Suzaan Boettger
There’s dirt, and then there’s earth. The former arouses fear and loathing – as a recent Consumer Reports proclaimed: "Anyone sentenced to viewing a full day of TV will come away convinced that Americans are obsessed with dirt. Commercial after commercial touts stuff to banish dirt…" Earth, on the other hand, is invoked by Save the Earth campaigns and ecologically minded artists to inspire reverence – making the earth a synecdoche for Nature, a spiritual Home and sacred Mother. These conflicting associations of soil – between dirt and earth, filth and fertility, primitive and primal – come into play when confronting art made with dirt displayed in a gallery context. Language itself encapsulates this intrinsic equivocalness (e.g., "it is soil"/ "it is soiled"). The ambiguities of James Croak’s Dirt Babies epitomize this: are they earth nymphs or defiled children?
Writing about anal character traits, Sigmund Freud inserted into his German text an English aphorism by Lord Chesterfield: "Dirt is matter in the wrong place."1 Context is fundamental: in the garden soil is earth; on the kitchen floor it’s dirt.2 Recent art made out of soil is doubly dirty: it is made out of a cheap and nonart material, dirt, and – seen against a pristine gallery – it seems an aggressive intrusion: "in the wrong place." All genuinely new art is transgressive; this kind inverts the breaches of good taste by its immediate predecessors prominent in the galleries, such as Jeff Koons who showcased multiple brand-new vacuum cleaners and enlarged glossy kitsch figurines to ostentatious scale. Along with other commodity fetishists, he was cleaning up the art world after the puerile excrescences of late Neo-Expressionism in the mid-1980s. Now a few years into international economic recession (begun during the fading dominance of cynical Neo-Popism), the current dirt workers have turned the idea of art as merchandise on its head. Not surprisingly, their work is associated with the other end of the body, what the Victorians euphemistically called "night soil." 3
The Western veneration for museums and formal galleries makes us approach them as temples of culture, and as anthropologist Mary Douglas noted in Purity and Danger "for us sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite ends… Yet it is supposed to be a mark of primitive religion to make no clear distinction between sanctity and uncleanness." 4 It’s the return of the Expressionist spirit, which always feels emotionally akin to "the primitive" that hauls dirt into the white cube.
The icon of dirt "in the wrong place" is Walter DeMaria’s New York Earth Room, in which, since 1977, a dark, regularly moistened earth and soil mixture has filled (up to a level of 21 inches) the former gallery space at 141 Wooster Street. (The DIA Foundation maintains it.) Here the formlessness of the dirt pile dominates the function of the rigid white architecture; nature overpowers culture. The Earth Room also evokes a perverse pleasure in dominating a space with one’s primal product, shit. The SoHo piece is DeMaria’s third version; the first Gallery Earth Room, Munich (1968) was itself a rejection of the contemporaneously dominant, cool Pop Art and rigorously contained Minimalism (just as the current dirt works renounce Neo-Geo’s detached conceptualism). The original room represented an approach to working with organic and ephemeral materials in remote natural environments as well as urban studios, an approach that Germano Celant labeled Arte Povera for his 1969 documentary book.
Like a mirror to our time, the current "povera" impulse reflects the current conjunction of a meager economy, social revulsion against ’80 excesses and disdain for art glitz. In the past few years artist have increasingly worked with detritus – from urban trash to destroyed ecosystems – in situations ranging from gallery installations to institutionally funded projects revitalizing environmental damage. Like the now omnipresent homeless scavengers, they look down for aesthetic sustenance, into the garbage can, onto the imperiled earth.
Emphasizing how artist David Hammons "has always chosen the dirtiest materials available," Tom Finkelpearl recognized the ideological implications of this artistic practice: "Hammons’s use of dirty materials relates directly to the social and economic status of dirt, a cheap substance, and to his own ability to control his means of production, like the dirt farmer." 5 Yet Hammons himself has provocatively associated his fondness for the rough, worn, and discarded to bodily processes: "I think I spend 85 percent of my time on the streets… So, when I go to the studio I expect to regurgitate these experiences… All of the things I see socially – the social conditions of racism – come out like a sweat."
Regurgitate? Sweat? These individual human wastes are the physiological counterparts to the castoff items that compose his work. Excrement is another material he has actually used – elephant dung gathered from visiting circuses, heaped, dried, painted and combined with other objects referring to his black African heritage.
The linkage – between social jetsam and bodily excretions – evokes the psychological conception of dirt. Psychoanalytic theorists have noted that in the context of the psyche, "matter in the wrong place," or dirt, derives from disgust for bodily secretions. Analyses of dirt fantasies reveal that dirt is often "anything which either symbolically or in reality emerges from the body or which has been sullied by contact with a body aperture." 7 There’s an intimate relationship between what one thinks of as dirt and how one thinks of the human body.
