Genetologic Research

Leonid Tsvetkov grabs recyclable materials out of dumpsters and trash bins—plastic bottles, Styrofoam take-out packages, cardboard egg cartoons, soda cans and more—puts them in concrete casts, and then leaves them on and around ancient Roman monuments, carvings, and inscriptions. So far, he says, nobody’s noticed them. Can you?

The idea came to him while, as a fellow at The American Academy in Rome, he was exploring the intersections of history, material culture, and consumption as they affect social and physical landscapes from antiquity until today. In his art studies, Tsvetkov realized that much of what we consider to be “artifacts” were trash in antiquity.  Though egg cartons aren’t likely to be considered treasure any time soon, Tsvetkov’s work makes you think twice before sending something to the landfill.  You never know, your old stuff could be a tourist attraction in a couple millennia.

THE GARBAGE PROJECT & “THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF US”  by W.L.Rathje

Between 1987 and 1995, archaeologists from the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona systematically excavated, hand-sorted, measured, and recorded thirty tons of contents from fifteen landfills located across North America — from California to Toronto and from the deserts of Arizona to the everglades of Florida. The information that resulted from these digs was unexpected. In contrast to all of the concern directed at fast food packaging and disposable diapers, the archaeological data demonstrated that both items together accounted for less than 2 percent of landfill volume within refuse deposited over the last ten years. Even more surprisingly, because of industry-wide “light-weighting” — that is, making the same form of item but with less resin — plastic grocery bags had become thinner and more crushable to the point that 100 plastic bags consumed less space inside a landfill than 20 paper bags. If all three items at the center of public concern had been banned and were not replaced by anything, the garbage archaeologists were certain that landfill managers would not have noticed the difference.

At the opposite end of the contents’ spectrum were materials that occupied large portions of landfill space but received little public attention. Construction/demolition debris (C/D) was one. Because of definitional issues, C/D was not even included in the EPA’s national estimates of the refuse that goes to MSW (municipal solid waste, or standard community refuse) landfills. Like the EPA, the Garbage Project tried to avoid the issue of C/D in MSW landfills. In fact, the Garbage Project’s one sampling bias was an attempt to avoid areas where C/D was concentrated because it could easily disable expensive drilling equipment. Nevertheless, C/D accounted for 20 percent or more of excavated MSW by volume and was the second largest category of landfilled materials recovered by the Garbage Project. The largest category occupying landfill space was paper. This was true for refuse buried in the 1980s as well as for refuse dating as far back as the 1950s because in most landfills paper seemed to biodegrade very slowly. As a result, by volume nearly half of all of the refuse excavated by the Garbage Project has been newspapers, magazines, packaging paper and non-packaging paper, such as computer printouts and phonebooks.

Not long after the Garbage Project’s first reports of its landfill digs, the energy directed at passing bans was largely redirected toward “curbside recycling.” A number of communities began placing emphasis on reuse and recycling programs for C/D. Paper recycling promotions often stressed the need to keep paper out of landfills because it didn’t biodegrade as quickly as once hoped. An association of States Attorneys General determined from dig data that several products which claimed to be “biodegradable,” including some brands of disposable diapers and plastic garbage bags, did not biodegrade in landfills, and the false advertising of these products was eradicated. All of this was evidence that some crucial views of garbage held by policy planners, the media, and the public had changed — and that garbology had been validated as a new kind of archaeology.

A RATIONALE FOR THE GARBAGE PROJECT.

For as long as there have been archaeologists, there have been guesses about what these behavioral scientists would discover if they were to analyze their own society’s refuse. While often humorous, such speculations are, in fact, based on a serious rationale: If archaeologists can learn important information about extinct societies from patterns in ancient garbage, then archaeologists should be able to learn important information about contemporary societies from patterns in fresh garbage. The pieces of pottery, broken stone tools, and cut animal bones which traditional archaeologists dig out of old refuse middens provide a surprisingly detailed view of past lifeways, just as all the precisely labeled packages and the food debris and the discarded clothing and batteries in modern middens reveal the intimate details of our lives today. If indeed there are useful things to learn from our garbage — things which can enrich human lives and minimize the undesirable environmental consequences of the industrialized world — why wait until we are all dead and buried to find them out? Garbology now! At least that is what Dr. Bill Rathje and a group of students thought when they founded the Garbage Project at the U of AZ in the Spring of 1973. Today, Rathje and the Project, including co-director Wilson Hughes who was one of the founding students, are still thinking along these same lines.

