This art is bullshit: Why artists meticulously recreate the trash – so much so that they confuse the cleaners | art

HeyOn the second floor of the Honey Armanious Gallery at Buxton Contemporary Gallery in Melbourne, a roll of tangerine peel sits on a shelf, its yellow, thick inner sides facing up. It feels like it should be cleaned, but it won’t be. The shell is not trash discarded by a careless visitor: it is a perfect resin cast made by Armanius.

Resin models of other, more common items were placed in the boxes, carefully placed around the gallery: a collection of melting candles, blobs of Blu-Tack, crumbled bits of polystyrene. These topics may seem unlikely in an exhibition, but Armanius is one of many artists who have turned their eyes to trash in recent years. Gavin Turk, Ai Weiwei, Susan Collis, and Glenn Hayward, among others, all make similarly painstaking—and often expensive—efforts to recreate items that most people wouldn’t look twice at. His trompe l’oeil sculptures from trash have been displayed in museums around the world and have achieved high prices at galleries and auctions. In October, a stack of six rubbish bags cast in bronze by Turk sold for £82,550 (about A$167,000) at Sotheby’s in London.

The understandable reaction to wilted Armanios peels or overpriced Turkish garbage bags is: Is it a joke? partially. They’re undeniably hilarious, and the artistic equivalent of “Is it a cake?”, the trend of bakers making lifelike replicas of everyday objects out of sponge and icing that took TikTok, and then reality TV, by storm.

Armanious’s creations are the latest in a long line of artworks associated with trash. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began incorporating scraps of waste paper into their paintings in 1912. Five years later, Marcel Duchamp displayed a ceramic urinal, a material manufactured to eliminate waste, as art. Since then, artists have incorporated actual waste into their works to prompt reflection on the things we value, and why.

However, creating the illusion of trash is very much a 21st century phenomenon and artists are pursuing it with varying effect. For Armanius, the act of making something, rather than finding it and rebranding it as art, deepens viewers’ investment in it. “The question that always comes up is: Why don’t we just show the real thing? Why do we care?” Armanius says. “The answer is, if I don’t bother making it, you won’t bother looking at it.”

Sometimes, it’s not always clear what is trash and what is art: In 2001, a cleaner at a London gallery threw away full ashtrays, half-full coffee cups, empty beer bottles, and newspapers that were actually a work of art by Damien Hirst. The same thing happened again at the Sala Murat in Italy in 2014 — and again last year, when some crumpled beer cans made by French artist Alexandre Lafitte were confused in a Dutch gallery.

Producing something new also allows artists to manipulate materials to comment on what we consider worthy of our attention. In 2008, British artist Susan Collis had an exhibition at Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. But on opening night, there was no visible artwork in sight, just a broom, some screws in the wall and a piece of wood splattered with paint on the floor. It was only when visitors looked closely that they discovered treasure in the waste. The screws were made of 18-karat white gold and encrusted with rubies, while the paint drips and dirt accumulated on the broom were opals, pearls and other gemstones.

Likewise, for Ai Weiwei’s 2023 exhibition at the Design Museum in London, he made delicate marble versions of a toilet paper roll and a takeaway box out of polystyrene, complete with chopsticks. In normal times, these items would be considered almost worthless, but early in the COVID-19 pandemic they were worth their weight in gold.

This growing questioning of what we value is particularly urgent in our age of climate crisis. Turk made his first bronze trash bag in 2000, and since then he has made replicas of cardboard boxes, apple cores, and more. (Apple cores are also a favorite subject of Glenn Hayward, who carves similar pieces from wood.) Turk has regularly spoken about how we are defined by litter – “We are what we throw away,” he previously told The Guardian. – And his bulging bags reveal in us greed and extravagance.

At their most successful and bizarre, the sculptures not only comment on society, but force us into uncomfortable self-reflection and our slippery sense of reality. When it is increasingly difficult to parse what is fact or fiction, these works of art also make us question how much trust we can put in our senses. It tests the limits of our vision and, therefore, how we understand the world.

The Armanius reproductions in particular are so accurate that gallery-goers must suspend their disbelief and trust that they are truly representative, and not merely found items. At Buxton Contemporary, the experience of trying to decipher them becomes a physical and mental task. Some of the sculptures are placed on the floor, others are hidden on window sills, yet more are hung high on the walls, enticing people to crouch and tiptoe as they try to look closely at the works – all while watching their step. The effect is both unsettling and invigorating at the same time.

It’s also fun, which is not always associated with contemporary art. “If you don’t enjoy the work, and take it seriously, then it’s not working,” Armanius says. “Fun is a completely serious state: it involves complete participation, amusement, and curiosity.”

Curiosity is perhaps the word that best describes the feeling generated by Armanius’ stunning creations. It’s so unimaginable that it’s tempting to reach out and touch it, feeling the difference between its copies and the originals. But please don’t do that – it is art, after all.