Is My Art Trash
It started as a joke. I’d snap a quick pic of a trash can at a highway rest stop filled with empty bottles of Miller High Life, resting next to water bottles dripping with someone’s dark yellow piss. The kind of urine that makes me concerned for the trucker who filled up those bottles. So many bottles of High Life, I hesitate before getting back on the highway with some driver who must be completely hammered. Imagine the drunk driver swerving between lanes before dying in a ball of fire and twisted metal, taking any car within a hundred yards with them. I’d share the pictures with a caption like, “I bet you’d prefer the piss. You sick fuck.” It was like that for a while, sort of using trash as a talking point with friends and acquaintances. I was the weird guy at parties who’d walk up to you and say, “Hey, how’s it going? Oh yeah, cool. You wanna see this picture I took of a dumpster yesterday? Trust me. It’s crazy.”
Then, maybe a year ago, I found this dumpster behind a Walmart. It was this beautiful, disgusting image. I still think about it sometimes, lying in bed at night. The dumpster was filled with hundreds of old Playboy magazine issues. Cover after cover of bleached blond hair, teased into helmets of keratin. It was like seeing a timeline of hair and fashion trends as a word cloud of periodicals. Thrown away carelessly, the nudie mags' pages were opened to centerfolds exposing their breasts and, depending on the period in which the magazines were printed, bushy or smooth pubic mounds. The models lay in seductive poses on top of buckets of old paint and black Hefty bags leaking viscous liquids of every shade. Pages soaked with dirty rainwater collecting in the rusty corners of the metal box, folded, wrinkled, and torn. An orange-skinned centerfold is bent across a jukebox looking over her shoulder at the camera. Her bare butt is a heart-shaped canvas painted with tan lines where her granny panties should be. Her eyes call out, “Climb on in. There’s a perfectly good Italian sandwich in here that only has, like, one bite out of the corner.”
On top of all the playboys was a stained wooden wedding arbor—a seven-foot-tall arch adorned with fresh white flowers of all sorts. Like the magazines and virtually everything thrown away, the arbor was tossed into the dumpster as an afterthought. Sections of the gorgeous dark wood splintered into smaller shards to fit inside. Daisy, tulip, and calla lily petals decorated the trash below them like freshly fallen snowflakes. Perfect representations of the purity of nature or marriage, scattered around as if a priest had consecrated the receptacle. I bless you, o dumpster, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. May the sins of your porn mags be washed away in the purity of God's love.
Loose flower petals landed over the naughty bits of some of these Playboy models like someone had done it on purpose. It was like someone walked by, saw the magazines, and said to themselves, Won’t anyone think of the children? Then climbed into the dumpster and started covering up titties with these petals until called away suddenly to some greater mission, like banning books from schools.
I spent maybe thirty minutes photographing the Walmart dumpster, zooming in on the centerfolds and their bodies covered in petals from the wedding arbor. I took care to get a clear shot of a nude model laying on a chaise lounge. Her skin was as smooth and flawless as the room in which the pictures were taken, and her arm was missing, bitten off by a pair of discarded, coffee-stained dentures. When I left I had over fifty new pictures on my phone.
After that, I started seeing trash as art. I’d walk by a trash can and think about the composition, the subject matter, and themes. Sure, the metal can tethered to a wooden pole in the park is spilling over with McDonald’s bags, Coke cups, and used needles, but is it aesthetically pleasing enough for a picture? What story is the garbage telling?
Public trash is a fascinating form of collective art. A piece created by a community of anonymous artists who know neither their artistic companions nor that they are in fact creating art at all. My empty soda cup stacks on top of your pizza box, on top of his poopy pants he accidentally shit in on his way to interview at Fuddruckers. He knew! He knew he had to poop when he got into his Oldsmobile with the passenger window that doesn’t roll down. He knew when he drove by the 7-11 and thought to himself, if I don't stop right here at this 7-11, I'm going to shit my pants. It wasn’t any fun when he walked into Target smelling like a dirty boy, buying a new pair of pants from the cashier. Her nostrils flaring. Her head tilted slightly up, smelling the onions he had on his hotdog yesterday. Changing out of his soiled slacks into the new pair. And, finally, tossing the dirty khakis in the trashcan, right before your pizza box and my soda cup.
They fit together like that. My story on top of your story on top of his story, creating something together that only the three of us could have created. Of course, in most cases, we never know the story of all the parts that made up the piece. All the little moments that existed leading up to the final product. But that’s part of the fun too. Half the fun is making up the stories myself as I photograph, meditating on the circumstances that led to this moment. And couldn’t that idea be expanded into every part of our lives? Life unfolds as all these random circumstances collide to make something gross and violent and beautiful.
Does what I do make me an artist or a weirdo? Is there a difference? Is it right for me to claim these unique pieces as my own simply because I documented them?
Who gives a fuck? It’s just trash.
