The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, The Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste

This exhibition examines overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification. The observation is made that the streamlined style of modern design, which served the new ideals of bodily hygiene while engaging the manufacturing policy of planned obsolescence, emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen. The organically modeled yet machine-made surfaces of streamlined objects are shown to have collapsed the natural and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, into an aesthetics of waste. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller.