Transcriber: Martina Cavallo Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
A couple of years back, I wrote a book about creative reuse,
and it had a thousand things in it that had been made out of other things.
There was furniture.
Check out this chair
that's been made out of a lovely garbage can.
Housewares.
Here is a bowl made by Boris Bally out of ethically sourced street signs.
(Laughter)
There were electronics.
This amazing USB keyboard made out of Scrabble tiles.
Art.
I'll forward through this before you get nightmares.
(Laughter)
Jewelry.
This is a New York based jeweler named Margaux Lange.
The main material that she likes to use are pieces of recycled Barbies.
And there is also Judaica.
This particular menorah
made out of cast-off bits of repurposed plumbing hardware
is called the Manorah.
(Laughter)
When I was putting the book together,
I realized that I had to have a fitting introduction.
I started thinking about really good ways that I could start to frame the book.
I teach Art History, so one of the things that I realized is
that maybe I could talk about the history of creative reuse
in the beginning of this introduction of the book.
So I started to do some research and kind of came to an aha-eureka moment.
And that is that I couldn't even really begin
to scratch the surface of the history of creative reuse
in 1000 words that I had in this introduction.
In fact, what I found out is
that every culture from the beginning of time
has practiced creative reuse,
and that we, as a culture,
even though we like to think and pat ourselves on the back
that we discovered recycling,
we don't even come close to any of these other cultures.
Another thing that I started to find out
the more that I did research in the area of reuse
was something that is a little bit counterintuitive.
And that is that recycling sucks.
Like I said, it sounds a little bit counterintuitive.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it,
but I want to frame this through talking about the three Rs.
You guys all know the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
Have you ever thought about the fact
that recycling is the third of those three options?
It should be your last resort.
So if you'd like to save a lot of energy, don't use something in the first place.
If you want to use, maybe, a little more energy than that,
maximize the life of whatever you're using,
and reuse it when you are done.
And then recycling, like I said, should be your last resort.
What follows is going to be a very brief history of creative reuse.
And I wanted to point out, as we're talking about creative reuse,
that here in Humboldt Country, we have an amazing reuse option,
and that's a new organization called SCRAP Humboldt.
So you should look up SCRAP Humboldt and interact with them however you can.
Let's do a few terms first to kind of set things out.
Let's define what recycling is.
Recycling is the act of processing used or abandoned materials
for use in creating new products.
So you have an aluminum can, you melt the aluminum can down,
you make a new aluminum can.
Creative reuse, on the other hand,
is the process of taking used or recycled materials
and turning them into creative pieces of art,
home decoration or other useful items.
In thinking about creative reuse,
we're going to go all the way back to the Ancient Greeks.
And I wanted to give you a little example about why recycling sucks
from the point of view of art historians.
That's really what the "recycling sucks" is about as the title of this lecture.
In thinking about Ancient Greek sculptors, their favorite material to use was bronze.
Yet we only have a few examples of Greek bronze sculptures left.
And the reason that we only have a few of these left is recycling.
Most of those bronze sculptures got melted down to make other sculptures,
but more often than not,
they got melted down to make implements of war:
spears, shields, helmets - like this.
So all of the sculptures are lost to time, in a way, because of war.
In thinking about creative reuse
and how something has been preserved through creative reuse,
you can start by thinking about Stonehenge and other Neolithic cultures.
But let's talk about the Egyptians.
In Ancient Egypt, most of you know that the pharaohs had boundless ambitions.
They loved to build huge monuments.
Yet the materials that were available to them,
to build the monuments out of, were fairly limited.
So the two things often butted heads.
So the solution was creative reuse.
The Egyptian kings would wait
for previous monuments to maybe fall into a little bit of disrepair.
They would declare eminent domain, and they would knock them down,
and they would use those pieces to build their own monuments.
This is a monument from Amenhotep III, and it survived in Karnak.
You can see bits of hieroglyphs from other monuments
recycled into the fabric of the building.
But I want to introduce you
to, perhaps, the unchallenged champions of creative reuse in the ancient world.
And that is
the Romans.
The Romans loved to reuse things
and they reused them for all sort of different wares.
One of the main things that they loved to reuse was the amphora.
The amphora was sort of the 50-gallon drum or the plastic bottle of its day.
Olive oil or any liquid used to come in an amphora.
But because this is a ceramic bottle,
they can't exactly melt it down and make a new amphora.
