Rubbish

by Martha McGuinn

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. A chest of drawers looks awkward on the pavement. Its button handles face the road at an optimistic angle. It is in a great advertising spot; a billboard for itself. “Look at that perfect chest of drawers.” The light turns green and we drive on. There is a special room in our building for rubbish. The chutes that lead to it from each floor are tiny. We have had to change the size of our rubbish bags so that we can post neat packages through the flap. People must have had smaller rubbish when this building was built. The door to the rubbish room is gross. The handle is steel and cold, but always looks like it should be warm with germs. You have to really tug the door to get into the room where the rubbish goes. Also, it stinks in there. Most people don’t bother to go in, but just leave things near the door. A woman recently left her whole house outside the rubbish room opposite. There were small bits in plastic bags in a pile that she topped with a mattress which I think she thought made the whole thing look more neat. Or hidden. But then also she had smashed all of her furniture into smaller pieces, so that everything lay dismembered in a long line. Sometimes people leave things near bins so you can pick them up if you know that they will be useful for you. But this woman made sure that nothing in the pile was useful. The weird thing about it was that she did this on New Years Day so no-one came to clear it away for over a week. She must have walked past all of her old stuff every day when she left her empty house. Or perhaps her house wasn’t empty, but was actually this perfect space where everything was useful and beautiful. It was strange to look at the pile of stuff every day. It felt intrusive, like I could see into her private world. That she had condensed everything she had into a display. Then it was gone.

The door to the rubbish room is gross. The handle is steel and cold, but always looks like it should be warm with germs.

At a similar time, I saw a carpark that had been filled with rubbish. It was a huge pile of stuff that must have come from lots of different houses. On the top of the pile were some sofas, a fridge, a washing machine and three mattresses. They looked as if they were melting into the heap — as if it would be impossible to pull them out now. The heap was a solid mass and somehow it was all the same soil brown colour that comes about when lots of things are mixed together. The sofas were not really sofas anymore. The brown snake like teeth of the pile gripped its sofa prey, slowly digesting it. If I went back now, I am sure the sofa would be nothing more than a bulge in the belly of the serpent pile.

In Devon, a landfill from the 1940s has begun seeping out of the eroded cliff onto a stone beach of the Jurassic Coast, so-called because there are so many fossils in the cliffs. Fossils that are millions of years old lie next to fossils that are seventy years old. Perhaps some of this stuff that people threw away seventy years ago is now a type of treasure and should go into a museum so we can see what life was like in the 1940s.

The value given to the sofa has been lost. Its structure and form have not necessarily changed, but it is a different thing now. It is just some rubbish.

Where is the line that defines whether something is or is not rubbish? I think that the term haecceity is important here. Haecceity is a thisness; it is what enables us to define something as this thing. It is why there might be a million pens that all look the same, but one of them is definitely your pen. This pen and not just a pen. Haecceity describes intangible qualities added to an object by a person. It is like a jacket that the object wears. Neither intrinsic to the object, nor the person, this jacket is external to both and is in a constant state of precarity. It could very easily at any moment slip off if the often delicate connection between person and object is lost. This type of connection, the one that allows a thing to be defined as this, takes varying forms, but they are mainly based on three categories: Sentimental attachment, usefulness and beauty. It is very easy for any of these connections to be lost. Sentimental attachment is often lost when a person dies for example. Objects can become less useful with time and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. When these connections are lost, is the thisness of the object lost too? Further, if an object is no longer defined as this, does it become rubbish? When put in a pile of discarded things, I would assert that something is no longer what it was intended to be. The mattress ceases to be this mattress and starts to be a piece of rubbish. The value given to the sofa has been lost. Its structure and form have not necessarily changed, but it is a different thing now. It is just some rubbish. Objects do, however, pick up new jackets through time. Something discarded as rubbish is often found and given new meaning.

In 2005, Mark Dion set up the Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy. Dion and his assistants ‘rescued’ things from flea markets and from the deepest corners of Manchester University and Museum to offer them ‘refuge’ in the bureau. Part of Dion’s intention was to turn the Museum inside out — to put its archives on display. Essentially, he wanted to adorn artefacts with new haecceity. In looking through drawers and boxes full of stuff, he and his assistants plucked certain pieces out. Here, the objects made the transition from being a thing in the box to being this thing on display.

Photogrammetry is, in some respects, the preservation of the haecceity of an object. It saves every object from the rubbish heap.

Many large museums are going through a similar process at the moment. The Smithsonian is in the process of making its entire collection, including (and probably most importantly) its unseen archives, available to be viewed for free in 3D online, on a site called Smithsonian X 3D. Developments in both photogrammetry and software are making this an accessible and practical process. Photogrammetry is, in some respects, the preservation of the haecceity of an object. It saves every object from the rubbish heap. On screen, the objects captured by this process float alone in their own rectangular boxes. Each is the most important, existing alone in its own world. Photogrammetry, however, is not perfect and often scanned objects can seem to be almost melting into each other or their surroundings. The foot of a scanned lion statue might merge with the top of the table it is standing on, making an impossible, organic looking form.

Autodesk’s Tatjana Dzambazova, is overseeing much of the development of putting virtual models online. Autodesk’s app, 123d Catch has brought photogrammetry to mobile devices and there are currently thousands of 3D virtual models of everything you can think of available on their website. It is Dzambazova’s dream to make ‘every object into a 3D model’. Essentially, to preserve everything, but also to make sure that everything is, or at least can be, as important as everything else. The only other place where everything is as important as everything else is on the rubbish heap. So what is rubbish now?