Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

A Learning Module for Dunn and McGraw IB World School Kindergarten

Teachers and StudentsA provocation for the Unit of Inquiry: Humans have

responsibilities in managing the earth’s limited resources.Part of the Sharing the Planet transdisciplinary theme

Lesson OverviewBelow you will find a general outline for the lesson included in this module. Your manner of delivery and the extent to which you explore the lesson and additional art activities is up to you. The lesson is designed with the two-fold purpose of serving as a provocation

for the unit of inquiry, and as a study of contemporary art as a discipline.

• Background on artist for the teacher.

• Slides and discussion starters for classroom use.– This is where you would begin projecting this

PowerPoint presentation with students.

• Ideas for art extensions.– These projects can be done as a class or

offered as individual opportunities.

Background for the educator

• Artist: Jason Middlebrook• Medium: Discarded cardboard boxes• Biography

– Brooklyn based artist, Jason Middlebrook was born in Michigan, however, the first ten years of his life were spent in Iowa, Kentucky, and Los Gatos, California, where his family finally settled.

Middlebrook is known for his sculptural installations, which can be quite large at 370ft by 10ft and inspired by science and nature.

He has had several public art commissions in London, New York and Santa Monica. They have also been featured at the Whitney Museum and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Review of the show “Live With Less” featured in Art in America, June/July 2009

• Jason Middlebrook’s ambitious project “Live with Less” used as its basic material discarded cardboard boxes collected on campus over a two-month period. Many of them were recycled into the show’s tour de force, Cardboard Stack (2009), consisting of 2 tons of the flattened stuff assembled in a column that conjured a tornado. Piled like landfill detritus, it majestically ascended the atrium’s entire 35-foot height. Middlebrook’s persistent themes—nature v. culture, repurposing throwaways, runaway consumption and its impact on the environment—were on full and varied view in this exhibition. The show began in the lobby, which was plastered with hand-painted signs executed with the help of art students and others in the community, an outreach component important to Middlebrook’s practice. They suggested the makeshift signs and shelters of the homeless, except the texts are more philosophical or exhortative, culled from the artist’s notebooks; they included an amusing comparison of Middlebrook to Tiger Woods and quotes from famous artists.

• On the first floor were 10 large works on paper (ranging from 2001 to ’08) that, though far less dramatic than the cardboard constructions, were the most beautiful component of the show. The majority were a mix of acrylic, ink and pencil, and displayed Middlebrook’s skill as a draftsman and colorist, combining delicate renderings of landscapes and cityscapes, and the small and large details that comprise them—houses, fences, leaves, fossils, shells, diatoms, ganglia and more—with expressive brushwork, washes and abstract swirls, stripes and geometric patterns.

• The floor above seemed more celestial, metaphorically joined to the first by the tower of cardboard. Dominating the space were the four soaring vertical elements of Stacked Night Sky (2009), a patchwork of painted black cardboard dotted with points of color and scored by lines that resembles an illuminated city seen from an airplane, with an image of ominous barbed wire stretched across the bottom section. Vividly painted planks of cherry, walnut, cottonwood and cedar leaned against the wall à la John McCracken sculpture or surfboards, and Nakashima-like benches of reclaimed wood embellished with painted stripes and dots were located throughout the space. Lastly, there were hundreds of varied bottles—actually concrete casts of containers salvaged from a dump near his studio—placed on the floor and along the ledges of the upstairs gallery. They were nearly indistinguishable from the real, weathered things, their status somewhere between art, functional object, junk and industrial fossil. Playfully earnest and visually provocative, Middlebrook’s work makes us think about downsizing, waste, art-making and inventive recycling, although somewhat contradictorily. This very enjoyable and well-stocked show was not the best advocate for living with less, but, hey, we know what he means.

Jason Middlebrook: Live with Less

• Check out this stack of boxes!

• What on earth is it?

• It is art! See the tall form. See the same rectangular shapes.

• How does it make you feel?

Analyzing the formal elements of the work

• How did the artist decide to stack up all those boxes? – Where did he get

them? What kind of building is this? Who comes here? Where would the boxes go if they didn’t get stacked like that?

• Who would come to see a stack of boxes?– Would you like to see

such a tall stack? How would you feel staring up at a teetering stack of boxes like that? Where else have you seen piles of boxes? Do piles of boxes feel neat or messy? What do you do with empty boxes?

• What is the artist trying to show you with this stack of boxes?– Do you like to stack

stuff? Why did the artist choose to stack these? What do you think the artist is trying to tell you with his stack of boxes so high?

• What would happen to all these boxes if they didn’t get made into a sculpture?– Where do boxes

come from? What is used to make boxes? Do people always need boxes? How else could people carry stuff? Is this too many boxes? Does this many boxes make you feel uncomfortable?

Inquiry

• What questions does this photograph raise in your mind?

Uncovering the Artist’s meaning

• Jason Middlebrook made this sculpture from trash boxes. He got them from the university where he worked. It only took two months to get this many boxes from the trash!

• Jason Middlebrook tries to get people to think about recycling and art-making.

• What does looking at his tall, teetering, box sculpture make you think about? Would you like to have this stack in your house? In your bedroom? How do you feel when your bedroom is too messy?

• How does the messiness at the bottom of the stack make you feel? Why would Jason Middlebrook make his sculpture a little bit messy looking?

• How does the part where the sculpture is pushing up against the ceiling make you feel? Why did Jason Middlebrook make his sculpture reach all the way up to the ceiling?

Connection: What connection can you make between the central idea and the artist’s work?

• “Humans have responsibilities in managing the earth’s limited resources.”

Action: Thinking about a personal connection

• Where do you see things like stacks of boxes?• What else do you see that makes you feel like

you feel when you see a teetering stack of boxes?

• If you were an artist, what would you stack to make people feel like they do when they see Jason Middlebrook’s sculpture?

• How can you arrange stuff to make people think about recycling?

Action: Take your learning one step further! • Pay attention to what there is too much of

around you. Does your family have piles of certain stuff? Newspapers? Milk cartons? Juice bags?

• Make a sculpture out of that stuff. • Put the stuff together in a way that makes

people really think about how it is way too much stuff. Maybe you will stack stuff to the ceiling to show that there is too much stuff like Jason Middlebrook. Maybe you will place the stuff all the way down the sidewalk to show that there is too much stuff. Maybe you will make a pile as high as you.

Resources for further learning

• http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/jason-middlebrook/

• http://jasonmiddlebrook.com/pages.php?content=resume.php&navGallID=Resume