Text by Max Liboiron.
Steady-State: Development Without Growth, 2011. New Museum, Festival of Ideas for the New City.
Steady-State is an interactive installation where visitors shaped a miniature model city made of New York City's waste. Within the piece, the overall number of buildings, green spaces, and other urban infrastructures stayed the same, but people rearranged, transformed, destroyed and rebuilt the cityscape into their idea of what a city should look like.
The piece started as a grassy mound. The first visitors had to dig and cut into the "grass" to find the table to build on. But here were so many items on the table that participants could not clear an open space, start from scratch, or build a grid. Every time they tried, they came up with "waste" that they had to build with because they couldn't dump the debris on State Island or ship it to Connecticut.
A pile of discarded bits began to build up in Harlem. It got so high we called it Mount Harlem. Some New York City landmarks began to grown downtown and the tidy grid tried to assert itself. One participant wanted to see if a city could rebuild after total devastation, like Japan or Haiti after natural disasters or Warsaw after WWII. So they destroyed the city and began to build from the chaos (everyone had fun being Godzilla). An urban planning student came by and said the city looked like Latin America, where you build on top of and around everything that's already there-- you don't clear a grid. After time, people started stacking skyscrapers again until the wind came and knocked them over. We had to learn to build wind-proof houses. Finally, a crew of eight-year-old architects came and competed for the highest skylines. Finally, they put all the green on top and called it finished.
Salt-winning: Equal To or Greater Than, 2010-2011.Oxygen Art Center, Nelson, BC, Canada.
Salt-winning: Equal To or Greater Than is a trash-based social economy. Over one hundred miniature globes were created from discarded glass, trash, and winter road salt. Each globe could be taken away by gallery visitors at any time as long as they left something behind of equal or greater value. Visitors were asked to fill out a survey after their exchanges that detailed what they took, what they left behind, and how they determined the equivalent value of the two objects.
There were several trends within the trades: people adjudicated value based on the mode and time of production and left their own handmade objects. Frequently people used found objects, trash, and even salt to create objects for exchange. Another trend was to leave things that had sentimental value rather than monetary or material value. Because this type of value is technically non-transferable, it addressed the idea of value in the abstract and exchange became a sort of sacrifice. A small number of people were "bargained hunters" and explained equivalence in very descriptive or shallow terms rather than in terms of value ("an object for an object" or "because I said so").
Some people grappled with value in terms of money, gift cards, lottery tickets, or other monetary equivalents. Finally, some people extended the idea of exchange and value to include personal interaction with the artist (to see what the artist might like), or would trade for an item, research their new art piece, and then trade out the object they left behind for an object with "more appropriate" equivalency.
Panel Discussion.- Waste.
Date.- Thursday May 2, 11:15 AM–12:45 PM
Avenue.- Great Hall, Cooper Union.
Participants.- Mai Iskander, Lydia Kallipoliti, Max Liboiron, and Samantha MacBride.
Moderator.- Jonathan F.P. Rose.
