmental costs of spiralling carbon emissions.

Katrina Carter and Laila Marie Costa both deploy the minutiae of waste. The small bits of refuse we often overlook: the closures and seals, ring pulls, bread tags and wrappers, are used to comment upon the larger picture of waste. Carter's installation, Temporary reprieve, 2007, showers rubbish upon us. Bit and bobs of detritus, a used theatre ticket, plastic bottle tops and corks, are some of the myriad items that make up everyday refuse. Threaded together, or enclosed in plastic bags, Carter's curtains evoke the aftermath of an apocalypse. An acid rain of refuse silently hails down upon us. For Carter the rate at which we consume and discard is alarming. Whereas previous generations repaired and reused we have become a society where to discard and buy is considered more virtuous. By suspending this matter, inert from the ceiling, Carter provides a moment for reflection upon this frenetic cycle. In contrast Costa's use of these items is visually fanciful. But Costa is not interested in redeeming rubbish through beauty. Her cheery aesthetic belies a more sober engagement between refuse and the natural world. Like Carter, Costa has gleaned from roadside kerbs and city streets, foraged through bins and public amenities to collect the pieces she has arranged in floral mandalas. These speak of both the feminine and the cyclic character of the natural world. The circular symmetry acts as a metaphor for the earth and its solar systems reminding us that both the micro and macro worlds are intertwined in nature.26 Even the seemingly insignificant bread tag plays its role. Yet with more of us living in cities we have become increasingly disconnected from nature putting us out of synch with its cycles, and rhythms, oblivious to the ramifications our actions cause.

Julie Shiels is a modern day glaneur, discovering the usefulness in overlooked and discarded material. In her work, Sunday best - aftermath, 2007, Shiels has made pyjamas from mattresses dumped in the street. The rich brocade from the skins of each mattress have been salvaged and refashioned into sleepwear. Shiels laments that 'a whole history of textile design was going off to the tip.'27 Each pyjama, like an excavated museum artefact, has its own provenance, detailing when and where it was found, its condition and any anecdotes associated with its discovery. The discipline of archaeology is evoked in this practice. Digging up the material waste of other times to learn more about their culture has a long history in western society. But Shiels' interest lies in the intimate relationship we have with the mattress. The site of memories, dreams and nightmares, experiences of illness and passion, sometimes death and birth, mattresses contain traces of the body; shedded skin, oils and bodily fluids. While her installation comes with a sign 'Please Touch', Shiels observes that her pyjamas often repel: 'because of their past, their proximity to the skin of a person or persons unknown.'28 In this respect her sleepwear plays upon our revulsion towards the abject. As sites of death and disease used mattresses embody that from which we want to escape. Jettisoned objects, old mattresses are confronting reminders of our mortality. It has been observed that commodity consumption is an attempt to transcend our imperfect state, to secure permanence and defy death.29 As Stephen Muecke noted, 'the fact of death lures us into so many fictions'30 - the fiction of consumption? The ambivalence Shiels' pyjamas provoke may be a response to their direct contact with humanity's underbelly and their proximities to bodies that can no longer tell their tale.

The abject also informs Paul Wood's ceramic piece entitled Domestic slump, 2007. In this work Wood has pieced together ceramics donated and scoured from opportunity shops. Both utilitarian and decorative they speak of the impulse to decorate and imbue our interiors with meaning. But like all commodities, they participate in cycles of fashion and so, while once desired and coveted for transitory values entangled with taste, they soon become despised and cast-off. The outmoded thing morphs into an object of ridicule encapsulating the moment when illusion withers and truth becomes manifest. Wood fuses the objects together in a kiln in a baptism by fire which purges them of their former life; in so doing the ceramics collapse and melt. But there is something very poignant in the outcome. A deflated duck lies exhausted in the drain of a hand basin, poised to go down the gurgler. What appears to be crystallised slime imbues the work with an organic quality, infecting the scene with a sense of death and decay. Shiny white urns mockingly frame the scene with their pretension to classical ideals of beauty that have informed taste for centuries. In the ruin that lies before us, failed aspirations hang heavy.

Simon Horsburgh's work, Untitled monkey business, 2007 combines discarded rubber thongs with the aesthetics of a banana peel in a work that reminds us to tread lightly upon the earth. Horsburgh plays upon the banana's twin resonances: banana peels, when stepped on, are treacherous, and monkeys eat bananas. Hence the peel acts as a metaphor for waste produced through consumption. In this way Horsburgh's work presages a fall in a witty evocation that echoes Jared Diamond's warnings in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Past societies, such as those who lived on Easter Island, faced with resource abundance gorged themselves until there was nothing left. Diamond asks 'what were the Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island?'31 Horsburgh asks us to consider the parallels. The pile of banana peels suggests a time spent recklessly gorging on a once plentiful resource. What is the message for us?

An American cultural commentator recently observed 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.'32 'Work, buy, consume, die: is that all there is?'33 asked Clive Hamilton. By considering what motivates us to consume, the artists in this exhibition provide a range of responses that are provocative, subversive and whimsical. While Diamond's portentous reminder that a society's responses to its environmental problems affect its eventual fate, signs of change are evident. Our capacity to be subversive is best illustrated in the activities of cultural jammers and initiatives such as International Buy Nothing Day, celebrated in Australia on the last Saturday in November. There are down-shifters who have opted out of the rat-race of 'affluenza'34 and compactors, a group in America who over dinner made a compact to buy only new essentials such as food, toiletries and underwear; everything else was to be traded or bought second hand. This phenomenon has reached Australia, and 'froogles' use the internet and sites such as Freecycle to change shopping to swapping.35 Even the fashion industry is beginning to embrace change and eco-fashion, which considers more carefully the environmental impact of manufacture, will hopefully ensure that green is the new black. Considerations of embodied energy in the food we eat and things we use, are leading to greater understandings of the 'cost' of things beyond immediate monetary terms. The cheap T-shirt from China is costly in its use of water and oil. Indeed twenty-five bathtubs of water are needed to grow 250 grams of cotton to make a single cotton T-shirt.36 Then there are the fuel costs involved in transporting clothing to Australia. While governments and business encourage us to buy because it is good for the short-term benefits of the economy and shopping has reached the status of a national past-time, there has never been greater need to question why we buy what we do. In the US shopping is even conceived as a patriotic duty, best exemplified in Mayor Rudy Giuliani's call to New York residents to go shopping the day after the 9/11 attacks.37 A consumer led revolution may be the only answer. In this the International Year of Planet Earth we owe it to ourselves and future generations to rethink our consumption habits, otherwise the advertising inducements to 'buy now, pay later' may have dire consequences.

Wendy Garden

Curator, Banyule Art Collection