wasting

Micheal McCabe
in response to 'Drive Thru' by Carlos Knight

Taken from a late-night walk along Courtney Place, Knight enlarges a momentary encounter with a KFC bag. In his careful reconstruction Knight invites us to consider the ‘sculptural potential’ of humour, of walking and of waste. Through the singular quality of the work, he focuses our gaze on the setting of the city towards a bag in the background, crumpled, marked by grease and resting momentarily in the crook of a gutter.

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Students are walking in and out of the general library as Knight begins his installation. They capture the work as it unfolds and takes shape. The gallery, much like the drive thru window, is a space that does not encourage lingering. Some stop to talk but the installation continues. The immediate qualities of the work, large, graphic and ‘crack up’ reflect current ubiquity of observational humour. Drive Thru embraces direct, present and absurd qualities of these jokes - POV you're heading to uni while eating a zinger burger but it’s really big or you’re really small. The flat quality to what makes this crack up is balanced by the considered replication of the found object. While humour invites the audience in, Knight gives meaning to these material encounters, which he observes often occur without intention.¹

Despite the cluster of flamingo scooters that are outside the library students continue to walk around the city. They come from dormitory suburbs, disperse across campus and linger into the evening. Theorised by Benjamin via Baudelaire (the flâneur), Debord (the dérive), and Jacobs (feminist urban advocacy), walking became a critical praxis of durational observation. The flaneur situated pleasure in opposition to an industrialising Paris². A century onwards Debord et al. utilised walking to resist the constraining “psychogeographical contours” of the city.³ In extension, Jacobs moved this beyond the polemic to consider the praxis of walking as a way to critically document the presence and displacement of women and children in the urban realm.⁴ While these readings consider the productivity of walking as a method of critique and protest, Drive Thru situates the drunken stupor as a practice of momentary wonder in the neoliberal cityscape. The ‘night out’ in its inebriation naturally drifts. Its loose form works alongside the principles of the derive; collective, drifting and durational. From flats to pubs to nightclubs to dive bars to 24-hour fast-food restaurants life unfolds across an evening improvising between fixed locations and the open of the street. Unlike Debord these acts do not release themselves from the spectacle of society. A night out explicitly consumes, yet alongside this consumption is the potential of being ‘unproductive’. ‘Wasting time’ opens up the possibility of ‘something else’ happening; of creating kinship, of lighting a rubbish bin on fire, of pashing a flatmate, of noticing a KFC bag slumped in the gutter.

Behind glass the work stands in tension with itself. Partially open at the top it gives way to gestures that fold, crumple and press into the surface of the bag. These cumulative acts tentatively hold the material in place. The bag evokes the poubelles of Arman, however, rather than a vast collection of waste, Drive Thru amplifies a solitary item. The bag enlarged and empty is a body double to the items discarded by university students; a pump bottle, a Musashi energy bar, a plastic St Pierre's sushi box, an empty vape, a bubble tea from Gong Cha. These residual artefacts create collective portraits of contemporary student life. Going to the gym, forgetting your reusable drink bottle, buying overpriced campus food and carving out small joys in a climate of increased precarity. The bag itself is held in fragile tension that will give way across the exhibition. Across time the permeability of the paper will take in the environmental conditions of the foyer. Fibers will swell with latent moisture. This will open deep creases encouraging them to relax and pull at the overall shape of the bag, pressing its surfaces further into the edges of the gallery. In Vibrant Matter Jane Bennet makes the argument of the agentic force of all materials. She describes the life of waste, much like this bag, to continue living beyond our use.⁵ Locating this position in the narration of a rubbish dump Bennet illustrates the various actors and agents present in the tip; seagulls pecking at food waste, food rotting and emitting gases, gasses transferring into the air, into the atmosphere, the atmosphere itself trapping heat, the cumulative heat then transforming the earth's ecology.⁶ As we move across scales of time the impact of our relationships to rubbish are pulled into relief. These material acts draw us back into the consumer systems we participate in. As we hurtle toward climate collapse, ambitious targets and banal reports track our distance to achieve them. Both the University of Auckland and Auckland Council aim for zero waste in 2050.⁷ ⁸ Knight’s work does not take positions on the achievements of climate policy, yet its scale invites us to imagine what happens after our use and relationship to that item of consumption. What potential exists beyond the bin? What potential exists beyond the university?

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Speculating on subsistence life Le Guin imagines the carrier bag as a holder for stories.⁹ In the collection of food, sustenance and medicine the vessel instinctually contains the lives of those who use it. While collecting wild oats or killing a mammoth certain narratives gathered, relayed and perpetuated. Enlarged, imposing and collapsing Drive Thru collects the precarious ways students see themselves and the scarce world around them. In this unstable vessel is also a certain potential in the act of ‘wasting’ and enjoying it too.

1. Carlos Knight, "Drive Thru, Carlos Knight - Window," Window Gallery, accessed July 18, 2026, https://www.windowgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/drive-thru.
2. Gregory Shaya, "The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910," American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (2004): 41–77.
3. Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive," Internationale Situationniste 2 (1958): 1–5, trans. Ken Knabb, https://rohandrape.net/ut/rttcc-text/Debord2006e.pdf.
4. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 56–73.
5. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
6. Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
7. Waipapa Taumata Rau, "Waste and Resource Recovery," University of Auckland, https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/about-us/about-the-university/the-university/sustainability-and-environment/sustainable-campus-and-operations/sustainable-practices/waste-and-resource-recovery.html.
8. Auckland Council, Te Mahere o te Tau 2024 hei Whakaheke, hei Whakahaere hoki i te Para ki Tāmaki Makaurau: Ki te Para Kore (Auckland: Auckland Council, 2024).
9. Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 165–170.