Dear reader,
We’re writing this from the temporary office of the Vienna Design Week team, located in a newly constructed building (there still are construction workers everywhere) in the 10th District. The whole building will serve as this year’s venue for Vienna Design Week. Tonight, we’ll be opening our first curated collectible exhibition here, called “Fokus: Trash”.
TRASH is a theme that has fascinated us for a while. However, as we started working on it, we realized how difficult it is to define. While there’s plenty of literature in aesthetic theory and art history on its siblings—KITSCH, CAMP, and the UGLY—there’s very little specifically about TRASH. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” we’ve attempted to explore TRASH by writing our own “Notes,” which we’re excited to share with you in this newsletter.
Enjoy,
Anton and Nina
Notes on Trash
In the beginning, there was wo*man, and with them came garbage. “Where there are people, there’s always garbage. Humans have always produced it. Even the Neanderthals found things they didn’t need, sorted them, and tossed them out. Ancient Rome struggled with waste management [...]. In 13th-century Cairo, regular clean-ups were held to clear the narrow streets of garbage,” writes historian Roman Köster in “Müll. Eine schmutzige Geschichte der Menschheit” (“Garbage: A Dirty History of Humankind”). What counts as garbage is subjective. Sometimes it’s a personal judgment, but more often, it’s defined by society. Social norms and structures—and sometimes even laws—determine what gets thrown away and what stays. According to Köster, garbage is whatever people have deemed “dirty, dangerous, disruptive, or useless.”
Archaeology would struggle without garbage: without the waste left behind by our ancestors, we’d know far less about their way of life—whether in ancient history, the Middle Ages, or the early modern period, writes Köster. In fact, an entire branch of research called “garbology” has emerged within archaeology, focusing specifically on trash heaps and, through them, the more recent history of humanity.
In contrast, the practice of referring to people as “trash” was documented relatively late. The term “white trash,” still in use today, originated in the southern United States around 1830 as a derogatory label for a severely impoverished group of white people. The insulting term has persisted over time and continues to describe an American white underclass and the living conditions often associated with it.
From the second half of the 20th century, a further “trash” meaning was added. Presumably from the 1980s onwards, the term was increasingly used to devalue pop culture products. Examples include trivial literature printed on cheap paper, so-called “C-movies” – i.e. Hollywood films produced on a low budget – and later reality TV. The concept of trash became a means of qualitatively devaluing cultural products that did not meet the standards of a cultural elite.
Although the label “trash” is relatively new, the devaluation of cultural products is far from it. The German predecessors of the word “trash” include terms like “Mist” (dung), “Schund” (trash, crap), and “Schmutz” (smut). In German-speaking countries, the fear of “smut and trash” has existed since the Enlightenment, particularly in literature. Educated citizens saw a threat in so-called “Kolportageromane,” a cheap, serialized novel, sold by street vendors. It’s somewhat ironic that during the early days of industrialization, Germany was known for producing poorly made, low-quality goods. In 1912, art historian Gustav Edmund Pazaurek published “Guter und schlechter Geschmack im Kunstgewerbe” (“Good and Bad Taste in the Decorative Arts”), where he warned against what he called „Materialpimpeleien“ (material finessing), or construction and design flaws. Pazaurek was also a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, a group founded in 1907 to promote a new aesthetic and higher standards for German-made products.
The discourse on taste, a fundamental concept in aesthetic theory, is not older than garbage itself but predates the notion of TRASH as it relates to people and cultural products. Like garbage, taste involves creating categories of distinction, driven by the hope of establishing a uniform and universally accepted sense of beauty and value. In his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste”, philosopher David Hume puts it this way: “It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”
Whether it’s “garbage,” “smut,” or “trash,” it all comes down to making a judgment: What is good and what is bad? What stays and what has to go? These labels are meant to relieve us from having to decide for ourselves. Where something is labeled TRASH or GARBAGE, there can be—and should be—no room for aesthetic appreciation. The terms “garbage” and “trash” are both tied to the desire for a classification of things.
It’s important to recognize this organizing force, as morality and aesthetics are often deeply intertwined. Aesthetics frequently serve as the foundation for politics that dictate what is considered “correct” or “appropriate.” It’s no coincidence that trends, beauty ideals, and even definitions of what qualifies as GARBAGE or TRASH are tied to social power structures like class, race, gender, and sexual desire. Take, for instance, the devaluation of tribal tattoos, which originate from colonized regions of the South Pacific, certain color combinations, or the use of “too much color”—which doesn’t align with Western ideals of white purity—or even class-based prejudices that surface when people consume food labeled as unhealthy.
