James Corner Field Operations / Courtesy of the City of New York
courtesy of the City of New York
above: Last barge of garbage to Fresh Kills Landfill, NewYork, March 22nd 2001
above right: aerial view of Fresh Kills Park
Greg Barton : What sort of recent shifts have you witnessed in our cultural reconciliation with dirt? Kate Forde : The one thing I can safely say is that it’s difficult to generalise about expressions of cleanliness on a personal or societal level. Attitudes and behaviours towards dirt seem to vary a great deal across cultures and have changed radically over the centuries.To take just one example, cleanliness has not always been associated with godliness (in John Wesley’s phrase) and in early Christian traditions being too clean was sometimes considered a sign of vanity or sexual licence so the early saints mortified the flesh and dressed in dirty rags. Today, being labelled as ‘dirty’ in sexual jargon can actually be a kind of compliment, although one doesn’t want to be considered really dirty. I wonder if some artists’ fascination with dirt is in part disaffection with modernism’s hygienic ideologies. Dirt is certainly a recurring theme - from the surrealist roots of abject art to Gilbert and George’s Naked Shit pictures. Dirt, as well as being disturbing or shocking, can also be beautiful.
Greg Barton : Could you describe the act of weaving contemporary artists throughout the sequenced narrative? Do you conceive of commissions as supplemental research? Kate Forde : In this exhibition we have interspersed a number of key art works which challenge our understanding of what dirt is and disrupt a kind of ‘narrative of cleanliness’. These include James Croak’s cast-dirt window made from ‘the most neutral and most loaded of materials’, Santiago Sierra’s Anthropometric Modules Made from Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, and an exquisitely fragile dust ‘carpet’ by the Croatian artist Igor Eskinja. Although these works raise a number of profound – sometimes abstract – questions they are not purely metaphysical works. In each case it is their material form which is striking – particularly in the context of a modern pristine gallery. The art works are absolutely integral to the show and the one new commission that was made specifically for Dirt was developed over a period of months and in close collaboration with the curators.
This is a fascinating work entitled Laid To Rest by the artist Serena Korda – who was inspired by the history of London’s great dust heaps (which Dickens vividly describes in Our Mutual Friend ). Korda was intrigued by the commodification of waste in Victorian London, and the way in which dust from the heaps was recycled by local craftsmen who mixed it with clay to produce fine quality bricks.The work she has produced is a palette of bricks containing dust either donated or collected by the artist from 500 individuals and institutions as well as a series of spectacular performances celebrating and commemorating this hidden history. One of the things I really like about this work is that it extends some of the issues considered in the show beyond the conventional parameters of the gallery. At the end of the show the bricks will be taken by horse and cart to a public park where they will be buried in a hole and ‘laid to rest’, becoming a kind of anti- monument to dust. n
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