Over the last 23 years the Garbage Project has literally immersed itself in fresh refuse placed out for collection and in materials exhumed from landfills. Fresh discards are recorded in order to study food waste, what people eat and drink, recycling behaviors, household hazardous wastes, packaging discards, and even the relation between fluoride and tooth decay. In 1987, when the Garbage Project added the excavation of landfills to its research repertoire, investigations focused on the composition of landfilled wastes, the rate of breakdown of these materials within landfills, the contribution of residential hazardous wastes to the leachate (or fluids) which leak out of MSW landfills, and the impact of various waste reduction strategies — recycling, composting, “source reduction” (which just means “using less stuff” in the first place) — on what wastes are landfilled. Today, the Garbage Project’s fresh refuse records, compiled from the long-term ongoing study in Tucson, AZ, and short-term studies in five other cities, form a one-of-a-kind database which currently encompasses 23 years of time depth.
Abstracts of an article originally appeared as Rathje, WL. The archaeology of us. In Ciegelski, C.(ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future–1997 (New York, Encyclopaedia Britannica), 158-177, 1996.

Pierre Bismuth
Today is the Tomorrow of Yesterday-Relaps, 2008

In Today Is The Tomorrow of Yesterday celebrity magazine covers are treated as precious fragments from a long lost civilization.  The artist-archaeologist reconstructs, as it were, selected documents of pop culture as if they were shards of ancient pottery.  The completed collages, with their cracks and gaps and off-center placement, bear the traces of this mock restoration process.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
IKEA Vase, 2010

Ikea-Vase is an amphora-shaped vase made of reconstruction paste and incorporating the fragments of an Ikea mug. The work questions the ability of historical artefacts to truly impress on us what life in an inherently unknowable past would have been like –and in the process points out the fallacious impressions a future archaeologist might conceivably formulate on our present based on its surviving remnants. -Regina Papachlimitzou-

Ikea-Vase (an amphora-shaped vase made of reconstruction paste and incorporating the fragments of an Ikea mug) question the ability of historical artefacts to truly impress on us what life in an inherently unknowable past would have been like –and in the process point out out the fallacious impressions a future archaeologist might conceivably formulate on our present based on its surviving remnants. – See more at: http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/blog/a-fictional-institution-with-an-authoritative-voice-museum-show-part-ii-arnolfini-bristol/#sthash.z4U7k1PT.dpuf

Christopher Locke
Modern Fossil – Asportatio Acroamatis, 2009
(commonly referred to as the Cassette Tape)

‘These Modern Fossils are made from actual archaic technology that was once cutting-edge. Most of these examples were discovered in the United States, although the various species are represented all over the world. It is sad, but most of these units lived very short lives. Most people attribute the shortened lifespan to aggressive predators or accelerated evolution, but this is not necessarily true. It has been shown recently that the true demise of most of these specimens came from runaway consumerism and wastefulness at the high end of the food chain.

This species was first seen in the mid 1960s, but is not widespread until the 1970s. Similar to Repondecium antiquipotacium, it is thought that the compact disc lead to the decline in the Asportatio acroamatis population in the late 1990s. Asportatio has often been found in close proximity to Ambulephebus sonysymphonia, suggesting a close relationship between the two species’.

– Christopher Locke –

Dominaludus Sexagentaquad, 2009
(commonly referred to as the Nintendo 64 Controller or “N64”)

Deferovoculae Cellarius
(commonly referred to as “Cellular Phone” or “Cellphone”. This particular example is a “Motorola Meteor”)

Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron
Hollywood’s trash and treasure, 2004

Ronald Reagan

Written by John Preston – Telegraph Magazine –

In 1988, French photographer Pascal Rostain had an idea. Or, to be strictly accurate, he nicked someone else’s. He read an article by a French sociologist who had set his students a project to examine the contents of 10 people’s rubbish bags. In garbage, the sociologist declared, could be found people’s true personality. Rostain wondered if it might take a little showbusiness twist. The next time he went on a job – to photograph the French singer Serge Gainsbourg – he took Gainsbourg’s bin-bags home with him. What he found astonished him. “It was like the key to Gainsbourg,” he says.

“Everything was completely distinctive: the bottles of Ricard, the packets of Gitanes. I felt as if I had a part of him in front of me.”

Soon Rostain and his partner, Bruno Mouron, were sifting through other famous people’s bin-bags. Brigitte Bardot came next, then French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. It may have been messy and smelly, but the results, the pair reckoned, were well worth the effort.

The magazine Paris Match suggested they try their luck in Los Angeles. In 1990, Rostain and Mouron flew to California with a map of the stars’ homes and a garbage collection schedule for Beverly Hills. “The first thing we would do was locate a suitable home,” says Rostain. “For example, Jack Nicholson’s or Bruce Willis’. Next, we would find out when the garbage was being collected and grab it before the truck came round.”

