Art from garbage is not necessarily a new thing, nor is environmental art novel, but I thought this installation by a fourth year student in anthropology was brilliant.
The unauthorized statement consisted of garbage, in this case tim hortons and other throw-away coffee cups and pizza-pizza boxes – two of the worst offenders mucking up McMaster’s recycling program and generally a sign of environ-mental-decay in a very educated society.
One student went to the trouble to create this statement which caught many students and passerby by surprise. I saw many people stop to read the messages printed on the discarded pizza boxes.
The fact that McMaster has chosen a take-out-food student centre makes some of the waste inevitable, but the coffee cup thing is easy to solve by bringing your own mug. How hard is that to do, really? Especially with MacGreen giving away mugs, and rewarding users with free coffee from the Union Market the last Friday of each month???
Anyway, while this isn’t an OPIRG action (would that it were!) it seemed suitably OPIRG-like for inclusion here.
The neat thing about environmental art is that no matter how not new the concept of garbage art might be, it’s very striking. Each time I walked by that tree I couldn’t help but look and see something that is used for something everyday displayed not only as garbage, but as art… the consciousness shift is really visceral… It’s also neat how many people didn’t notice until it was right on top of them.