The Metropolis

Reviewed: Song Dong's Waste Not - the objects are winning

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 16 February, 2012 12:40

Newly opened, and free, at the Barbican is Chinese artist Song Dong’s Waste Not – a collection of all the items his mother hoarded through her lifetime.

When Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions for art in 2001, the act provoked thoughts about consumption, materialism, and similar unfashionable forces which everybody repudiates in word and promotes in action.

Waste Not provokes similar thoughts.

A life reduced to objects is a terrifying thing. A hundred goggle-eyed toys menace the viewing path. For every toy, a box, for every box a polystyrene block. Packaging outnumbers product, plastic obliterates organic. It’s a vision of earth as hell, with plastic in place of flames.

There are touching items too. Personal items. A chalk drawing of a girl. A bucket of shells, perhaps taken from some family beach trip. A cooker, which looks much used. Was it? I don’t know. But the image resonates.

Many items here are rich with associations. But the viewer must imagine them. The woman who amassed this collection has gone.

The corpses of 10 umbrellas lie side by side with 30 paintbrushes. Lined up like this, so many of them together, the objects are sundered utterly from their uses. The umbrellas are so far from rain, the paintbrushes so far from paint, it’s as if they have come full circle and are lying in a factory before being shipped out. They might never have been owned at all. The person who possessed them does not define them in any way. But they now define her. The objects are winning.

Free at The Barbican until 12 June 2012 – Song Dong’s Waste Not

---