Lawrence Weiner on the Trash Can

I like the idea of something that has no function except to hold other things that have been used. A trash can is a container which takes on the remnants of what you were doing, like an ashtray. The container is something people must make, and then its only purpose is to fill up with things that people have no use for any more. Or what’s just too dirty to handle.

When I was working with Meta Memphis Design in 1989, I realized that the major item you could build for furniture is a poubelle – a trash can – because at the end of the day, that’s how you know what you have accomplished when you make things: by what’s in the rubbish. It’s the detritus, what’s left over. We built a beautiful trash can from copper and marble, which is fabulous, but the base is so heavy that you can’t move it around. We had this trash can at the studio, before we rebuilt it, but now I have a new one: a large galvanized iron bucket, which one of those plastic bags fits into. I don’t think it was made as a trash can but rather for milk. Nevertheless, it fills up at the end of the week, and you think, ‘Okay, I have done something!’

But there are these days, when there is not much you can go through. You think, ‘Where has my day gone?’ When I’m in the studio and working, I look forward to recycling because it means that you go through piles of things, tie them up and put them out on the street. It really fits in with the idea of being a sculptor. It’s physical, you see the result of having gone through and used what comes through the studio – by its pure mass, not at all by its content. I don’t go into the detritus. Dumpster diving doesn’t interest me.

^{Main image: Courtesy: © Getty Images; photograph: Christiano Francisco Antonio Takatsch Castellano / EyeEm}