020 ☼ On Junk
notes on trash
In The Legacy of Conquest, author Patricia Limerick writes that an entire era of time in a civilization can be summarized by the trash it left behind. Using a migrant's diary as an example, she notes that the day-to-day of the vernacular Old Wild West is summarized by the proliferation of not weathered saddles or bullet casings, but by dented tin cans. "By the common wisdom of archeologists," writes Limerick, "trash heaps say a great deal about their creators." The idea being that the evidence of life and lifestyle itself is reflected in what people get rid of—little heaps and towers of aluminum cans outside of lean-tos that later morphed into ranchy suburbs marked by blue recycling bins.
More likely those trashed campsites became nothing at all—just dirt plazas for leaning towers of aluminum. “A monument can be nothing more than a rough stone,” writes J.B. Jackson in The Necessity of Ruins, “Its sanctity is not a matter of beauty of use or of age; it is venerated not as a work of art or as an antique, but as an echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual.” No one goes to the museum to see trash on display—or do we?
Over the summer, I found a bizarre record at the thrift store whose off-kilter cover sent me on a labyrinthine hunt through Web2.0 collector's forums and deep into the dustier corners of discogs dot com. I've been thinking about the record artwork since and wrote my theories in an essay for AIGA's Eye on Design:
"What ends up in thrift stores as cultural excess, what repeats and reproduces longest, will become our most legible artifacts. What we thought was schlock tells us more about who we were than our most expensive museum experience. And what we are is an outdated record built for vintage stereo systems reissued and mischaracterized by its album art, languishing in the thrift store, sealed in its original plastic and waiting for a curious hand." Read the whole thing here. I recommend pressing play on the embedded video as you start to read.
The personal price of global capitalism is exorbitant shipping and duties on the best American vintage deadstock stockpiled in Malaysia. Standby for my st0ned takes on pre-NAFTA thrifting. In Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century, cultural essayist and my personal favorite author in high school, Douglas Coupland writes about the landscapes that formed Ed Ruscha, something about the plains of Oklahoma and gas station parking lots, plastic trash bags as tumbleweeds, etc. He writes, "Because it's 'only garbage' you don't overthink the trashing process, so you can often find very interesting portraits of a person by looking only at what they discard."
During lockdown, four friends and I forced ourselves to watch as one of us poured the sum of our uneaten dinner party into the trash. The volume of our excess slopped onto the slack sides of the trash liner with a juicy thwack. This is who we really were. I liked that in New York you throw your trash on the sidewalk in plain view; I think it’s mentally healthy for humans to visualize the sheer amount of shit it takes for us to exist under l*te st*ge c*pitalism. This is who we really are, lumped together, clothed in toxic plastic.
Later in the essay, Coupland and his buddy find a bunch of panned scripts in a Los Angeles dumpster behind a greasy section of 90's-era Sunset. "We were essentially wallowing in a form of industrial waste, except instead of leftover plastics or metal we were wallowing in a container load of crushed dreams and failed hopes." He admits, "it felt kind of decadent being there." Simmering in a jacuzzi of trash is how Jewish folktales describe Lilith, the sexiest demon out who, after divorcing Satan and falling to earth, took the "first man" “Adam” as her second husband. I picture her singing Bjork's Hyperballad while she picks through her belongings on a cliff before you wake up so she can be happier. Just kidding—that's actually just footage of me in my storage unit, pawing through all my seashells.
Speaking of trash, I met artist Kate Clark years ago when I was a program coordinator for an art and project space my friend ran out of his storefront slash illegal loft. She had moved to town for grad school and had immediately taken a job as an historical reenactor in San Diego's (and California's) oldest pueblos-turned-tourist-trap. She was hired to explain bits of history to pale Midwesterners wandering through the haunted colonial she spent most of her time sweeping in a bonnet. I was immediately enamored by her process. Since then, she's put together some of the more interesting ~relational aesthetics~ style art projects I've yet to see including a recorded oral history of cruising for an entire park and more recently, 800 bagged pieces of trash artifacts from the depths of the Pacific Northwest called Everyday Artifacts: Working Class Waste from 1890s Seattle which is featured in a juried show at BAM Biennial: Architecture & Urban Design through April 2022.
I asked her some quick questions about trash, art, and life as a working artist:
For the fine people of my newsletter, how would you describe Parkeology as succinctly as possible, especially how it started and how it's grown? I started Parkeology in 2015 in Balboa Park, San Diego, thanks to a grant. For two years, I staged a series of collaborative temporary installations and performances about the weird, underground, and sometimes violent stories of the park. Now I've started to work on permanent public art commissions with the same goal of co-creating art about the lives and hyper local stories that coexist within civic spaces in the United States.
Which objects did you find the most of and what did you imagine about the people using them? What did the objects tell you? We found hundreds of glass bottles. Lots for Worcestershire sauce—the Victorian equivalent of Sriracha. Most bottles were labeled as “medicine”—opiate and alcohol concoctions. Who knows what maladies people were treating. Some of this medicine was also labeled for horses, which told me these poor horses were being worked so hard their owners were trying to squeeze whatever remaining labor that was left in their weakening bodies. I want to make a monument to all the urban working horses of the U.S. now.
What felt the most valuable? (Value here defined by anything you want.) Some of the most valuable objects to me were the peach and plum pits, because it meant that they had once been inside of the mouths of people that are now long gone. It meant that even if census records described these folks as “tenement residents” here was proof of sensuality and joy in their daily lives.
Lastly, what message do you want to send to artists, writers, and creative laborers right now who may be burnt out and discouraged? We're small and that's our strength. We're the grit in the oyster, sand in the gears, seed floating through the air, ready to create new life in whatever opening we find. Crannies grow ecosystems. But this smallness is fragile. If you're feeling crunched, know there are more of your kind, and you, in your individual wholeness, are a perfect and necessary gift to the world. ☼
Recently I wrote about pairing the paintings of the late California Modernist painter, Wayne Thiebaud with an NA Aperolish spritz for Variable West, a new platform dedicated to art, art writing, and sharing art with ~anyone~ who's interested in art on the West Coast. It was launched by my dear friend and colleague, Amelia Rina, who is a capacious intellect, a talented writer, a generous but firm editor, and in general, an excellent friend and hang. As long as I’ve known her she’s been dedicated to accessibility, equity, and justice. And of course, good writing. She rules. ☼
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