This Art Is Trash!

The Museum of International Folk Art’s “Recycled, Re-seen: Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heap” is a crowded fun-house exhibition, a gathering of 700 visual analogues, many of which cause a gasp, from 50 countries. Vibrantly colored flip-flop sandals scavenged on the beach near Monrovia, Liberia, were refashioned into a cartoon helicopter complete with a rubber-band-powered rotor blade. Haitian children transformed plastic soft drink bottles into a miniature camouflage Humvee during the U.S. military invasion. Zulu artisans wove telephone wire into gauzy, swirling Op art baskets.

Folded magazine pages feather the extended wings of an aggressive three-dimensional eagle--the “Freedom Bird”--the creation of illegal Chinese immigrants whose boat ran aground in 1993 off Rockaway Beach, N.Y. Still detained in York County Prison, they create variations on the American eagle.

The show, which opened last month, also includes works that could pass for the quintessential American folk art of pieced quilts, but with a twist: There’s a Minimalist field quilt made from factory overruns of men’s underwear labels, and a strikingly self-referential “Tobacco Sacks” quilt that spells out in edge-to-edge large letters the objects from which it was made.

The show’s installation is an updated, walk-in version of a curiosity cabinet or Wunderkammern--the 16th, 17th and 18th century forerunners of today’s museums. While modern art museums tend to rely on the segregation of periods, schools and movements, here related oddments are intermingled and clustered together. The show mixes the ingenious, the crude, the functional, the elegant. It crosses time periods, continents, class and caste, thereby honoring the pan-human capacity for delight through visual appeal and creative correspondence. Many of the works thumb their noses at artistic hierarchies with considerable glee.

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While it may sound unwieldy, the show is structured in six sequences, stringing together semi-private, semi-public enclosures and tableaux. For example, in the American section, a grid of goggles is embedded in a wall--through which are revealed images of far-flung environments like “ ‘Grandma’ Prisbrey’s Bottle Village” in Simi Valley and Tom Every’s colossal sci-fi contraption called “Forevertron” (located just south of Baraboo, Wis.).

Whenever possible artists are identified and their portraits are included. In the toy section’s war-toy alcove, for example, a mural of a 1995 photograph shows three Haitian boys--Sony Fradeis, Geutchine Desir, and Louis Max David--who made pint-sized copies of military equipment. The photo shows them sitting in an American Chinook helicopter at the U.S. base in Port-au-Prince.

The other four sections are the Global Marketplace, the Aesthetics of Sound, Recycling on the Body and Recycled Chic. Vignettes that feature individual artists punctuate the show, including five in-depth case studies augmented by video interviews. A few of the featured artists already are well-known, like Mr. Imagination, whose bottle-cap encrusted environment includes the throne from his Chicago living room. Others are more obscure, local phenomena, like pop-top recycler Ray Cyrek, who used millions of aluminum pull-tabs to make a shimmering environment at his home in Homosassa Springs, Florida.

“Recycled, Re-seen” is the brainchild of Charlene Cerny, the museum’s director, who began her research and fund-raising more than six years ago. She has an impressive track record of initiating such forward-looking folk art exhibitions as “Que Viven las Fiestas” and “Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition Is Change,” the latter of which is coming to Los Angeles’ Craft and Folk Art Museum in November. Nevertheless, her concept of a show about art from recycling didn’t make sense to a lot of people. Still, Cerny persevered, dedicated to the idea of showing work by folk artists who use castoffs.

As opening day approached, despite $700,000 in grants from such major foundations as the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a companion book published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., Cerny was still hearing the same question: Why should an institution, especially an American institution, spend this much time on trash? Critics apparently see Cerny’s concept as straying too far from the stereotype of the rural folk artist who works with so-called “authentic” materials, means, and methods--the traditional hand-carved and hand-painted furniture, figures, and toys, or charming paintings on tin or cardboard.

At first, Cerny couldn’t find any published research that related to her ideas; terminology was a special problem. Several words apply: garbage, trash, refuse, rubbish. While books have been written about the intricacies of landfills and disputes about recycling, even among the dozen curators, folklorists, anthropologists and ethnographers who eventually contributed to the publication, none had previously concentrated on artists and the art they made from recycled materials.

By February 1994, Cerny and colleague Allen F. Roberts traveled to West Africa in search of junkyard innovators and artists. Roberts, a professor of anthropology and director of the African Studies Program at the University of Iowa and specialist on the Benin culture, served as a consultant for the show.

The port city of Dakar, Senegal, known as the “African Marseilles,” stands out as a special center for such creative activity. In a “junkyard” sprawl under a highway bridge that is known as Colbane, they met Bubakar Fane, who prefers to be called Carlos. He is a blacksmith who makes trunks from flattened oil barrels, corrugated roofing, and other scrap metal. Of all the places Cerny traveled, Colbane remains her most vivid memory. Roberts writes evocatively of Colbane in his accompanying essay: “It possesses astounding tactility--an explosion of shreds, shards, and shrapnel. It is everything sharp all in one place, glinting under the fierce sun. Rust reigns. Tetanus lurks. . . . Its visual overload is matched by clanging and banging. . . .” Cerny and Roberts both stressed the improbable hopefulness and almost absurd industriousness of the grimy workers they met. Carlos told them: “I make do in this way. I make do so that I will not steal and thereby defile the names of my mother and father.”

