544
PARTISAN REVIEW
ciated word, the trash jargon-as the material of art may simultane–
ously give and deny significance. But when it dominates and any waste
words will do, no words will really do. When anything goes, nothing
goes except an indiscriminate mystical embrace. Waste, too, becomes
absolute.
Our rubbish art says that our primary experience may be found in
our refuse, rather than in ideal athletes or madonnas, for it is our
dumps, and only our dumps, that we see as enduring. It may also
suggest that awareness of wasting, rather than human proportion or
transcendental hope, may be our deepest received knowledge. As John
Morris ends a recent poem on mortality: "What lasts is waste."
Of course waste-as-art also reveals art-as-waste. Current educated
commonplace emphasizes that our economy, our styles of producing
and consuming and living-and, I would add, many of our
institutions-become dominated by processes of waste. So our art
mimics it, and becomes it. Contrary to backward capitalists and
Marxists, our production-consumption systems seem increasingly pure
in self-expansion, hardly confined to profits or service or justice. They
go on for their own sake which, with the destruction of ecosystems, is
considerably waste's sake. Our baroque normalization of wasted hu–
man as well as other energies becomes our meta-ethos. Properly, then,
much of our art plays with waste-as material, as stylistic manner, as
icon-producing the art-of-waste in what now appears to be the major
aesthetic decorum of our time. Probably the falsely decorous art, the
timorous and trite, merely fails to recognize its own wastage, evident
often in an indignant and pretentious denial that it is mere waste.
Defensively in the Waste Culture, our redemptive activities, small
as well as large, take on the wasting quality. We joggers, for example,
run
to
get nowhere, pouring exertion and sweat with self-disciplined
elan
at the purity with which we waste out our wastes. Many of our
more energetic forms of entertainment-distraction delight in wasting,
from cars (Demolition Derbies) to egos (the "put-down" comedians).
Few things can match in humorous absurdity the current jumble of
historical cast-offs which constitutes most of our religiousity. And
many of our artists seem to hold that by dumping enough-loose
giganticism in painting, an endless inchoate flow of words, monumen–
talism in trivial packaging-that is, by wasting paint, words, purposes,
and all responsive strategies, one increases the possibilities of aes thetic
absoluti sm. Waste reaches towards heroic dimensions-buildings,
landscapes, cities, the whole culture.
