The extensive project development GREEN WASH, part of OSCA’s initiative Projects of the Everyday, was the winner of the City of Adelaide SALA prize in 2025. The generous support produced some special moving image work in collaboration with George Graetz and a brilliant text by Jennifer Mills that I am very happy to share here:
GREEN WASH
1. Material
Green Wash is a durational performance by the artist Cynthia Schwertsik1. Visitors are invited to bring in unwanted items for “processing.” The artist is smashing them with the blunt end of a log splitter.
How do we deal with all the stuff?2
The world produces 430 million metric tonnes of plastic per year. Of this, two thirds are short-lived plastics that will soon become waste.3
Begin with the material4
The artist’s movements are considered, but not contrived. She is diminutive, but strong.
Greenwashing is a PR tactic that makes a company or product appear environmentally friendly, without reducing its environmental impact.5
Schwertsik’s previous work, Bestowed (2024/25), sought to relieve participants of unwanted items in a ritual setting. This time, she doesn’t want to take responsibility for their stories.
A Senate inquiry into greenwashing was launched in 2023. The release of its report was scheduled for August 2023. It has been rescheduled five times.6
We talk about rage. About gender stereotypes and ageism. The threat of invisibility, and the problem of being underestimated. The expectation to make the kind of art that Schwertsik describes as “nice community projects.”
Australia is responsible for around 4.5% of global fossil carbon dioxide emissions, with 80% of those emissions coming from its fossil fuel exports.7
Schwertsik wears a grey apron, plastic safety glasses, plastic gloves: domestic-industrial. She sometimes forgets to wear her protective equipment. Everyone except the artist must leave the gallery while the processing takes place. We watch through the window.
Destruction is enjoyable to watch. We make the sounds people make when we watch fireworks. Across town, the Crows are playing the Hawks at the Adelaide Oval.
A reference for this performance is Jimmie Durham’s Smashing (2004). Durham sits at a desk in an ill-fitting suit. People bring him miscellaneous items – a loaf of bread, a toy car – and he smashes them with a rock. Then he takes out a stamp pad and stamp, a pad of paper, a pen. He stamps a page, signs it, hands it over.
We watch the demolition of a ceramic planter, a coffee machine, a chair.
“Ooh, that was satisfying.”
Two small boys, passing by with their mother, are entirely mesmerised.
Large, or technically challenging objects receive louder responses.
“How is she going to do this one?”
We file back inside. The artist holds up the remains of the coffee machine.
“It didn’t really break. It’s solid plastic.’ She sounds impressed.
Where does the waste go?
What do we hoard, or leave lying around? What do we discard? How do we live with ourselves?
When the artist sweeps the floor, people lift their feet, reach down to help.
Every action has its own form of attention.
The artist talks about vigilance. Being Environmentally Aware. Separating our rubbish. Checking every label. Reduce Reuse Recycle!
Who is responsible?
The concept of a carbon footprint was popularised by BP as part of a rebrand in the early 2000s. It is now widely recognised as an attempt to shift the blame for climate destruction to individual consumers. 8
We are complicit in systems of destruction. The forces of capital feel inescapable.
2. Theories of value
Schwertsik keeps her stamp pad and pen in a tool table by the door. Donors are offered a receipt. Our names are written on the wall in pencil: cheap patrons.
Most art-making, like most care work, occurs outside the formal economy.
The section of the gallery where the artist works is lined with cheap plywood. It is soon covered in shards, fragments, green paint.
To queer use is to linger on the material qualities of that which you are supposed to pass over; it is to recover a potential from materials that have been left behind, all the things you can do… if you refuse the instructions.9
When we move outside, the window becomes a screen.
“It’s very relaxing,” someone says. “Cathartic. Good for mental health.”
Rage is part of the image, but it is offset by the artist’s poise, a deliberate stance of calm appraisal. She has a curious interest in these materials and what they will do.
It is difficult to separate performance from social practice, sculpture from painting, order from disorder, participation from observation. No position is ever fixed.
Sometimes, audiences object.
“That’s compostable.”
“I’ve got one like that at home.”
“I almost want to rescue that one.”
“No! No! That’s a great decanter!”
When we move inside, the gallery is a studio. The artist is a painter. The conversations that take place are those of a studio visit: spontaneous, responsive, circuitous.
The section of the gallery where visitors walk or sit is lined with astroturf.
The ocean is 2.5 degrees warmer than average. A harmful algal bloom is killing wildlife along the coast of South Australia.
Astroturfing is a PR tactic in which corporate-backed lobbying efforts are disguised as grassroots movements against, for example, renewable energy projects.
Since the Paris climate agreement in 2016, 80% of global emissions can be traced to just 57 companies.10
The wall opposite is painted green. It’s the colour of a green screen. If we wanted, we could make the background disappear and replace it with an image.
In an attempt to pass Australia’s lax environmental regulations, mining company Glencore has proposed implementing “koala offsets.”11 How much is a koala worth on the open market? Are habitats fungible?
“The absurd is already there,” the artist says.
Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.12
Most artists evade commodification, by instinct or conviction. A video work can be sold, but a video is not the work. The text is not the work either. The text can be sold, at a standard rate of one dollar per word. That was a fourteen-dollar sentence, though it’s absurd to say so, since the payment is not for the text itself but the hidden labour of its production.
