The concept of sustainability is evolving as a real requirement. In these days, thanks to the awareness campaign called FridaysForFuture, carried out by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the whole world has decided to protest against the pollution of the planet.
Sustainability is a thorny topic that affects all areas of society equally. Even art has been influenced by this contemporary problem.
Has the issue of sustainability in art really been born in recent years?
Actually the concept of Trash Art joins the artistic world when art finds interesting the use of waste in order to express particular contemporary requests.
The critic and curator of art Lea Vergine claims that this new artistic research can be started on the eve of the First World War.
The artists wanted break the mould, contrasted the noblest materials with traditional and miserable ones demonstrating how waste could be an artwork. The scandal created was perceived as a kind of game.
All the artists of the Sixties up to the first exponents of Pop art and many of Informal, with the beginning of consumerism, return to use waste materials, but in a different way.
The waste, indeed, has changed with the arrival of the plastics and the sense of play is replaced by sarcasm and alarm. There was a sense of social and political criticism.
The use of waste by past artists shows a very hard irony that we relive today. This irony also shows a strong sense of collective fear and anxiety.
We are breaking the balance of our society bringing natural ones to the limit.
But all is not lost! We are still in time to change things, just get started now.