Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
The buildings we call home, the things we use every day, and the technologies we depend on would quickly become useless without constant repair and maintenance.
Recycling and reuse can also be an essential stimulus for invention and innovation. They force us to look at things differently and experiment with novel solutions to familiar problems.
Artists are often at the forefront of such experimentation.
French modernist Marcel Duchamp made reuse a central part of his practice when he selected everyday objects such as a bottle rack, a snow shovel, and, most famously, a urinal, as “readymades”.
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Pablo Picasso showed a real flair for recycling in his collages and “assemblages”, turning torn newspaper, children’s toys and broken furniture into creative media.
More recently, Girrimay/Kuku Yilanji/Yidinji artist Tony Albert has transformed “Aboriginalia” into a compelling reminder of both the racial prejudice at the heart of Australian culture and the powerful presence of those who endure this prejudice.
He reuses ashtrays, tea towels and other mundane items adorned with harmful stereotypes. By gathering them together and holding them to scrutiny in a public context, Albert forces us to acknowledge our role in ensuring this invisibility.
By reusing and repurposing everyday objects, contemporary artists create powerful points of connection between their work and the daily experience of their viewers.
These parallels can provoke a new awareness of unspoken attitudes and prejudices, and even inspire ethical or political action.
Read more:
Not A Souvenir: Tony Albert exhibit turns racist Aboriginalia into a powerful act of truth-telling
Adaptive reuse
Unlike Duchamp, Picasso and other modernists, Albert’s works are not readymades or assemblages. He doesn’t seek to push aesthetic boundaries. Instead, he wants to challenge our understanding of the world, and of ourselves.
Such works can be described as examples of “adaptive reuse”.
This term has been used for the past few decades in heritage conservation and architecture to refer to the adaptation of existing buildings for new purposes. The renovation of a disused factory into a living space or a power station into an art gallery.
The practice has ancient pedigree, but it gained contemporary currency from the 1970s in response to a rising awareness of climate change and scarcity of resources.
Romanian architect Sherban Cantacuzino was an early advocate, warning in 1975 the “wholesale and indiscriminate destruction” created by demolishing disused buildings posed “fundamental ecological and sociological problems”.
Similar concerns now inspire Albert and other artists.
Canberra-based Ashley Eriksmoen gives new form to pieces of furniture discarded at the side of the road, in monstrous sculptural assemblages. They become witnesses to the creative potential of the things we forget and throw away.
Sydney-based artist Sarah Goffman transforms single-use plastics into ornate replicas of historical ceramics and glassware. Things we would ordinarily seek to forget are used to highlight ecological issues of pollution and sustainability.
Working with wreckage
In a recent paper, I use this idea of adaptive reuse to shed new light on a series of works created by Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
The series began in 1993 when Cai stumbled across the remains of a ship abandoned on a remote beach in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, on Japan’s northeastern coast.
After working with local volunteers to carefully remove the wreck from the sand, Cai used the salvaged timbers to create five works across the next decade.
In Kaikou – The Keel (1994) and Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki (2004), Cai and his team of Iwaki-based volunteers installed the skeletal hull of the wrecked ship in museums in Japan and the United States.
For Kaikou, Cai embedded the hull in nine tons of sea salt sourced from the local desalination plant – then the only such facility operating in eastern Japan.
For Reflection, he replaced salt with white porcelain figurines of the Buddhist deity Guanyin, broken factory rejects created in China.
In San Jō Tower (1994), The Orient (1995) and The Dragon Has Arrived! (1997), Cai and his volunteers used timber salvaged from the wreck to create three makeshift wooden structures resembling the tiers of a pagoda.
These were initially shown individually at the entrance to the Iwaki City Art Museum. They were then stacked on top of each other for their display as The Orient at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
Finally, for the 47th Venice Biennale, they were suspended in mid-air and made to resemble a missile in flight.
The salvaged timbers of the wreck he found on that deserted stretch of coastline gained new life and new relevance as a vehicle for ties to place, for local and national identity, geopolitical tensions and international relations, global trade, and, ultimately, ecological conservation.
Born again
In “adaptive reuse” artworks by these and other contemporary artists, things that would otherwise be overlooked, abandoned or destroyed are born again.
Their recycling is motivated not only by aesthetics, but ethics as well.
Albert reclaims and reuses the stereotyped kitsch of another era to expose ongoing issues of racial prejudice.
Eriksmoen transforms hard rubbish destined for landfill into fantastic composites that show the surprising beauty of the everyday. Goffman reminds us single-use plastics will likely be the ubiquitous antiques of the far distant future.
And Cai has used the wreck of a humble fishing ship to raise a range of cultural, historical and ecological questions that remain relevant today.
Alex Burchmore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/08/adaptive-reuse-how-contemporary-artists-reuse-and-recycle-objects-to-be-born-again/