Bags, bags and bloody bags! They are just plain UGLY. They cannot be reduced, they cannot be decomposed, all that can be done is either to recycle them or the easy option is to just throw them away. Many people today resort to the easy option of just throwing them away *tut, tut, tut*. Such a selfish response is creating many problems in our environment.
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| Plastic bags covering a farm in the US in 2009 |
According to the Australian Government Department of Sustainability “in 2002 around 50 to 80 million bags ended up as litter in our environment”. This statistic is appalling and although it was nearly ten years ago and the pollution rates may have decreased; there is still a significantly large amount of plastic bags today still circulating around our planet. Plastic bags create visual pollution problems and can have harmful effects on aquatic and terrestrial animals. Plastic bags are particularly noticeable components of the litter stream due to their size and can take a long time to fully break down. BUT… *deep breath* Who ever thought that bags could look actually decent?
An art work that is a body of thousands and thousands of plastic bags is Pascale Marthine Tayou’s “Plastic Bags 2001-2010.” This is a site specific work commissioned for the ‘21st Century Art in the First Decade’ exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. It consists of thousands of cheap coloured plastic shopping bags and looks absolutely magnificent. The work draws your eyes from the top to the bottom which is inevitably its focal point. Its large form, at first is over powering, but you begin to realise that it takes the shape of a somewhat upside down “curved” triangle, that is rocking on its tip. However the work hangs precariously from the ceiling in this droplet like state. It seems that there is a danger that the large droplet could spill its contents onto the gallery floor at any moment. If that were to happen it would be similar to what our consumer society is doing to the planet right now- saturating it with commodities, many of them unnecessary.
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| "Plastic Bags 2001-2010" by Pascale Marthine Tayou |
This is the “good” that I mentioned before as this artist is using waste that we, as a species have generated, and created a beautiful, awe-inspiring work to make us think about the detrimental effects of our out of control consumerism.
Stay tuned for next week's post on what I consider as "bad" in the art world.
Hope you enjoyed.
Your greenie with a voice,
Eartha24-7
