dumping the trash with Jackie-o

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

i had this thing hanging on my studio wall throughout most of the 1980′s. it’s about the size of a 10″ record cover. i found it somewhere, lord knows where. it’s a piece of graphic design rubbish. except for that tiny little fraction of graphic design ephemera that the fine art world has (for whatever reasons) decided is “art” suitable for a museum collection, this is 99.99% of what we do, this is what i do for a living. i make rubbish. landfill.

at one time in my life (the year 1973) i made my living as a garbageman. at the time, i was absolutely humiliated by the job. i was a college student (at a small conservative religious college – the only one who gave me a scholarship) and, because of scheduling, i had to go to class in my working clothes. i reeked. nobody would even acknowledge my existence. it was one of the loneliest periods of my life.

so, even though, i wallowed in trash for most of my waking hours, and suffered societal shunning, i found my true calling. i found the coolest crap in the garbage. sure, there was the imagined horrifying bins of nightmare discards (i once had to empty an entire dumpster full of half-dissected dead cats from a science lab into a compactor! i almost puked.) but, i also found really cool stuff. it’s amazing what great stuff people will throw a way. i found stuff i still use to this day, almost 40 years later. it was extremely inspiring. i now look back at that gig as the very BEST job i ever had. i would trade to go back in a new york minute.

so, now, when i see the rubbish that my chosen profession industry, all that ‘beautiful design work’ that fills up landfills (and all the horrors of that which haunts so many PC folks) is what thrills me. i’m fiddling while rome burns. i just make another project and i laugh – loudly! “there goes another notch in the destruction of all mankind!”

however, i also see what i do as beautiful i hang it up on my walls, i obsessively collect some of it and i even share it with others (like you) as if it important to us (or something.) we’re basically big naked monkeys and whomever is gibbering the loudest gets the attention. and the respect. and gets to be the leader. in a weird small sick way, that’s what i’m doing here. i’m actually showing you garbage and telling you why this particular piece of rubbish is important to … who? us? really?

i’ve never collected art. when i somehow acquire a nice piece of ‘art’, i tend to give it to a new home. i don’t value it. i’ve given away enormous numbers of dollars in art value over the decades. what i keep is the crap, the cultural detritus that i love. i am a garbage head. damn proud of it, too.

ADDENDUM:

AC: i’ve read extensively on “garbology” (yes, it’s a science and that’s what it’s called.) we all imagine landfills as being big places where things go to rot, right? well, that’s not how they work any more. landfills are huge storage ‘middens’. we save it all for later generations to deal with. no joke.

archeo

cal type studies of old abandoned landfills have shown that the oxygen down there is virtually gone, so nothing can really decay. the result is that stuff that was buried back in the 1930′s is still fresh and new when they do core samples. they can even read the newspapers they dig up like they were printed yesterday – bright and white. they find organic matter (like corncobs) that are still ‘fresh’.

so, now they way landfills work is they layer stuff in there and desire to keep it stored for later. they imagine old landfills being a sort of resource mine of the future. that’s also why they encourage plastic bags. they act as further ‘preserving units’ for the garbage to be stored in for long long long periods of time. keeps it ‘fresher’.

and all that yard waste we so carefully separate? well, it goes into the landfills, too. it’s used as an organic layer between the layers of garbage (sandwiched with layers of gravel.) it acts as a gas barrier and helps to preserve the garbage. no joke. that’s how it’s all used.

so, whenever self-righteous twits get all indignant and uppity and morally superior about recycling and landfill etc. i just laugh. they haven’t got a friggin clue as to how that stuff works. all that garbage we make right now will be saved for hundreds of years down there. we’ll be rotted away (unless you’re embalmed) long before that crummy header card for that blister pack you did for $50 back in ’06 is gone….

…oh, and one more thing. we always get all freakd out by our landfills ‘filling up’ with (take you pick, depending on when the media care happened) – glass, aluminum, plastic, disposable diapers. remember when disposable diapers were a freak point in the media because of the ‘threat’ to our landfills? man, it’s was so stupid.

what is actually filling up our landfills quicker than everythign we use and toss is DEMOLITION DEBRIS. all those buildings we tear down? they go into landfills. 95% of landfills are full of demolition debris – old buildings.

we made a law back in the 70′s – to promote even more development – that demolition debris can go into landfills if it is broken down into small enough pieces (they have exact measurements, even).

so, instead of tearing down a building and salvaging the parts for re-use, it’s much much faster and cheaper to simply grind it to bits and throw it in a landfill. when they passed that law (to help the business greedheads) they created a huge problem with landfills that goes unchecked to this day.

so, the next time some psuedo hippie/yuppie do-gooder gets all huffy about throwing shit away, lay the demolition debris issue on them. maybe they finally go after the proper target, eh?

and don’t get me started on the fraud that is aluminum.