James Croak has been experimenting with the possibilities of casting dirt extensively since the mid-80’s, after inventing his soil-binder mixture as an inexpensive substitute for bronze. In contrast to that more neutral material, soil acquires its own specific associations. Playing with and against them Croak has astutely explored several thematic inversions. In the wall piece Wing (1989) a graceful feathered span associated with air and elevation is cast in material from the earth and ground, suggesting transcendence dirtied, weighted down, grounded. Recently, he’s been casting old wood frame windows to produce austere architectural grids. Akin to the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte’s window-landscape transparent. Sunlight is obscured, and the works present a view of nature that has been closed by one of its own element, soil.
Croak’s Dirt Man With Fish (1986) contains another powerful juxtaposition to the connotations of dirt. In ancient Near Eastern religious symbolism, the fish represents a primal sacred being; it lives in the water, our first Magna Mater, but serves as food for those who live on land. In early Christian belief the fish became a symbol of Jesus. Psychologically, the fish is associated with the milieu symbolizing the unconsciousness, water, and fishes’ plentiful eggs demonstrate the unconscious’s potential fecundity Croak’s Dirt Man, in topcoat and hat, is a businessman made of dirt; walking stooped and with a cane, he seems down-trodden, weak. Oblivious to the school of glimmering turquoise fish that moves through his body, this dejected fellow is unaware of the potentialities of the spiritual realm, or alternatively, of his unconscious.
Paradox is most poignant in Croak’s "Dirt Baby" series of 1986-91. While babies do soil themselves, their attentive parents quickly change and powder them. In a Dirt Baby – a dirt piece that has been finely detailed – all of a baby’s connotations of purity, innocence, and promise are contradicted by dirt’s associations with filth, defilement and refuse. Croak’s numerous dirt offspring suggest an identification with an emotionally battered child; what has been refused here, so to speak, is the hopefulness that newborns inspire. This concern with defiled childhood partakes of a broader impulse in the art world, as several baby boom – generation artist (sculptors Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley and Robert Gober) have focused on childhood as metaphor. An interview titled "Dirty Toys" began with Kelley saying, "Because dolls represent such an idealized notion of the child, when you see a dirty one, you think of a fouled child…" The contrast between Koon’s stainless steel Rabbit (1986) and one of Croak’s Dirt Babies pointedly illustrates the shift in the zeitgeist between the 80’s and the 90’s. When he transformed a pliable inflated toy into a silver bauble, Koons utilized the animal symbolizing speed, fertility and profligacy; thus subject and material were joined to encapsulate the 80s elevation of the frivolous into extravagant preciousness. Likewise, Croak’s poorer material and bleak view of infancy could be an icon of our current reduced expectations.A
Delving into the touchy ambiguities between earth and dirt, these sculptors have admirably been unafraid to get their hands dirty. Using soil to convey experience of and in the body, they have transformed the negative cultural associations of "dirt cheap" into redeemable "pay dirt," manure into nurture, the yield of powerful art.
Notes
1 James Strachey, trans., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.9 (London: Hogarth Press, 1959): 173. In another pertinent reference, after giving a lecture on perversion and hysteria, Freud wrote to himself, "I longed to be away from all this grubbing about in human dirt…" Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.5, p. 470.
2 The lattar was recently addressed in an imaginative group exhibition called "Dirt & Domesticity, Constructions of the Feminine." No actual dirt was present, but plenty of photographs, sculptures and videotapes examining housekeeping as women’s work, particularly by hired women of color. The show was presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York City, June 11-August 15, 1992. Currently, no dirt is being unturned by the art world.
3 Stand without attribution in Rebecca Solnit, "Dirt," Art Issues, 15 (December 1990/January 1991): 31
4 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Ark, 1984): 7-8.
5 Tom Finkelpearl, "On the Ideology of Dirt," David Hammons, Rousing the Rubble (New York: institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1991): 74 and 78.
6 David Hammons interviewed by Maurice Berger in Art in America, September 1990, p.90, as quoted in Finkelpearl, p.79.
7 Lawrence S. Kubie, "The Fantasy of Dirt," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 6 (1937): 391. Kubie continues, "There is her revealed a fantasy… that the body itself created dirt, and is in fact a kind of animated, mobile dirt factory, exuding filth at every aperture, and that all that is necessary to turn something into dirt is that it should even momentarily enter the body through one of these apertures…" Specific confirmations of some of the observations in the paper are presented in W. Donald Ross, Michael Hirt and Richard Kurtz, "The Fantasy of Dirt and Attitudes Toward Body Products," Journal of Nervous and mental Disease 146 (1968): 303-309.