Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

When the alchemist is closed By Nigel Ryan (From left) Lotta Barlach: "All my costumes can be worn and are intended for use on the human body." TranSglass: "We like the bottles, they have an economical attitude. They're surprising but also familiar. A sort of recycled chic."

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Magie Hollingworth's Eagle Eye, a circular, papier mâché plaque almost a metre in diameter, is a concretised pun. It is made from old copies of the Eagle, a children's comic featuring, most famously, Dan Dare the pilot of the future.

"I've got an idea, I'm going to make a cup of tea," reads one of the few legible sound-bubbles emanating from Dan's geometric jaw. Perhaps it is from The Mystery of Moo Moo's Wharf, one of the few legible story titles.

Eagle Eye itself features in Reclaimed -- subtitled a little more lengthily Recycling in Contemporary British Craft and Design. It is a British Council organised exhibition that currently occupies Townhouse gallery.

"I am a natural hoarder," writes Hollingworth. "I want to use, re-use and use again. Recycling my accumulated wealth of paper -- life's fragments -- is the perfect vehicle for expression." Fortuitous, then, that she should have stored so many vintage comics.

Comics feature again in Justine Smith's Wizard, a papier mâché dog constructed out of old copies of the Beano, whose most famous character is Dennis the Menace. A more oblique pun here, perhaps, given that Wizard was itself the name of a comic, though I'm not sure it survives.

"The appeal [of recycling] for me," writes Smith, "lies in the concept that the contents of the publication with all its references to popular culture and contemporary life are being preserved and frozen in time, but that eventually the work made in this style will be very nostalgic, with references to out of date pop bands and old football players, with the mellowed appearance of the papier mâché confirming its age."

Nostalgia, then, in the shape of a totemic dog that will improve as it yellows.

I should confess to ambiguous feelings about the current show. It is fun in places, less so in others and several of the pieces one might wish to see re-recycled. But what really pushes the whole thing off-kilter is the context. Cairo is, after all, a city that has turned recycling into an art form -- small a, of course, and only in a manner of speaking. But the idiom is telling because of the nonchalance with which it betrays a very basic division: recycling, here, is the prerogative of the poor; for several communities it is a means of survival. Recycling in the First World is a life-style choice. It is design and consequently gets exhibited in art-spaces.

Think of all that Muski glass -- cobalt blue, green, turquoise. Every last bit is recycled. In Reclaimed is the TranSglass Bottle Collection. According to the catalogue "it originated in the desire to design and manufacture a collection of tableware... We chose to develop a recycled glassware range because we think recycling is important. It was also an economical option... Maybe it is most important to create a contemporary beauty that shows a positive attitude to the environment... to make a product so beautiful, functional and elemental that it becomes a pleasure to live with."

The catalogue notes are telling: "a tableware collection", a cliché of life-style catalogue speak; "economical option" suggests responsibility, but combined with "recycling is important" expands that sense of responsibility beyond the merely fiscal to include environmental awareness. But most significant is the desire to create "a product so beautiful, functional and elemental it becomes a pleasure to live with", a reiteration of the ambitions of every design based movement -- from the Wiener Werkstatte to the Bauhaus to mid-century internationalism -- ever to have been canonised in a large format, glossy, and formidably expensive book. Unfortunately the glassware really isn't very nice, which I suppose betrays only the most important of the makers' ambitions. I doubt, too, if it would prove more economical than similarly recycled local products, but then they are not Design.

Far preferable are the pieces of whimsy, works that are less outrageous, dare one say less dated, in their ambition. Clare Goddard's exhibits are well-served by their titles: Recycled Tea Bag Tags Wall Piece is a long, narrow hanging comprised of stapled tea-bag tags -- Typhoo, Lipton, and the slightly aspirational Twinings; Recycled Tea Bag Wall Hanging is a series of smart circular tea-bags, dyed and stitched onto a strip of fine fabric, itself dyed in tea. It flutters in the wind like a prayer flag.

Goddard shows, too, recycled tea-bag handbags, a bewitching idea if only because of the alchemical transformations it implies. But then the most appealing exhibits in this show are those at the outer edge of probability: a dress constructed of rubber gloves, hanging in an unlikely tutu from the waistband, or from foil pill packets, strung together with metal chains and looking ever so Paco Rabanne, though in his latest, New Age manifestation he is unlikely to appreciate the punning title, Addiction.

The most functional pieces remain the furniture: Edward Teasdale's Wave Bench, beautifully made from reclaimed wood, and elegantly curved, is a piece of classically understated design. Other items, though, such as Michael Marriott's Five Series Sardine Collectors Cabinet, a table top five drawer box constructed from an MDF frame, with sardine can drawers and wing nut handles, are merely tricksy, a reworking of the kind of objects that litter the backgrounds of Salvador Dali's paintings and that appeal to a similarly adolescent sense of the absurd.

The oddest aspect of this show, though, is the reclaiming of Marcel Duchamp in the longest of the catalogue essays.

"An understanding of Marcel Duchamp," it insists, "is particularly crucial to the story of recycled design for it was this French artist's creation of ready-mades (involving the re-presentation of everyday articles such as a bicycle wheel and a urinal as works of art) in the first decades of the twentieth century which led to a radical change in the way many artists felt about using apparently everyday articles in their work and in so doing questioned the very status and meaning of mass produced objects."

This peculiarly skewed, post-Pop reading of Duchamp, says a little more than it intends. For it is not the status and meaning of mass produced objects that Duchamp was questioning, but the status accorded by virtue of being displayed in the spaces reserved for Art. They are, by now, notoriously accommodating spaces. Perhaps, soon, they will include toy cars made from old Flit aerosol cans, and scrap metal rattles, and exhaust pipe trees, and pails bent out of old ghee containers, and discarded car seats utilised by boabs, and yes, that cobalt blue glass. All are readily available. All are locally made.

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