Selma Selman’s art often revolves around recycling, something that places her in a long lineage of artistic transformations
Anybody who encountered Selman’s work for the first time at documenta 15 will be aware that she paints on car parts, more precisely, on Mercedes and BMW engine hoods. As she herself readily confesses in an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she can no longer paint on canvas. “Once upon a time I did paint on canvas.” Born in 1991, before studying Art in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and on the United States’ East Coast, she painted incessantly and her father, a scrap merchant by trade, acted as her agent. He never kept a picture for more than a few days. “He really is a catalyst for my ideas,” Selman continues, “because we used to work at home in our junkyard together.”
Selma Selman, Painting on metal – Mercedes-Benz, 2023, image via acbgaleria.hu
She started using the material on which her family’s business is based. “In my village,” she continues, “a Mercedes-Benz represents a symbol of success. (…) But at the same time, I travel to Germany, where I destroy it, and use the parts as painting surface. Various notions of value are in play here. First, the purely symbolic value of the car, in that it represents affluence, then its material value, and finally its hard-to-define value as art.
Futurists of the 21st century
There is too much of everything in the world and yet it is never enough. Too little potable water, too little clean air, too much trash. That is a problem, so much so that it is shifted around the world, often along old colonial lines of power. Electronic scrap ends up on toxic dumps in Africa where raw materials are harvested in conditions that are hazardous to workers’ health. From a global viewpoint, recycling (which the Global North sees as the basis of an environmentally conscious economy) is a pretty dirty business: No less waste is produced but it is less visible. The superfluous quantities of everything gets repressed and the old imbalance of power between the center and the fringes is repeated. And as Selman once put it, the Romany people have been working in the scrap trade for more than 100 years now “in order to survive as an oppressed minority in modern Western society”. This is the source of their knowledge about the durability and reusability of materials. “In my opinion, in the 21st century the Romany people are the planet’s leading social, ecological and technological futurists.”
Selma Selman, painting on metal, 2020/21, image via acbgaleria.hu
For her 2019–20 performance entitled “Mercedes Matrix” the artist had her father and other relations take apart a Mercedes E-class until only its chassis and the engine block remained. This was the first time she first collaborated with her relatives. The parts can be reused and it could be the case that this work contains a paradox such as the one about Theseus’ ship: What is left of the Mercedes after all its parts have been dismantled, sold or used as the raw materials for art?
Selma Selman, Mercedes Matrix, 2019, Kampnagel Hamburg, Image via mrezni-muzej.mg-lj.si
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/ Tracks/ Maintenance Outside, 1973, Part of the Maintenance Art Performances series, Image via thecollector.com
A Wages for Housework march, 1977, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute / Bettye Lane, image via thenation.com
Recycling and upcycling. Transforming and reusing are examples of old forms of cultural engineering, particularly important for us these days when we are simultaneously confronted with overabundance and scarcity. However, such technologies have also been practices used in avant-garde art for a long time now. Perhaps everything started with the idea of using trash as a material. Probably the most radical example of this and definitely the first one was Marcel Duchamp, that pioneer of concept art, who declared his finds from flea markets to be ready-mades.
Demystification and transformation of work
In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles coined the term “Maintenance Art”. The young mother declared this activity which she had to perform anyway to be art. The New York-based artist extended the scope of the idea and started scrubbing the steps to museums. She concerned herself with the kind of work that is necessary to keep cities clean, later becoming artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation. Her praxis evolved in the context of the second wave of feminism, which was intent on bringing to light those kinds of work that, for the most part, tend to remain invisible. One example: In 1972, the movement “Wages for Housework” was founded by a group of female activists headed up by Silvia Federici. So perhaps the term “work” is pretty important when we start talking about recycling and art. Whereas Duchamp’s ready-mades put the refusal to work on display, aiming at questioning those established notions of art, artists such as Laderman Ukeles made work itself their subject matter. This somewhat demystified the artist’s work, with its frequently masculine connotations.
Selma Selman, Motherboards, 2023, Performance, Krass Kultur Crash Festival, Hamburg. Courtesy: the artist; Foto: Mario Ilić, Image via krass-festival.de
Selma Selman, Motherboards, Performance 2023, KRASS Kultur Crash Festival, Hamburg. Foto: Mario Ilić, image via berlinerfestspiele.de
Selman is concerned herself with work and she opens her continuing performance “Motherboards” (2023) by reciting Rudyard Kipling's “The Secret of the Machines” (1911): “We were taken from the ore-bed (orbed) and the mine, /We were melted in the furnace (frnas) and the pit” In this text, worker and machine meld, and the melting of metals is a symbol of industrial labor. Meanwhile, Selman’s father and the other performers process electronic scrap (something that is normally disposed of a long way away from Europe). When the piece was originally performed at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, a cellist and a DJ provided the accompanying music, which in turn referenced the sound of work – although here something else also takes place. Selman extracts the gold, a material that recurs regularly in her work, from the scrap. At a later point, she will cast a nail from it. For a later performance she extracts platinum from catalytic converters for cars. Kipling's verses call the industrial age to mind and the performance is based around labor as a small-scale kind of extraction.
Selma Selman, Dirt 0, 2021, exhibition view Art Entcounters Foundation Timișoara, image via artsy.net
Any history of the art of recycling would have, to some extent, to be a history of labor. Or, to express it more precisely, a history that explains how new notions of the artist’s work are replacing the old ones. Incidentally, there is another piece by Selman on canvas, Dirt 0, dating from 2021, that is also a ready-made. This piece is the large piece of cloth in which her father carried car parts, only in the white cube it was transformed into an abstract, almost gestural painting. Selman’s work revolves around transformations (turning scrap metal into gold) and around how to help restore some kind of dignity to once stigmatized labor, namely handling the leftovers, the world’s superfluous elements. However, this is not possible without an artist’s intervention, a further transformation.