So the solution is creative reuse.
It costs too much to send amphoras back to their original sources
to fill them back up.
So, the Romans, in their architecture, loved to use concrete,
and they would take amphoras,
and they would embed them in the concrete to make the concrete lighter,
but still keeping the structure sound.
This is the Mausoleum of St. Helena, in Rome.
All of the little pockmarks that you see here
are places where amphoras were originally embedded.
Archeologists love to look at the reuse of amphoras.
Here is an ancient well that has amphoras that are all mortared together.
This is actually a sarcophagus.
Someone who didn't have enough money for a proper sarcophagus,
their family presumably chopped the tops and bottoms off of some amphorae
and buried them in the ground in it.
This actually comes from Pompeii.
Archeologists discovered this, and they were wondering
why in the world someone would have cut an amphora in half,
put a hole in the top and embedded it in a wall at waist height.
They thought about it a little bit, (Laughter)
and they realized they were looking at an ancient urinal.
I'm going to lay a couple of art-historical terms on you today,
and they're in conjunction with the Romans.
The first one is "damnatio memoriae."
If you were a Roman,
the way that you lived forever was by having other people remember you.
So the worst thing that you could do to a Roman
was to remove them from public remembrance.
That's what "damnatio memoriae" is.
I'm going to give you an example,
and this is an example that is not creative reuse.
This is the Emperor Septimius Severus.
If you recall, Septimius Severus left his empire to his two sons.
This is Caracalla on the right and Geta on the left.
And by looking at this,
I think you guys can all figure out how this worked out for poor Geta.
(Laughter)
So, they inherit dad's empire and Caracalla immediately has Geta killed.
Not only that, but he declares a "damnatio memoriae,"
and he has all of Geta's images removed.
And I can really almost imagine Caracalla's baggage here
and imagine him with the chisel sort of going to here and say,
"Mama always liked you best. Mama always liked you best."
And you've got to really really really hate your brother
to go through painstakingly removing him from thousands and thousands of coins.
(Laughter)
But with "damnatio memoriae,"
sometimes creative reuse came to the rescue.
When there was a bad emperor - and there were a lot of bad emperors -
sometimes the Romans would take their sculptures,
and they would recarve them into the sculptures of later emperors.
This sometimes led to a few hinky details with the sculptures.
Strange hairstyles, strange head shapes, strange features, mismatched ears.
In the case of this one -
by the way, this is Caligula and it was recarved into Claudius -
they recarved the head, and they found out that it was way too small for the body,
so the solution was to cut the head off and match it up with some other body.
And that was the way that it was preserved.
By the 3rd century, things got really crazy.
This is actually another statue of Caligula
that had sat around for a couple of hundred years,
and it was recarved into a later Roman military leader.
One of the telltale signs with some of these recarved statues is
that on the original statues, the beard sat on top of the face,
as it should.
In the recarved statues, they would just hack the beard right into the face
to try to save space.
Here is another one that art historians really love.
This is the word "spolia," or spoils.
Spolia is the modern art-historical term used to describe
the reuse of earlier building materials or decorative sculptures on new monuments.
Looking around Eureka, and particularly where I live,
there's a lot of "spolia" on the outside of buildings.
But the textbook example is the Arch of Constantine.
This was consecrated in the year 315 CE,
but the interesting thing about the Arch of Constantine
is that Constantine had it frankensteined together
from the monuments of 2nd-century Roman leaders.
Art historians love to debate why he did this.
Was he just cheap?
Was he lazy?
Were the sculptors of his era not up to his standards?
Or was something else going on?
That "something else" is something
that everyone who embraces creative reuse really knows:
that everything that you reuse comes with its own story.
And so, Constantine perhaps grasped
that all these things that he was taking from other emperors
came with their own story,
and therefore reflected on his magnificence.
These are a couple of roundels,
and they were taken from a monument from the Emperor Hadrian.
Constantine's sculptors painstakingly took out the faces
and recarved Constantine's face into the face on these.
You can see how the classical sculpture of Hadrian's Era doesn't quite match up
with the slightly stranger sculpture of Constantine's Era.
The Romans weren't the only culture to embrace creative reuse, of course.
Islamic cultures a lot of the time embraced creative reuse.
This is from the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem.
It was made out of a common material that was left around Jerusalem,
and that was spolia, pieces of marble, left behind by the crusaders.
