Eight Resourceful Artists on Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling

While going down a rabbit hole of artists who use repurposing as fuel for their creativity, I found an article that featured these two artists amongst many who value the art of giving items a second life.

Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman: Kid, 2023 (left) and Being, 2021 (right).Photo : Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

I collect a lot of stuff everywhere. My wife accuses me of being a hoarder, but I always say, “There’s going to be someplace that this can go.…” When we go to the dump every Sunday, there’s a “take it or leave it” recycling place. There are a lot of kids toys and other things to take. I’ve got boxes and boxes labeled “things” and then “miscellaneous things.” I’ve been collecting things for 30 years, like old phone cords … casting old spiral phone cords can be kind of difficult. I still have my old Walkman CD player. I just don’t throw things away. I think about objects having a history—and representing a sort of culmination of a history that, if you want to be absurd about it, could be charted back to the Big Bang. They have a sort of cultural meaning that can be very specific and very diverse, which is a point of departure I like (Battaglia, 2024).

For Kid, I used a lot of found objects to create the surface. I made a model and ultimately the piece was cast in stainless steel. On the arm is a plastic conduit used for drainage, a muffin tin, a Nerf football, donut shapes that kids put on cones, a sippy cup, oven roaster tins, some dolls—a wide variety of things. There’s an ecological element to it, but an individual can only can do so much. There are also elements of fantasy and cataloging in it, which I like. Creating an avalanche of associations when you put a bunch of things together is interesting to me (Battaglia, 2024).

I'm really drawn to Kid, it is a fun form and makes me think of a cartoon yet has an onion effect because the layers of complexity with craft, materiality, and meaning.

Liz Larner

Liz Larner: Meerschaum Drift (Blue), 2020–21.Photo : Evan Bedford/Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

When I heard that China stopped accepting our recycling, I decided to keep mine. It built up rapidly, and I was overwhelmed! I started to realize the issue was one of mass and scale, and that these are very sculptural issues (Battaglia, 2024).

I was thinking about the Pacific plastic patch. So I started making forms that resemble seafoam drifts, which are amorphous and floating. They’re made of my recycling—things like bottles and containers, but also objects that carry an emotional attachment even as they’re just throwaways, like a pair of swimming goggles I got for my son that have hearts for eyes. It used to be important to take care of your things because you had less, and you valued it more. That turn to disposability devalued things so much (Battaglia, 2024).

I took a class at the Newkirk Center [in California], and learned that recycling is not going to work. We need to repurpose and reuse, which is a whole different mindset. Recycling still imagines disposability. You used to see a lot more funky assemblage art, but around the 2000s, I noticed that I myself certainly got caught up in the thrill of the new— in making things with all these new machines (Battaglia, 2024).

Both of these artists approach the topic of reducing and reusing differently, but both share the same philosophy. With Tom's whimsical approach and Liz's more critical imitation similarly commenting on the excess that is the state of the world around us, and further away like the ocean. Resourcefulness creates an opportunity for designers to look around our own areas for inspiration and materiality as ways to limit the amount of trash we produce. What systems could be put in place to encourage the reuse of an items lifespan, and how would you get people involved?

Reference.

Battaglia, A. (2024, March 19). Eight resourceful artists on reducing, reusing, and recycling. ARTnews.com. https://www.artnews.com/list/art-in-america/features/recycling-art-portfolio-1234700212/tom-friedman/