Part I: Garbage Art
Recently, someone came and took a picture of my art work and posted it on the web—the world wide web, that is. In a transom in the hallway—where there was once a stained glass window (a few examples still remain scattered throughout the Chelsea)—I have mounted two pink, plastic ducks, shampoo bottles that can apparently also be used as coin banks once the shampoo runs out. I found them in the garbage, and this is my art. I’m a garbage artist, a practitioner of a little known genre of fine art that generally goes unappreciated, even persecuted, in this philistine world of ours, even here in the Chelsea, where you’d think people would know better. Garbage art is related to found art, but it’s a more specific sub-genre: found-in-the-garbage art.
I can give you a few other notable examples. For instance, one time I found a duck mask in the trash. This was apparently thrown out by a rich yuppie family with two small children. The mask was red and yellow, and composed of some kind of heavy rubbery material, rather than the cheap plastic most Halloween masks are made out of, and that’s what attracted me to it. (It’s just a coincidence, I think, that it was a duck, though of course this species may indeed hold a deeper psychosexual meaning to my unconscious mind. There was another mask I could have chosen: a pirate, I believe. It was thrown out in a whole pile of perfectly good toys.) It may not have even been a duck, come to think of it, but rather some other sort of bird, maybe a hawk, as it had a hooked beak—but it still looked more like a duck than anything. I climbed up on a chair and stuck it high up on a little knob that jutted out from the wall, slightly above and to the right of the family’s door. It would be like a totem, watching over our hallway, stern and foreboding, ever vigilant—and yet cartoonish, and therefore strangely apropos, expressive of the playful, tricksterish spirit of Chelsea art as I conceive it. It looked great up there, and I figured the yuppies would appreciate the fact that their cast off toys had been put to good use in the service of art. The mask remained up for a couple of weeks, and then someone climbed up and ripped it down roughly, maybe jumping from their perch to do so, leaving behind a small scrap of yellow duck flesh that remains to this day. Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton (Next Week: More Garbage Art)
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