This exhibition is rubbish

By Daniel Nelson

The Rubbish Project

Image by Science Museum

Isobel at the Science Museum in London, I have been looking at one of your old disc drives.  Rebecca Marshall at the same institution, I’ve also seen your disc about stationery.

Joshua Sofaer, the man sifting every single item thrown from mid- June to mid-July by the 500,000 visitors and staff, has had some surprises.

“We’ve found a huge amount of medication. Everybody seems to take pills. Everyone seems to throw out deodorant, and the bins from the cafés are full of apples with one bite taken out of them and rejected sandwiches…  Sick smelly people that don’t eat their lunch. That’s the Science Museum audience!” he says with a laugh. “That’s probably what we all are.”

He finds the food waste especially depressing: “One thing I’ve learned is Don’t give your children lunch because they don’t eat it.”

Because the museum collects rubbish so quickly there is little smell. “There’s a lot of pineapple, so it’s quite sweet!”, Sofaer told one interviewer.

A common reaction of young visitors to The Rubbish Collection project is to screw up their noses as bags of rubbish are strewn across the viewing tables and go “Eeeuw” in disgust at the randomly-strewn dog-eared packets, left-over food and broken objects.

Yet they themselves are the source of much of it.

Objects discovered by the trash sorters include a bra and pants and a very large man’s suit (not necessarily related), several pairs of shoes, scores of chairs and about four tons of paper and cardboard – much of it wrapping from the gift shop.

Lavatory waste, used nappies and sanitary towels are not being sorted, “though we are measuring the amount being taken away, and it’s being photographed” before it is turned into ‘sludge cake’ in agriculture.  All other items of rubbish, big or small are emptied by volunteers and museum visitors onto specially-designed surfaces and photographed by cameras built into overhead canopies. The photos are displayed on a large floor display throughout the day in an ever-changing slide-show. 

After it’s been sorted and photographed, the rubbish is taken for recycling or sent to a landfill.  From September the recycled rubbish will be on display. Sofaer (who is an artist not a rubbish expert: “I’m interested in the aesthetic value of these materials”) is also picking out a number of items that he will re-work and incorporate in the display. One visitor has shown the way by arranging sugar sachets, straws, paper towelling, ice cream spoons and other detritus into a brilliant picture of a ship on the ocean.

Sofaer has worked on two previous rubbish projects – book recycling in Japan and with waste-pickers in Brazil. His interest in rubbish started off not as environmental concern but as a “provocation” to art and the art market, “the way in which when objects come into galleries and museums they accrue value.

“You take a canvas and put a few paints that cost pennies on that canvas and that canvas becomes worth millions. It is the ultimate model of capitalism.”

In 1897 artist Marcel Duchamps shocked the art world by trying to exhibit urinals, titled Fountains, in a gallery. Many critics see the act as a landmark in 20th century art. Sofaer’s project has similarities.

“The Science Museum is concerned primarily with collecting unique and special objects,” he explains, “and here I’m asking people to consider what this museum throws away. It flips the museum upside down.”

His work is less shocking that Duchamps’ but interesting for the way it is causing some visitors and museum staff to think about rubbish and how it is disposed of.

“We are trying to provoke behaviour change: by handling rubbish you encounter it differently,” says Sofaer.

·         The Rubbish Collection is at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, SW7: phase one (documentation): 16 June – 15 July;  phase two (display): 25 July – 14 September