Cycles of Consumption
by Marina Shterenberg
Terry R. Marashlian
Cycles of consumption
“I am speaking to the culture we live in”, says Terry Marashlian, who, using all twenty thousands pounds of hydrolic pressure of his “Art Crusher” compactor is preparing to make two feet in diameter ‘coins’ from recycled aluminum cans. The project is called Recycler’s Guide to San Francisco and proposes to bring to our attention the faces of the “nameless” recyclers who collect aluminum cans in exchange for money. Terry spent months on E-bay searching for the ideal compactor. When it finally arrived in his studio, he needed to inventory all his skills, from the time when he used to work in industry, in order to wire the machine and get it to operate. “I thought it would be bigger” was my first remark when seeing the “Art Crusher” in person. Of course, I grew up in the socialist Soviet Union, still living in the shadows of industrial revolution, where the notion of the machine was perhaps exaggerated out of proportions in the minds of people that didn’t work in the factories or in the fields. Today in America, the industrial machine is even further removed: “In our everyday life we don’t come in contact with gigantic machinery that makes our culture possible”, comments Terry, “The awe of seeing one of them work is overwhelming”. Injecting himself in the recycling process and freezing it in time, Terry is involved in constructing a kind of cultural archeology by bringing our attention to the function of objects in a recycling process as currency. When the ‘coins’ are completed and exhibited, they are not destined for an art collection. Terry plans to take the ‘coins’ back to a recycling plant to conclude the cycle of obsolescence and to emphasize that his investigation is apparent only in viewing the entire cycle.
As viewers of Terry’s work, we have a chance to recognize ourselves partaking in the cycle of consumption. Providing an illusory sense of freedom and choice, products today are designed to become outdated almost instantly. By having to have the “latest”, we are the prime contributors to the accelerating cycle of obsolescence and discard. The extent of individual discard is visible in Terry’s resin “time capsules”, in which he crushes discarded electronics, taken at the end of their lives, and interrupts the process of recycling. It is significant for Terry that both, the resin he uses as well as the plastic components of the parts inside, are the byproducts of oil. Crushing the objects, Terry is engaged in compressing a part of our culture as well as ‘freezing’ the passage of time.
Vectors to the Moon investigates a different kind of a cycle, a cycle of salt. Purchasing large quantities of unprocessed sea salt, Terry is compressing the salt into salt pillars, which will be placed on the beach pointing to the positions of the moon. As the tide comes up, the pillars will be slowly washed away and the salt will be returned to the ocean. The project overlays the cycles of the waves, the moon and the salt and Terry is still unclear about the details of the final installation.
Terry’s work highlights our awareness of the difficulty in conceiving a cycle that one is a part of. Collapse of the past and the future in today’s postmodern society has created a sort of eternal moment of the present. To experience a cycle, one now must enter a metaphysical space that transports the viewer into distinct points in time, which, when connected, define one continuous process.