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Collective Edinburgh 5 August to 2 October
This show is demanding: Hans Schabus has collected all his family's household waste for an entire year and displayed it in a gallery. It is such a brilliantly simple idea that, well, lots of people have thought of it before (or something very like it). Most of them thought better of it and moved on. Schabus has done the dedicated/obsessive thing, diligently retaining the disposable evidence of his existence. From fag ends to butter wrappers, printer cartridges to toilet roll tubes, it has all been withheld from the recyclers or rescued from landfill, carefully sorted, neatly folded and laid out like a block chart across the full length of the floor in Collective's four adjoining spaces.
At first the work yields surprisingly little, except maybe that there is less of it than one might expect, given how bad we are all supposed to feel about western consumption (I have been in student flats with more rubbish than this). Schabus does not appear to consume anything to excess - perhaps frugality and obsessive behaviour go hand-in-hand. To make the quantity obscene we have to do the mental arithmetic and multiply this one household by a whole city. And even then the thought is nothing new.
Read in the context of the artist's previous work, 'Remains of the Day' lacks the obvious mining or undermining of institutions and places, but is a...