In the twentieth century, trash was drastically re-invented to become a daily fixture of modern life. Art became increasingly difficult to define, while objects and commodities were produced like never before. Most of this thesis has to do with objects: whether categorized as trash, art, or commodity. I’ll use Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” series to examine these categories while looking at the difference between human intentionality and (what theorist Jane Bennett calls) “thing power.”  

As humans, we take for granted the idea that we are in total control of the fate of objects and most nonhuman entities. We get to decide if an object is trash, art, tool, or commodity. We get to decide if a creature is an animal, a robot, a sentient vacuum, or something in between. Often, these decisions are arbitrary. Capitalism has trained us to believe that certain objects are trash long before they should be. 

The production of all of this stuff contributes to the warming of the earth, the warming of the oceans, the bleaching of the coral reefs, the proliferation of droughts and wildfires; all the calamities you’ve heard about so often that you’ve become numb to their implications. In this thesis, I seek to raise questions regarding the ontological status of various objects while examining the ways in which twentieth-century artists have dealt with these ontological questions in a century that produced more stuff than ever before.