India is another place where you can find Islamic creative reuse.
This comes from the Mughal dynasty.
This is the Qutb Minar; it's outside of Delhi, in India.
This is the world's largest free-standing brick minaret,
and it is made out of 27 different Hindu temples.
The Great Mosque of Córdoba, in Spain.
A lot of people in textbooks love to point to the fact
that the columns in the mosque are reused from an earlier Christian building,
but not everybody knows that archeologists think
that there was a Roman temple on this site, or near this site.
It was knocked down,
and parts of that were reused for the Christian church,
which was then knocked down to make the mosque.
And of course, Spain didn't remain under Islamic control;
so, when another Christian group arrived,
rather than knocking down the Great Mosque,
they simply plopped a Christian basilica right into the middle of the prayer hall.
Roman jewelry is something
that gets reused a lot during the Middle Ages as well.
During the Middle Ages, there wasn't quite as much gem mining,
and there wasn't as much gem carving.
So the answer was to take all bits of Roman jewelry
and reuse them any way that they could be reused.
This is the Lothair Cross; it's in Aachen, in Germany.
It was donated by Otto III, the Emperor, and it was made around 1000 CE.
This is a really strange Christian cross
because instead of, in the middle of it, seeing an image of Jesus,
we see an image of Augustus, the Roman emperor.
What Otto's thought process might have been
was a synthesis of different things.
Synthesizing the image of Christ,
the magnificence of Otto himself, and the magnificence of the Roman Empire.
Of course, this was during the period of the Holy Roman Empire.
Another even stranger cross is the Herimann Cross.
This also comes from Germany.
On this Christian cross, we do see an image of Christ in the middle of it,
but instead of having Christ's normal, would be golden face here,
we have a face that's taken
from a Roman lapis lazuli sculpture of the Empress Livia.
Her face has been cut off and put onto the face of Christ,
presumably to amp up the value of this piece.
As I was putting this lecture together,
I confess I was working on this during Halloween,
and I started thinking about skulls and the way that skulls are reused.
We always hear of people
drinking from the skulls of their vanquished enemies.
I know I like to.
(Laughter)
Lord Byron actually kept a skull around his house,
and when he would have a really wild party,
they'd wind up drinking from that skull at the end of the night.
But I don't have examples of any of those skulls that I can show you;
instead, I'm going to show you a more gentile example.
In Tibetan Buddhism, they have objects called "kapalas."
These are the skulls of monks that have been cleaned and dried,
and offerings can be left in them.
Another major realization that I had
was that when I was thinking about and doing all of this research,
I realized something that comes as second nature to anyone
who is older in this audience.
And that is that as a culture, as a society,
we can't even hold a candle to the things that the World War II generation did,
just a few generations older than us.
The amount of things that were recycled and reused
are almost beyond our comprehension.
Here's a poster on the left
for a salvage drive for paper, rags and bones.
And on the right, this is from Vogue Knitting.
Vouge Knitting during World War II
was encouraging people to take apart and unravel their knitwear,
re-dye it, clean it up and knit it into new things.
The final thing that I want to talk to you today about
is also from World War II,
and it surrounds a German group called Der Deutsche Werkbund.
The Werkbund was a group of German designers
who embraced good design, clean design.
They actually went to the trouble of putting together kits
that they would send out to schools to teach German kids about good design,
instead of bad design like cuckoo clocks, the nemesis of the Werkbund.
(Laughter)
After World War II, materials in Germany were in very, very short supply,
so Der Deutsche Werkbund embraced the only thing that they really could do,
which was creative reuse.
They used lots of materials that were left over from the war,
and they recycled them into housewares,
they reused them into housewares.
Here are some strainers made of the filters from gas masks.
Candle holders made from the same gas mask filters.
These are actually shell casings; they have been enameled
and turned into water pots and cooking pots.
The final thing that I'm going to show you
I think is karmic payback for all of the years
that artists have been having their things taken away from them
and recycled into goods that are going to war efforts.
This is a German helmet;
it's been enameled, and it's had a handle added to it,
and it's been turned into a pot.
It's not a cooking pot.
(Laughter)
I can only imagine that while this thing was being used,
I hope that the person using it sort of grasped the symbolism of using it,
remarking on the futility of war every time that it was used.
And my other hope is that every time that thing was used,
somewhere,
one of those recycled Greek sculptures
got a little smile.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)