Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (21 page)

  Greet and speak to tour groups during weekdays and on the third Saturday of the month

  Make three pieces of art for the company’s permanent art collection

  Use materials recovered from San Francisco’s waste stream

  Be available to talk with the media

  Leave all art created during the residency with the company for the next twelve months for exhibitions at off-site venues

F
INE-TUNING THE
recycling process, knocking down the flow of stuff into facilities like The Pit, keeping the poachers in check—that’s all good and sensible, Munk says. But she figures the next strides, the closing of that last big gap between taking less to the landfill and making less waste, will require something beyond changes in industrial trash collection methods and destinations. It calls for changes in mind-set, in how regular people think about what they regularly buy—or don’t buy—which governs what they do and don’t throw away. And that’s the essence of Munk’s job: Changing minds, perceptions and comfort zones, she says, is what the artist-in-residence program is supposed to be about.

Munk ought to know—it changed hers. She was a clothing buyer for a high-end San Francisco boutique. It can be a lucrative living, making your work and your personal life revolve around consumption. But she eventually decided there was only so much stuff you can cram into a closet, or a life, before it gets old. Surprising her friends, family and herself, she gave it up in a heartbeat when she bumped into one of her old college professors on the street in 2000, and he mentioned that he had just taken what he considered to be the coolest job he had ever heard of: running an art program at The Dump. Munk had never heard of the residence program before, but almost without thinking, she blurted that she needed something new to tackle, too, and she wanted to return to the arts and education studies she had pursued in college. Could she come work for him?

“You can start next week,” he replied. She did, joining the art staff at The Dump. She worked part-time at first, still supporting herself as a fashion buyer, her life an uneasy truce between opposing values. Within a year she came on full-time and eventually succeeded her professor as director in 2007.

Her shared office is filled with posters, photos of trash art, a few oddities from The Dump and the most vital objects in the room, a mass of black three-ring binders. Each represents a single artist’s application for a residency, shelves of them dating back to 1990, containing proposals for their projects, personal statements, résumés, work samples, portfolios, recommendations, pleas. There’s also a checklist of required artists’ tools only a dump denizen could love, ranging from sewing machine to band saw to metal inert gas welder and plasma cutter. The binders are thick and detailed, and document a surprisingly intense passion to tackle trash that can’t even begin to be explained by the $1,800 monthly stipend. Munk and her two colleagues make the first cut of applicants, then a community advisory board makes the final decisions.

“I know what to expect when I heat a piece of steel ordered from a supplier,” wrote the first artist-in-residence, sculptor William Wareham, whose job included setting up the first rough-hewn studio at The Dump in 1990. His rough-edged sculptures of torn metal and old shopping carts proudly displayed their trash provenance. “But with this, it’s impossible to know with certainty. That’s one of the things that makes this an exciting project.”

A year later, Remi Rubel’s large and colorful quilt-like mosaics of bottle caps and other found objects looked like anything but trash. Yet she, too, seemed to be a natural for the program: “From the day I learned to walk,” she wrote, “I began searching the ground for treasure. Tumbled glass from the sands of Lake Michigan or coins from sidewalks later became bottle caps and flattened cans from the streets.” The Dump became her ultimate treasure hunt.

Susan Leibovitz Steinman designed a hilltop sculpture garden behind The Dump in 1992, where each artist—they were all sculptors at first—was asked to deposit at least one work. (The landscaped hilltop garden also served a practical purpose: a noise buffer between the clang and crackle of the transfer station and the Little Hollywood neighborhood next door.) Winding through the garden, Steinman placed a path of crushed gray concrete recovered from the Embarcadero Freeway that collapsed in the massive 1989 earthquake; it’s embedded with found objects and the words of students contemplating the future. She called it the River of Hope and Dreams. “It feels really good to me to rescue things. Things come with stories already in them,” Steinman said.

Towering over one part of the garden is Marta Thomas’s striking “Earth Tear,” a curving, eight-foot-tall teardrop made of individual plastic bottles that seem to flow like liquid across their rust-flecked rebar frame. All scavenged, the common pieces of refuse have been shaped into something magical, symbolizing for Thomas sadness at environmental harm assuaged by the hope for renewal that grief can usher in. And like the plastics adrift in the ocean, Earth Tear’s plastic bottles have begun to break down, clouded, cracked and brittle from exposure to sun, mist and rain.

In its second decade, a broader range of the arts was represented in the mix of residents—painters, videographers, graphic artists, musicians. The Dump was nothing less than a playground in 2010 for artist Ben Burke, founder of San Francisco’s Stars and Garter Theater Company and Apocalypse Puppet Theater, who put his thoughts about the program to verse:

It rains and it shines, the world turns on a dime, and our grease is the trail that we leave. We spin yarns to the moon, for the story’s a loom, it’s the carpet we walk that we weave. So go on, act the fool, for the sea is not cruel, and the ship, it turns out, is not sunk. It’s just run aground, as the table spins round, and it’s time to build fables from junk.

T
HE TWO
artists of summer 2011 provide a fascinating contrast as they work in adjacent sections of their warehouse studio. The raucous sounds of the transfer station provided background music for their labors, seasoned by the occasional shout of an air horn from a passing train on the freight line across the street. The ever-changing trash storehouse of the PDA is just steps away, a tide that washes new material their way throughout the day. From their studio, they can see something interesting as it arrives, and leap into action.

Of the two artists, Abel Rodriguez is a bundle of energy, constantly in motion. He doesn’t keep a chair in his crowded workspace. He likes to stand as he works, moving among the hundreds of items he has rescued from the piles—the finely turned legs from a cracked and broken table and chair set, the pieces of a wooden dish dryer, a pack of blank CDs still wrapped, a brand-new tea ball, silvery bent hubcaps, a photograph of Emiliano Zapata fresh from some revolutionary battle surrounded by his troops, who look all of twelve years old, not much bigger than their rifles. Rodriguez says he already has accumulated too much material, an abundance of artistic riches, but he cannot help going out every day to see what the trash tides wash his way. When he agrees with something you say, he answers in rapid fire: not “Sure!” but “Sure, sure, sure!” He’s a fast talker, a streamer, and his thoughts come in a rush. “Nothing’s ever still here, nothing’s ever fixed, everything’s in constant motion. That’s how it’s been all my life, so this environment is perfect. Perfect. I don’t put things away, I don’t like to waste. I like to repurpose. Waste is a misnomer.”

The Yale University–trained artist certainly incorporates this ethic in his work, big collages and sculptures that resemble the sorts of amalgams of debris that wash ashore, fragile and inviting. They have a deliberately temporary quality. He likes to attach things with visible applications of tape to emphasize impermanence—as well as to let him pull things apart and reconfigure them on the fly. “Nothing is permanent,” he says, pacing his part of the studio. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”