While the sensory overload of Colbane still looms large in Cerny’s recollections, the workshop of second-generation recycler Assane Faye ultimately became a more pressing concern. Faye makes briefcases, jewelry cases, lunch boxes and toys from misprinted metal sheeting and beverage cans. He prefers the red of tomato paste cans and the blue of the local tuna fish cans. Faye, who claims to have been the first to make European-style briefcases, lines his goods with scavenged magazines and newspapers, with inside and out carefully selected for ironic appeal to his tourist and expatriate customers. After a full afternoon of negotiating, Cerny purchased Assane Faye’s entire workshop, including a pair of mismatched doors that are an assemblage of recycled materials begun by Faye’s father. Faye wrote in her catalog essay, “It is our duty to collect little things and try to make something out of them.” But Cerny said in an interview that she was not quite prepared for just how much she had acquired. The workshop which Faye sold for $400 required a crate far more sturdily built than the doors themselves, and to reach landlocked New Mexico by show time, it had to be shipped by air. The final tally was $3,000.

In contrast, Cerny’s negotiations with pop-top artist Ray Cyrek at first seemed a wild goose chase. Her introduction to Cyrek came via a couple from Michigan who visited the folk art museum. They told Cerny about Cyrek’s double-wide trailer festooned with thousands of pop-top chains. Cerny describes it as “Glittering in the sun, the 4 million pop tops were, well, dazzling. Lit at Christmas with 16,000 hand-colored lights, Ray’s place was simply magic.” Cerny was fascinated by the artist, a retired machinist, whom she described as a “gruff and crusty, hard-working Polish-American.” In April 1993, with $1,000 from the Folk Art Foundation in her pocket, Cerny asked Cyrek to sell an 8 foot by 30 foot curtain that adorned his patio. Cyrek shrugged: “What would I do with $1,000?” Two years later Cyrek called Cerny back, asked her to come and be prepared to take it away . . . soon, that is, if she still wanted it. When she arrived, he also donated 30 other pieces. A few months later, Cyrek died.

Barbara Mauldin, the museum’s curator of Latin American folk art, is a scholar of festivals. For this exhibition, she concentrated on Trinidad and the highlands of Ecuador. In fact, recycling and improvisation in the steel-drum bands of Trinidad and Tobago proved both obvious and already heavily documented. Ecuador was a much different situation. Mauldin went in search of a more elusive artist, eventually involving three arduous trips, including a high-jacking at gunpoint. In 1991, she had been startled by a photo of a Corpus Christi ceremonial headdress decorated with light bulbs and crowned with a baby doll. After finding very little information, Mauldin went to Quito in 1992 and followed a rutted dirt road to the remote mountain village of San Rafael (near Puijili) and the home of Jose Ignacio Criollo. He was shocked; he had never been approached by an outsider, and most problematic for Mauldin and her consultant, he didn’t speak Spanish; he spoke only Quichua. By local standards, Criollo was clearly a man of elevated status. His home was cinder block--not adobe--and, it was filled with costumes that the villagers rented from him for their many different festivals.

In 1993, Mauldin returned with a suitcase full of peacock feathers, an essential crowning flourish attached to a Corpus Christi headdress when it is worn by a dancer. She negotiated a contract for a specific piece that would be picked up the next year. Criollo asked for $30 and Mauldin finalized the agreement for $400 in consideration of the artist’s consent to an interview. Criollo signed with a thumbprint. In 1994, Mauldin returned with a video crew and Amado Ruiz, an Ecuadoran activist whose mother was a known native leader. In a videotaping, Criollo blossomed, telling how he “dresses” the edges of the headdresses in mirrors and lightbulbs. He said he began using the bulbs in the early 1970s, long before electricity was delivered to his home.

When Cerny and Mauldin speak of their experiences, it is clear that they were captivated and enchanted by the artists and their work. This raw exuberance is reflected in the installation, a blend of tumult and triumph. Cerny concludes in her text: “For me, the power of recycled arts lies in their ability to make manifest the power of transformation and of personal transcendence, meanings that are rooted in the very process itself. Some would say that is a romantic notion. But could it be that the very concept of metamorphosis is inherently interesting to the human intellect? . . . Recycled works are compelling because they suggest the triumph of human creativity over circumstance, and divergent thinking at its best.”

With this exhibition, the field of folk art feels more vital and urgent, and a lot less quaint.

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“Recycled, Re-seen: Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heap,” Museum of International Folk Art/Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe. Through Aug. 22, 1997.