Is the Rise of Trash Assemblage Art a Recession Indicator?

As spring turns to summer, the streets of New York become perfumed by the stench of trash, whose brownish liquids and rotting foods bake beneath the sun. But this season, you can find some of that rubbish not just outside museums and galleries but within them, too. Call these trash assemblages “gather art,” a kind of work made by foraging for tossed-out junk.

The rise of gather art is most abundantly visible at MoMA PS1 in a group show called “The Gatherers,” a thought-provoking survey of 14 artists fascinated by debris in all its many forms. But it is also noticeable in an array of solo exhibitions held across the city, from shows for established figures, like Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali, to outings for artists who have yet to receive canonization here, such as one at 47 Canal by Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, whose recent sculptures make use of recycled ATV tires and handles.

The trend is not entirely new, of course. The art of Robert Rauschenberg and Isa Genzken, with their collections of ramshackle arrays of spare industrial parts, urban litter, and consumerist detritus, comes to mind. Yet this recent crop of gather artists is not merely reviving Rauschenbergian techniques, which evinced a greater concern with the notion of the readymade itself than in the capitalistic forces that gave rise to it. By contrast, these gather artists have issues related to our globalized economy and climate change on their mind, though these ideas are woven into their art obliquely rather than addressed outright.

Notably, the prevalence of gather art has sped up in the past five years in New York, a period of Covid-induced slowdown and economic downturn. Does that make gather art a recession indicator? It definitely feels that way, especially because so much of this work is quite dour. Plus, there’s the fact that it costs less to appropriate preexisting material than it does to buy new art supplies. When the going gets rough, artists reduce, reuse, and recycle.

But the curious thing about gather art is that it isn’t always bleak: some artists seem optimistic about what will arise from the ruins of our bottomed-out society. Below, a look at three New York shows of gather art.