KINGSLEY WIDMER
543
aesthetics or intellectual history, and the like, but those of, say,
bottling. The stuff can better be handled if marked "Dispose of
Carefully," "Recyclable," "Return for Deposit," etc. After all, packag–
ing
is
the American art, our grandiloquent and wasteful aesthetic,
whether in the form of plastic bags or philosophical bags. In its purest
forms, such as the neatly designed joke-present of a "Box of Nothing"
(clear! y labeled "Empty," "Zilch," etc.), or Christo's "Running Fence"
north of San Francisco in 1976 (which for something over a million
dollars carefully, and dully, fenced nothing in or out), or the latest
"critically acclaimed book" (any other specification might be as
redundant as further description of the "Nothing" box)-these are
pure art if art be pure waste, which these literally become in a trashing
short time.
It
would be obtuse not to admire the paradoxical qualities of the
Waste Culture, such as its appearances of lavish variety yet contain–
ment within the package-to-garbage game, and its many ways of
arriving at one imperative: Dispose of Properly. Waste stuff, of course,
can be sanctified, as with the trash in the medicine man's bag, but only
by shamanistic proximity, not by intrinsic quality.
It
may be wrong,
then, to ask of a book whether or not it is "good," for anything other
than to brief! y package a careerist, a fashion, a cute notion. That would
be rationalizing rather than shamanizing the rubbish.
In a waste-accelerating economy and a humanly wasteful social
ordering, deep imperatives to cultural wasting should not be surpris–
ing. As with population growth, weaponry, bureaucracy, techno–
communications dominance, and other forms of self-generating and
self-perpetuating mad production, there finally may be no other end.
However extravagant and depleting, the processes may have reached a
mystic stage, a pure wastefulness, beyond any rationalization.
A historical part-paradigm might be suggested by the use of
waste words in modern painting. The cubist of several generations ago,
such as Braque, provided visual shock by inserting a fragment of
newspaper in a still-life meditation, showing that discarded words were
dead things which could be revisited as aesthetic patterns quite
transcending the original stuff. The surreal collagist a generation later,
say Schwitters or Miro, set off forms by inserting word-keys which
mockingly broke up the sense of usual context and expectation. A step
beyond that ambiguity came with more recent rubbish artists blowing
the meaningless words of advertising and public sloganizing into
monuments of waste-as-culture-achieving an antisensibility which
de-transcends. To use rubbish-the fragment of newspaper, the disso-
