Monday, July 28, 2008

Trash Logic

The main problem with making miniature dioramas of dumps using trash is to not make it look like trash. People have to WANT this stuff, to take it away for free, to choose to sacrifice that space on their already over-laden mantel for a miniature ice flow made of bottle caps. Truthfully, yesterday I made some art that looked worse than the original garbage it was made out of.

But now I have a theory: garbage and not-garbage can have the exact same materiality, but there are some culturally-determined ground rules. First, garbage is not orderly. You can have a beautifully plated fennel and goat cheese haut cuisine, but turn it upside down in the sink and it's only fit for the garberator. Secondly, the more recognizable something is, the less trashy it is. At Quigley, the white metal area, where all the fridges and water heaters go, is less trashy than the auto pile, which is less trashy than the domestic pile, though they are all equally garbage. If you leave your fridge in the white metal area, all lined up with the others, and go back in a year, not only are all the other pieces highly identifiable as fridges and stoves, you can probably also pick out your very own discarded fridge (if it hasn't been scavenged). The auto pile is a bit more mashed up and not very orderly, but you can still tell a truck from a van and you can probably pick out your old 1988 Volvo. But in the domestic pile, even though things are sort-of-kind-of intact, you probably can't pick out your old pork chop or orange rind, and the place is a sty. The domestic pile is a giant pile of not-me/ not-mine. Your personal space is defined by whatever is not in the domestic pile.

And what does that have to do with art? Am I going to put people's names on pieces like those cheap key chains or mugs in drug stores?

There are two tactics I'm using in making art-into-trash. Firstly, I make things recognizable as something else, and secondly, I make them orderly in a certain way.

Recognizability: I make ice flows out of housing installation styrofoam so that they do not resemble styrofoam, though that is the "authentic Dawson City Raw Material" their little hand-stamped tags lay claim to. (Some of the little landscapes have rock slides in them, since the landscape icon of Dawson City is the landslide on the north edge of town. I add gravel to the slides, but for one little landscape, I left a gapping zesty blue styrofoam slide amongst an otherwise realistic miniature forest. I thought it was terrific. I want to see if anyone takes it. It is the only landscape that lets its materiality pop through. It is my favorite).

Order: The type of ordering I am going for articulated itself to me through my mode of production. My least favorite but most neccessary part of making a giant installation of miniatures is the one-person assembly line. I cut 50 little pieces; I paint those 50 little pieces; I add sparkles [or salt, the poor man's sparkle] to 50 little pieces; I box and store the 50 little pieces until installation time. And those 50 little pieces do not look like garbage no matter how ugly they are because they are units.


Image:Snowy units of styrofoam trash drying and waiting their turn for the next phase of production.

A junk store looks like a junk store because none of its pieces are matched. A supermarket looks clean and un-junky because it has 49 other Ritz cracker containers beside and behind the one you just took off the shelf, and there are 49 other types of similar crackers in the section. Have you ever been to Meat Farms Supermarket in Setauket, Long Island? Besides the unfortunate name, they tend not to have the staff to straighten the shelves, and the place looks trashy. The crackers are mixed in with the juice boxes, and even though those crackers are just as clean and edible as the ones in Stop-And-Shop, Stop-And-Shop's just seem more sterile, maybe even crunchier, and certainly less grungy.

So assembly-line aesthetics, thanks to Henry Ford, are important to our sense of order and garbage. Garbage would be a radically different animal if it weren't for capitalism. There'd be less of it, period, but I think there would also be less of it as an identifiable category. There would be less that could be recognized/unrecognized as garbage if it weren't for the "unit."


Image: Trashy tea bags turned raw art material

Lastly, and also relating to order and recognition, the easiest way to turn trash into something desirable is to line up a whole lot of similar pieces and call it archeology. Mark Dion is the master of this.



This is the technique I will use for the representation of garbage in the north dump, where one archaeologist came and dug up 5,000 tin cans for his dissertation on transience.

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