Debris and immobility

A ticker tape of statistical figures races to keep pace with the cataclysms pulsing nonstop through the landscape, through its inhabitants. A sharp rise in the number of limbs lost by soldiers this month. The population of New Orleans cut in half nearly overnight. "That city could be bulldozed," responds the leader of the US Congress. Roll titles: Extreme Makeover, Shock and Awe Edition. Tah-dum! After twenty years, suddenly a white majority presides over the city council.

Call it Risk Society, Liquid Modernity, Disorganized Capitalism, Flexible Accumulation, or plain ol' Shit Happens. Only eight years in and already we're said to live in "a headless century." (1) "There isn't time or distance enough to perpetuate monuments .... No absolutes are reliable and no hierarchies are consistent, so that which seems most a part of the world in its freshness, rawness, and anxiety trumps the autopsies of the acceptable and the negotiable." (2) Sounds pretty cool, or so you'd think from thumbing through the essays and pictures in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, the catalogue accompanying the inaugural exhibition of New York's freshly relocated New Museum. Assembled here is yet more testimony regarding the rise to prominence today of a new aesthetic, what Philip Dodd, the director of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, back in 2003 called "bedroom art"--"grubby, less designed, do-it-yourself work." (3) Besides London and New York, much the same case has been made by recent shows in Washington, DC (The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas at the Hirshhorn) and Los Angeles (Thing at the Hammer): that a new generation of artists is churning out neofunk sculpture, totemic cobblings of 3-D non sequiturs, portable barrages of material distraction, chains of random appendages, peripherals, auxiliary parts, all exploding from or collapsing in on an overwhelmed or simply absent main trunk. Hey, there's a party in my objet!

It makes sense that debris would emerge today as a favored artistic medium. How better to figure the various leitmotifs of our blurred and shattered present, when theories of "regime change" and "creative destruction" dictate global policy? Not only can casual detritus vividly convey the ever-rising tide of data uncorked by ubiquitous informatization, but its very disposability and reuse signify continual process, thus getting at the incessant turnover, mobility, and shape-shifting that increasingly characterize our factories, infrastructure, objects, and relationships. Rampant among the works in Unmonumental, for example, is a pointillist or pixelated patterning, which imposes a visually digitized common denominator on two- and three-dimensional elements alike. At the same time, reliance on such materials as foam, drywall, duct tape, stuccolike coverings, and other budget-engineering mainstays suggests the protean capacities that Roland Barthes had glimpsed in 1950s plastics. "More than a substance," Barthes wrote, "plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation ... it is less a thing than the trace of a movement." (4)

The works selected for Unmonumental and the other big contemporary sculpture surveys present a decidedly biased view. There are other ways that younger artists currently employ debris as source, medium, and theme, in accordance with different intentions and resulting in different effects. For instance, Heather Mekkelson, a young artist who recently began showing in Chicago, fabricates and compiles sculptural ensembles that she collectively titles Debris Field. She starts with images of natural disasters taken from newswire or internet sources, at once large-scale and everyday, typically hurricanes and tornadoes visited on communities in Florida, where she formerly lived. Mekkelson zooms in on details of the physical aftermath, shards of architecture and material culture--splayed roof shingles and splintered two-by-fours, an electric alarm clock, a lone slipper. From these photographs she'll then decide which objects to isolate and re-create herself, not by appropriating junkyard refuse or even thrift-store items to serve as proxies, but by purchasing new materials and fabricating one-to-one-scale replicas as exactly and meticulously as possible. Otherwise, there is no editorializing, either in the form of survivor testimonials or by Mekkelson herself; there's just this strewn infrastructure, what had been a community's everyday life preserved at the precise moment of its termination.

One telling distinction of Mekkelson's work is its expansive sense of scale. Although she uses many of the same quotidian objects that pepper works by Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison in Unmonumental--a chair, some sofa cushions, a polyester bedskirt, bath mats, printed gypsum board, electrical wire, a fence gate, some miniblinds, a plastic laundry basket--Mekkelson's mauled and orphaned possessions still strongly reference a wider context, a whole sense of place and way of life. Her work unfolds first and foremost as landscape.