“Trash is not so easy to grasp or define when it comes to visual aesthetics. That’s because ‘bad taste’ can’t really be proven logically—it’s always a matter of perspective. Not just from the viewpoint of those who create trash, but also from those who consume it. You could argue that this applies equally to art and ‘good taste.’ According to Heidegger, a work of art can be experienced aesthetically through its ‘thingness’—the synthesis of material and form, which could, in a way, also apply to trash. However, art also reveals a historically-creative dimension of truth that is absent in ‘non-art,’ such as low-culture phenomena like trash and kitsch. Nietzsche, in contrast to Plato’s condemnation of the poet as a liar, attributes to art the ability to treat ‘appearance as appearance.’ Art ‘does not want to deceive; [it] is true.’ Trash and kitsch, on the other hand, are the aesthetic forms of lies, in an extra-moral sense,” writes graphic designer Jonas Bornhorst in his bachelor’s thesis, “Contemporary Trash”. However, we must acknowledge that not everything labeled as art is “true,” and not everything excluded from the art world is necessarily trash. Sometimes the label TRASH is simply a way to maintain certain hierarchies. At the same time, one could argue that something becomes art when it possesses an element of truth, and this might be the key to distinguishing real trash from something merely labeled as such to exclude it from the conversation. Or, to put it more practically: Is a lavish, hardly recyclable, and extremely expensive Jeff Koons sculpture more ‘true’ than a chandelier obviously made from used yogurt cups?
In the design world and the relatively new collectible design scene, both GARBAGE and TRASH have gained notable momentum in recent years. As product designers have recognized that their field is inherently political and capable of addressing global issues, they have turned their attention to the world's major crises. One such crisis is the massive amounts of waste we produce as a human species, which is evident in phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics found in human blood. It makes sense to tackle these problems through design—whether by upcycling, recycling, developing recyclable materials, or creating sustainable products.Many of these designs adopt a style that maintains a kind of aesthetic distance from being TRASHY. There is a clear risk of reinforcing negative stereotypes. Recycled waste must avoid appearing trashy; instead, it should look confident, ecological, and innovative, which can sometimes result in a somewhat staid appearance. This demonstrates how the regulatory framework around waste extends to its aesthetic presentation and highlights why aesthetic perceptions, forms, materials, and products must always be considered and interpreted as part of a socio-political context.
At the moment, a new generation of designers is embracing the ugly, the TRASHY, and the previously overlooked. This includes curved, often calligraphic ornaments with spikes, tribal designs, a surge of Y2K nostalgia, and, to borrow from Pazaurek, some unconventional material embellishments. The result is what could be coined as the TRASHY aesthetic—a reinvention of TRASH as high culture within galleries and art academies. However, this raises a question posed by Jonas Bornhorst: “Can trash be produced intentionally and with full awareness of what it represents, or is it merely an imitation of its aesthetics?” And does this then constitute an appropriation of TRASH?
This is important because: “[...] our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically specific forms of communication and collective life”. This is how the philosopher Sianne Ngai puts it in her text “Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting” from 2012.
To summarize:
TRASH (GARBAGE): A socially and systemically constructed consensus about the “no-longer-usefulness” of an object or material, often influenced by societal norms.
TRASH: A cultural asset (which can also include lifestyles) considered inappropriate for high culture by certain culture-producing and receiving groups, and thus stigmatized.
TRASHY: An aesthetic category that references (and possibly satirizes) the concept of “trash,” transforming something once devalued as “low culture” into a form of “high culture”.
Despite these definitions, things remain complicated because the terms TRASH (GARBAGE), TRASH, and TRASHY are interconnected and dependent on one another, yet they each have distinct meanings. (A significant distinction between the terms TRASH and GARBAGE pertains to the object of evaluation.) While TRASH (GARBAGE) typically refers to physical objects and materials, TRASH often pertains to intangible aspects such as style choices, lifestyles, or qualities. The fact that the English language often uses the same term for both (TRASH (GARBAGE) = TRASH (CULTURE)) only adds to the confusion. This overlap highlights the need for specific knowledge and context to differentiate between TRASH as a material category and its immaterial counterparts. As Köster notes, “All too often, [garbage] serves primarily as a metaphor—a social mechanism for assigning or denying value to things and people.”
As you can see, the phenomenon of TRASH is quite complex. This complexity mainly arises because the term has evolved over time, with its new meaning not entirely replacing the old one. As a result, at least three levels of meaning now coexist: Initially, TRASH referred solely to unwanted objects; then it came to describe so-called “low culture”; and now it signifies the reappropriation of aesthetic interpretation (TRASHY). The fact that these meanings are all subjective and normative only adds to the confusion. However, it is precisely this ambiguity that makes TRASH a particularly intriguing contemporary phenomenon. It allows us to explore, articulate, and discuss our varied feelings. TRASH thus serves as a catalyst for conversations about the things we as a society create and how they reflect the bigger questions humanity faces.
CRUCIAL TRASH-PRECIATION AND TRASH-NALYSIS. Thank you for your service.