Taking someone’s rubbish is not illegal in America, but then came the awkward part. Rostain and Mouron wanted to do the photography in their Paris studio where they felt able to do their best work. They travelled back to France with three trunks of rubbish. When French customs officers demanded the trunks be opened, they recoiled in disgust, then went into a perplexed huddle and finally waved them through as harmless lunatics. Once home, they washed the contents of their trunks before spreading them out in neat lines to be photographed. They decided not to shoot anything that was either directly personal or medical – despite finding American Secret Service papers in Ronald Reagan’s rubbish listing his bodyguards and details of the weapons they carried. This puts them in quite a different league to more scurrilous scroungers such as Britain’s Benjamin Pell (aka “Benji the Binman”) who has made a speciality of raiding the rubbish bins of the famous, then selling the contents on to the tabloids, or even the original “garbologist” A. J. Weberman, who obsessively pillaged Bob Dylan’s bin for three years in the late 1960s. But there were still embarrassing slip-ups. In the rubbish of TV host Larry King, Rostain and Mouron found what they assumed were babies’ nappies. However, they turned out to be adult incontinence pads, which King indignantly denied were his. “We never wanted to create a scandal with what we were doing,” Rostain insists.

“They knew we won’t take pictures of empty Viagra packets, for example.”

Sharon Stone

Yet what they have photographed proves to be both revealing and mysterious. While the objects themselves may be mundane, they throw up perplexing questions.
What, exactly did Sharon Stone do with 13 tins of pear halves? Was she simply creating a giant flan to delight her many friends? Or were darker, more fetishistic forces at work? Madonna, as one might expect, has glugged her way through a lavish array of bottled waters. However, there’s a faint poignancy about the empty pizza-for-one packet that nestles nearby.

Madonna

In Jack Nicholson’s rubbish we find a hearteningly large collection of empty booze bottles, but also a discarded hairbrush and comb. Does this mean that Nicholson’s creeping baldness has now reached the point where coiffure has become a thing of the past?
There’s nothing overtly strange about Elizabeth Taylor’s rubbish, but look more closely and a terrible bleakness starts to show through: the single-meal wrappers, the two bottles of non-alcoholic beer, the copies of the National Enquirer with articles about her in them. Is this how she spends her days, reading about herself in the scandal sheets while eating chicken enchiladas? It’s no wonder she chummed up with Michael Jackson; his life would appear to be equally empty, hedged about with ketchup wrappers and Cup O’Noodles.

It comes as no surprise to learn that several of Rostain and Mouron’s subjects – they won’t say who – recently bought the prints of their own rubbish at an exhibition in New York for $US6000 ($A8300) a piece, thus completing what even by Hollywood standards is a very peculiar cycle of self-regard.

“My brother is an archaeologist,” says Rostain, “and he’s always telling me that if he could find the garbage of a Mayan family, then he would win a Nobel prize.

Oddly enough, I think what we are doing is significant. In 200 years’ time our pictures will provide a very useful guide to how certain people lived in the 21st century. So, you see, what we’re doing is fun – but it’s not only fun.”

Tim Noble & Sue Webster
Real Life Is Rubbish, 2002

Tim Noble and Sue Webster. Partners in both life and art, Tim Noble (1966) and Sue Webster (1967) explore the toxic influences of consumer culture through new modes of portraiture. Turning garbage into complex and visually arresting sculptural installations, Noble and Webster exploit, manipulate and transform base materials, often using self-portraiture to undermine the “celebrated” authorship of the artist.

Dead White Trash (With Gulls), 1998, one of their earliest garbage pieces, is six months’ worth of peanut butter jars, soup cans, and other stuff from their kitchen rubbish can, plus a pair of dead seagulls. That it was the same six months it took to make the piece is more than a cute conceit. “As we were making it, we were eating and consuming,” says Noble. On the wall, the shadow figures of the artists take a break with a cigarette and a glass of wine. Real Life Is Rubbish, a recent work, is constructed from studio trash. “All our old tools,” explains Webster. “I was using a screwdriver, and it made my nose look great, so I used it. So we eventually ran out of tools.”

Dirty White Trash (With Gulls), 1998

Diet Wiegman
Regarded from two sides, 1984

Shadow sculpture ©Diet Wiegman 1984

Tony Cragg
Stack, 1975

Many of Cragg’s early works are made from found materials and discarded construction materials and disposed household materials. This gave him a large range of mainly man-made materials and automatically provided him with the thematic concerns that became characteristic of his work up to the present. During the 1970s he made sculptures using simple making techniques like stacking, splitting and crushing. In 1978 he collected discarded plastic fragments and arranged them into colour categories. The first work of this kind was called ‘New Stones-Newtons Tones’. Shortly after this he made works on the floor and wall reliefs which created images. One of these works , Britain Seen From the North (1981), features the shape of the island of Great Britain on the wall, oriented so that north is to the left. To the left of the island is the figure of a man, apparently Cragg himself, looking at the country from the position of an outsider.

