In a well-known passage of Nadja (1928) André Breton recounts scouring the Saint-Ouen flea market in search of ‘old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse’ relics. Since the Surrealists’ embrace of the salvaged ‘ruins of the bourgeoisie’in the early twentieth century, outmoded and discarded materials have been utilised by a variety of artistic movements. Regimes of Value, an exhibition curated by artist Elizabeth Gower, suggests that although this may not be a particularly new artistic strategy, it is one which has much currency in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Spread across two venues, The Substation and the Margaret Lawrence Gallery in Melbourne, this ambitious exhibition features the work of more than twenty-five local artists who use urban detritus and ephemera as their primary material.
Regimes of Value is the fifth exhibition Gower has curated, since the late 1980s, dedicated to artists’ collections and methodologies of collecting. She notes that the shifting political and cultural conditions of the time have informed the kinds of materials utilised and investigations undertaken within each show.1 We might add that these same conditions inevitably frame the viewer’s interpretation of the work. Over recent decades there has been growing public awareness and anxiety about the devastating effects of global capitalism on the natural environment, fuelled in large part by the accumulation of scientific evidence attesting to anthropogenic climate change. Concurrently, eco-aesthetics have become increasingly prevalent, with a number of major exhibitions addressing environmental issues staged around the world.2 Against this backdrop Gower’s marshalling of works crafted from waste materials appears a reproach to a contemporary consumer culture characterised by excess, disposability and waste.
Indeed, a number of works in Regimes of