Performance art is said to be ephemeral.
In the gallery, the artist is struggling to stabilise an assemblage of bicycle, chair parts and yoga mat. A cassette tape dangles, glints in the light. Paint drips onto the mat.
“That looks like abstract expressionism,” someone says.
The artist collects the paint with her brush, ruining the impression.
A friend told me that Blue Poles has a cigarette butt in it. Also broken glass.
The artist has dunked a T-shirt in green paint and hung it from a clothing rack.
In the centre of the room, a plastic globe drips green.
“It’s like you’re creating new continents,” someone says.
“The continent of plastic,” the artist nods.
The location of the work is never settled. Action, material, production, destruction. A dynamic system. The body is in the work – the body is material. But it’s never only material, and it’s never only the body.
Already, some of these objects are unrecognisable.
While the artist works, we talk about works of art that are about labour. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation Can’t Help Myself (2016). An artist who added up the time they spent proving they are not a robot online.
Is art productive or reproductive labour? Does it have to be useful to have value, meaningful, or only(!) beautiful? Artists resist all these categories, by instinct or conviction.
Each work of art generates its own form of attention.
3. Process
I compliment the artist on the attention she is giving to process.
“The mess is not always that obvious,” she replies.
Not all labour is productive or reproductive; some labour is destructive.
The text is produced by breaking down ideas.
When an object is smashed, where does its value go? How is our labour remembered?
“Not everything is very successfully stacked,” the artist says as she picks her way through the accumulated assemblages.
Not digesting something, spitting it out; putting it about. Queer use… can be understood as vandalism: “the wilful destruction of what is venerable and beautiful.”13
I’ve been reading a book about the Luddites. They didn’t smash machines they liked using, only those that threatened their income and relationship with their craft. This distinction seems important.14
The artist is entertaining guests, modelling her greenwashed accessories. A dripping book hangs from a wire coat-hanger. “Brooding cattle farmer romance.” Provenance matters. Provenance is obscured.
Domestic rubble crunches under her feet. More shades of green have been introduced. The gallery resembles an experimental dwelling. How many tins of paint has she used?
“Not as many as I expected. I’ve been a bit too frugal.”
I think about the restraints artists place on their use of materials. Not wanting to risk using the good paint, timber, yarn. Not wanting to waste anything, do anything expensive.
Rocketry engineers call an explosive failure a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Types of process: industrial, emotional, natural, bureaucratic, creative.
“Some things are really, really difficult to take apart,” the artist says, holding up what’s left of a heater.
Material. Revolutionary. Decay.
“This reminds me of something a technician told me. 90% of the time, when computers or heaters stop working, it’s because of dust.”
The algal bloom comes up again. Sea life trapped and suffocating. System collapse. The work feels overwhelmed by conversation. The work makes room for it.
“I keep forgetting to worry about breaking the window,” the artist says, momentarily relieved of her vigilance.
4. Redistribution
In its final arrangement, the performance installation resembles an art exhibition.
The artist has made fifty works. They are on display in the gallery, many hanging from the ceiling. Each is priced at $25. Each is tied by string to a tag. For another $25, the artist will stamp and sign the tag.
Each work is coated in several shades of green, like camouflage. Each work has been weighed, and the weight is written on the tag above the list of materials.
77gr. Spoon, toy, jewellery, pouch. 207gr. Bike, Dyson.
I can’t tell you the aesthetic value of these objects. What is the aesthetic value of the microplastics in your bloodstream?
The text is produced by breaking down ideas and rearranging them.
Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.15
Single use plastics are being phased out in the state. Plastic drinking straws, banned in 2021, still exist in this work. So do plastic soy sauce fish. Soy sauce fish are endangered; a week after the exhibition closes, they will be extinct.16
On the tag, these materials are labelled as ‘takeaway debris.’
In 1813, three Luddite organisers were tried in England. Authorities wanted to quash the movement, so the Luddites were executed by public hanging. Their bodies were dissected and the parts dispersed so that there could be no funerals.
Soy sauce fish are made from recyclable plastic, but recycling machines can’t process items this small, so most of them end up as ocean waste.
The artist has cleaned up. Put the mess away.
The position of the work is never fixed.
1 Held in August 2025 at Floating Goose, a shopfront gallery in Tarntanya/Adelaide. Made in collaboration with Paul Gazzola/OSCA as part of the series Projects of the Everyday.
2 Exhibition description
3 United Nations Development Program
4 Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (W.W. Norton, 1986)
5 Greenpeace
6 Australian Parliament House website
7 Climate Analytics
8 Victoria Clayton, ‘How Big Oil Hijacked and Weaponised the Individual Carbon Calculator’, The Wire, 2023
9 Sara Ahmed, ‘Queer use,’ Feminist Killjoys, 2018
1 0 Carbon Majors Database
11 Graham Readfearn, ‘Plan to extend Queensland coalmine would bulldoze critical koala habitat’, The Guardian, 2025
1 2 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon and Schuster, 2018)
1 3 Sara Ahmed
1 4 Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine (Little, Brown and Company, 2024)
1 5 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966)
1 6 Replace the Waste, SA government website.