Britain Seen From the North, 1981

Shi Jinsong
Secret Book of Cool Weapons, 2007

Jim Reinders
Carhenge, 1987

“Carhenge, which replicates Stonehenge, consists of the circle of cars, 3 standing trilithons within the circle, the heel stone, slaughter stone, and 2 station stones, and the Aubrey circle….

The artist of this unique car sculpture, Jim Reinders, experimented with unusual and interesting artistic creations throughout his life. While living in England, he had the opportunity to study the design and purpose of Stonehenge. His desire to copy Stonehenge in physical size and placement came to fruition in the summer of 1987 with the help of many family members.

Thirty-eight automobiles were placed to assume the same proportions as Stonehenge with the circle measuring approximately 96 feet in diameter. Some autos are held upright in pits five feet deep, trunk end down, while those cars which are placed to form the arches have been welded in place. All are covered with gray spray paint. The honor of depicting the heel stone goes to a 1962 Caddy.”

Adam Horowitz
Stonefridge, 1997

Atop the flat landscape on the edge of Santa Fe, among tumbleweeds and trash and the beauty of northern New Mexico’s skyline, “Stonefridge” catches your eye and confuses your mind like a mirage.

Refrigerators of all colors and shapes stand 18-feet high, lined up in a 100-foot diameter circle, facing inward toward a cluster of taller fridge towers. It’s as if the outer ring of fridges is worshipping these inner towers, or perhaps protecting them from the outside dangers.

Like Stonehenge, which is aligned to solar and lunar astronomical events, “Stonefridge” is geographically aligned to its own kind of power source: Los Alamos National Laboratories. Adam Horowitz, a critic of the atomic bomb, purposefully built the monument in a place where visitors can see the labs in the distance. He calls it an “atomic alignment.”

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Genetologic Research nr.22; 60937 Ikea-era, 2005 A.D., Rome, Italy

Genetologic Research nr.23; 50075026 Ikea-era, 2005 A.D., Rome, Italy

ANT FARM (Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels)

Build in 1974, Cadillac Ranch was made up of ten Cadillacs, ranging from a 1949 Club Coupe to a 1963 Sedan, buried fin-up in a wheat field in Texas. The piece was contructed in four days using a motorized back-hoe and low-tech surveying tools. On the fifth day the work was unveiled. In the tradition of readymades, the work uses mass-produced parts which have symbolic overtones. The Cadillac was a status symbol in 1960s America, indicating that the owner was financially succesful and had therefor ‘made it’. By using the Cadillacs as mere component parts of a work, ANT FARM subverted their symbolic function. The piece functions as a kind of cemetery, a comment on social values as well as their deathly polluting effect on the environment.

Mark Dion

Mark Dion is an explorer, naturalist, archaeologist, botanist, historian, and artist all rolled into one. His recent art actions and museum installations have focused on archaeological digs at unusual sites, deemed “historically insignificant” by local historians. A recent dig on the bank of the Thames River in London revealed interesting, if not significant, objects such as medicine bottles, animal bones, pottery shards, and several messages in bottles. As with other dig recoveries, Dion categorized the Thames material and presented it in curiosity cabinets (a term describing the display cases used for cultural artifacts and oddities in the seventeenth century) at the Tate Museum in London. Unlike an archaeologist who scientifically classifies objects to reveal their historical significance, Dion creates his own categories that may tell us more about contemporary culture than that of the past-color, for example, may put a sixteenth century, yellow porcelain fragment next to a Juicy Fruit gum wrapper.

New England Digs, 2002

Maarten Vanden Eynde

‘In 2004 I went to Tajimi, Japan to master the art of traditional ceramic making. I learned to make a tea ceremony tea-cup, the most valuable ceramic art object, and destroyed it. I labeled it ‘Genetologic Research N.18, 2004 A.C., Tajimi, Japan’ and presented it in a typical conservation-like museum context. It was very hard to explain my motives to the Japanese visitors of the exhibition taking place at the end of my residency, who considered the broken cup as useless. A stonethrow away from the room where my work was shown, in the same building, people where selling little pieces of very old cups on an antique market for extravagant prices. Right now, in 2006, the work is history and as much part of archaeology as any other found object’.

‘Genetologic Research Nr. 18, 2004 A.D., Tajimi, Japan’, 2004
(35cm x 35cm x 20cm)

In 2005 I went to Rome, Italy, just after IKEA declared that their catalogue was now the most printed book ever in human history. They beat the bible in the same week as the big boss of IKEA beat Bill Gates and became the richest man on earth.
I descided to preserve an IKEA sample for future generations and dug it under ground in Il Foro Romanum, the old historic center of the Roman Empire. It is an open air museum, where archeologists are digging for eternity.

‘Preservation of IKEA tea cup’, 2005