Ten Huts. Jill Sigman
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and neighborhoods have been deemed disposable. Immigrants, people of color, the poor, and the otherwise marginalized have a much higher probability of living with toxicity and dealing with waste.
Even more disturbing is the fact that there is a slippery slope from people working with waste to people being seen as waste. In a disposability culture, marginalized people not only contend with proximity to waste and toxicity but they are themselves often identified or treated as waste by those with the power to do so. I recently saw an exhibition of artworks made by men on death row in Tennessee. Dennis Suttles makes dough roses out of the leftover bread on inmates’ meal trays. In an artist statement he writes:
As a memorial, I would like to see one or more roses like these built out of scrap material which would otherwise have been sent to a landfill or destroyed.
These roses would be larger, with stems at least 20’ long. They would be placed in parks or town squares around the country.
They would represent all the lives of people in prison. While the world may look at someone in prison as trash, only to be thrown away, there is still a lot that we could offer to society if people would just take a moment to look.4
In his essay dwelling object hut thing (which appears later in this book), André Lepecki writes about how re-seeing in a negative direction, a kind of ontological demotion, happens not only to objects but to human populations as well. He cites the Nazi devaluing of European Jews, Roma, and other “outsiders.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that I am descended from this population that has felt the effects of this demotion all too viscerally. Perhaps re-seeing in the other direction is a form of mending. Early on in the project I inherited some plastic bags full of hundreds of unwanted Ace bandages. I used them to hold the huts together until I ran out after Hut #6. A futile attempt at bandaging our future. Tikkun: to mend the world.
CAPITALISM ∙ Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industries, and the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned. Private firms and proprietorships operate in order to generate profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, and, in some situations, fully competitive markets.
Dennis Suttles’ Artist Statement in Life After Death and Elsewhere, 2015.
COURTESY OF DENNIS SUTTLES
The huts are a labor of love, perhaps a seemingly hopeless one, and that is part of their nature. The search for materials—in dumpsters, garbage cans, on street corners, under overpasses, at waste transfer stations—is part of them. The many hours of piling, wrapping, tying, weaving, and balancing of objects are part of them. The undoing knots, sorting materials, and giving away objects at the end of each hut are part of them. I make them with my own hands. They could not be made by machine, outsourced to fabricators, or exist only in concept and still be what they are. They are labor intensive. They are not sold. They are ephemeral, like mandalas. But the time, effort, and physical act of working these materials are important to me. All of these actions conspire to create a space where there was no space before.
This labor also matters because it is about synching means of production with materials. Art and other consumer products made with found materials can, and often do, aim for a slickness worthy of the capitalist world, and can thereby undermine the values of working in this way. They can ride consumer trends, assuaging our guilt-ridden desire to “recycle and reuse” while leaving us complicit in large corporate structures that don’t really take those values to heart. We’ve all seen items made for the market and looking just that—marketable—with slickness and gloss masquerading as professionalism, hip, and intellect. But it’s important to remember what waste is and that there’s a reason we have it. These objects may be fun, but in our consumer orgy, these are the pasties of capitalism the morning after … when the magic is gone and the adhesive is dirty.
According to cultural anthropologist Robin Nagle, whose fieldwork involved a decade with New York City’s sanitation workers,
Material consumption always includes, though seldom acknowledges, the necessity of disposal. If consumed goods can’t be discarded, the space they occupy remains full, and new goods can’t become part of a household. Because sanitation workers take away household trash, the engines of our consumption-based economy don’t sputter. Though this is a simplistic description of a dense and complex set of processes, the fundamental reality is straightforward: used up stuff must be thrown out for new stuff to have a place.5
And new stuff must have its place. Capitalism has clear financial goals, a profit model, a bottom line. It is incompatible with re-seeing (unless re-seeing makes a profit). And it is incompatible with wonder, unknowing, the value of the intangible and ineffable. The deregulated capitalism we have become accustomed to in the United States is especially uninterested in these things, does not make space for them. But these found objects live on the outskirts of capitalism in a zone of failure. They have all been cast off by someone in some way. The world of the huts is no longer a consumer paradise. This is paradise declassified.
So, why is this a better crucible? And for what? In a space built out of found materials, full of object histories, and worked by hand, there is room for new kinds of connection because connection is not mediated by profit and product. There is room for unknowing. There is room on the edge of apocalypse. It’s like the heart-to-heart talk you have with a stranger while waiting for the last night bus, or breakfast the morning after you’ve stayed up all night, or confessions around a campfire. Without slickness, market value, and status symbols, new values can emerge. And it’s about time because we, as a society, have a lot of stuff. But we are spiritually poor.
Found materials connect us to their histories and to the other people who have touched or made them. These chains of connection affect what the huts become, how they feel, what issues they raise. Hut #10 contained toys that I found on a curb in Sarasota, Florida. Some of the musical ones were playing as I went through the trash. The woman putting out the garbage bags told me they belonged to her young daughter who had died; her house was being foreclosed. The huts would not be the same if the objects were new. This is not a showroom. Object histories converge with my own history and the histories of others in each hut to make these spaces ripe for experience.
Toy from curbside garbage on Hut #10.
DANIEL PERALES
New values emerge from new experiences. At the huts, these often involve dancing, planting, having tea, community discussions, workshops, freegan cooking, and other ways for people to interact. These activities form the temporary microculture of each hut. This is why the huts are not simply objets d’art. They cannot become what they are without being animated (literally, invested with spirit).
After building Hut #10 at The Ringling, I created an event in which I served tea made with herbs from three local gardens and danced while Kristin Norderval sang. It was a way to greet the public, activate the hut, and make it fully a space of its own. Many of the people there had watched or participated in the creative process—curators, conservators, museum guards, their families, students who helped me build, people who offered things they wanted to throw away, and others who took home things I found and didn’t use. Many had had conversations with me, watched the hut come into being, or seen their cast-off objects become part of it.
I was wearing a pin with red satin lips given to me by one of the museum guards because it was Valentine’s Day, and I had a handkerchief that an audience member brought me attached to my belt loop; it had been her grandmother’s. Tying it to the hut was the last impromptu gesture of my dance and the last addition to the structure. When I danced, the space was focused; people were very present. Some cried. Unstated, we were launching this gathering space and this hut together, and they were not just “audience”; they were the people who would continue to keep it alive when I left Sarasota. By having had a meaningful experience, it became theirs in a way. Their relation to the hut and the gallery space was changed.