October 25, 2007
INSTALLATIONS:
Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project
L.A. Contemporary Gallery November 9-24, 2007
Her name is Zhang Yin, she’s worth more money than Oprah Winfrey and she wants your junk mail! She’s made more than 3.4 billion dollars (27 billion yuan) importing America’s waste paper, including junk mail, to China.
Her company, Nine Dragons, China’s largest container board maker, returns it to us as packaging on inexpensive, and oft recalled, made-in-China merchandise. According to the China Daily News, the “Waste Paper Queen” is “extremely” fast talking, still she has yet to talk the Chinese into recyling more of their paper waste. Only 30 percent of their scrap paper is reused, while Americans salvage 70 percent. Most of China’s waste paper is still buried or burned, while our’s is exported to entreprenuers such as Zhang Yin.
America remains number one in paper production, but China is now the world’s second largest producer of paper at 49.5 million tons and the second largest consumer at 54.4 million tons.
So how much paper is that?
I can’t imagine. My mind’s eye got bloodshot trying to picture it.
Artist Chris Jordan resorts to digital imagery to see this kind of stuff. His “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” is an effort to visualize our country’s habits of consumption. He does giant, digitally generated photographs capturing the millions of soda cans, plastic bags, trees cut for mail order catalogs and cell phones we run through in the course of our average consumer days. He does it so we can see what the unimaginable and astronimical look like.
A similar impulse prompted me to start “Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project.” I wanted to see what each day’s demanding demi-mound added up to in the course of a year. My visualization exercise resulted in 157 pounds of shredded junk mail to be installed at the L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City November 9-24.
And since I started the project I have encountered other artists trying to make apparent what we might hear or read about but can’t picture in our minds. Like Stan’s Cafe, a six Brit theater troupe, presenting their performance installation “Of All The People In All The World: The Americas,” at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center November 29-December 30, 2007. They use grains of rice to represent individuals, then measure these into piles both massive and mini to illustrate such statistics as the paltry number of women who have served in the U.S. Senate and the 8 million people living in America’s gated communities. They will use 16.5 tons of rice during the work’s run. It’s a number I find hard to conceive of, so, I guess, I’ll just have to get up there and see it for myself.
