MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation

I just wanted to send a post regarding my experience uploading documents today. Everything seems to be running really smoothly. I used the Mac Lab at Bobst and walked right in without a reservation. (It seems pretty open in the mornings, I worked from about 10-1 without a problem). Also. the staff is really helpful if you have any problems.
I'd like to suggest the following keywords to be added:

Incineration
Sewage Treatment
Coney Island
Reports
Propaganda or Advertisements

What Does Your Trash Say About You?

It is said that one is able to gather a good deal of information about a person’s behavior and activities just by looking through their garbage. I know for a fact that if you were to dig through my trashcan in my apartment in Brooklyn Heights, you would probably find this view to be true and come to some interesting conclusions about who I am as a consumer. For example, the empty Starbucks cups (and let me emphasize here on cups in the plural) would reveal that I visit the chain on a regular basis, and some would argue almost to the point of obsession. Amongst the coffee cups, you would also find used napkins and brown paper bags from Chipotle Mexican Grill, again showing my loyalty to a specific chain. Other products found inside my trashcan include Orbit gum wrappers, an empty Baked Lays potato chip bag, Yoplait yogurt containers, and Heinz ketchup packets. If you were to search through my trash on a weekly basis, you would find all of these items repeatedly, because I stick to certain products and do not tend to make changes.

With this idea in mind, that if I personally held to specific brands and buying patterns, surely those in my neighborhood did too, and so for the next two weeks I set off to try and find out what those were. Of course I would not be able to fully grasp the consumer patterns of my fellow Brooklyn residents considering the time restraints, but I could at least try to begin to understand what their garbage revealed about them. According to the book Rubbish!, garbage in the United States is like a “mirror of American society,” and like my garbage, I definitely found that to be the case here with the population of Brooklyn Heights. I chose to concentrate on just a couple of residences because to go around the entire neighborhood and observe their trash would probably be an entire semester’s project within itself.

I started off by first observing my own apartment building’s habits and behaviors and found out some interesting things. Now, I have to add that my apartment building is all NYU graduate housing, so even before I looked at the garbage bins outside I assumed I would come across bottles of wine and beer, or fast food packaging, being as we are students; we hardly have time to cook our own dinner and having the occasional drink is not at all far from the truth. However, what I found in the plastic bags that lined the curb outside my building surprised me; instead of bottles of alcohol, there were bottles of water, and not just any particular brand either. There were bottles of seltzer water, Smart Water, tonic water and various mountain water brands. And instead of McDonald’s bags, I found discarded boxes of Lean Cuisine and other sorts of healthy prepackaged food. It seemed that graduate students were healthier than I had given them credit for!

The next apartment building I focused on (about a couple of blocks away from mine) produced almost the same results as my building, with the exception that more families seemed to live here. The reason I came to this latter conclusion was because there were a lot of Capri Sun juice boxes (very popular with the kids and easy to put in a lunch bag) as well as fruit snack boxes (such as Fruit Roll-ups) and dinosaur shaped chicken nugget boxes (such as Kid’s Cuisine). But like my building, water bottles overflowed their plastic bags (mostly of the Perrier brand), as well as other healthy beverages such as Tropicana orange juice (which was pretty much the only brand I came across) and milk cartons (of no particularly dominant brand, but usually skim or 2%). Another interesting observation I made was the brand of magazines, usually Shape, Self, or Men’s Fitness, again confirming my findings that my neighborhood was concerned with its health.

Of course just by observing these two residences for a couple of weeks, it is hard to decipher which individuals/families like which brands, or whether they chose to buy something merely because it was on sale. However, for the majority of the part of what I observed, the people in my surrounding neighborhood generally lead healthy lives. This is not to say that they never eat fast food, or they never drink soda or alcohol, but during the course of two weeks of observing their trash, I found that on the whole they like to take care of their bodies.

As I pondered about my behavior and the behavior of those around me, I started to consider Maya’s blog entry titled “Trash Talk.” It was about a website she had found that focused on a project people were experimenting with; for two weeks straight, you had to live with your trash and refrain from using a trashcan, this way people would become more aware of how much waste they actually produced. I thought to myself, if I were to test out this little project, what would it say about my waste habits and how would it affect my consumer patterns?

Now, I’m just taking a guess but I would probably come to find that I drink way too much coffee and spend way too much money at Starbucks. Instead of paying four dollars per drink, I could save more money by buying some generic coffee brand and making some at home, which would also reduce my consumption of paper cups by using a ceramic mug instead. Or I would come to find that I should also cut down on the Chipotle runs, because 1) it’s not entirely healthy to eat here all the time and 2) like Starbucks, it’s expensive and I could save the money and buy more groceries. What would my fellow Brooklyn residents find of themselves? Maybe they would find that they should drink more skim milk instead of 2%, or maybe they would cut down on the bottled water and reduce their consumption by buying a filtered water container like Brita or Pur. Living with your trash, like I told Maya, would be a good experiment to see your patterns of waste but it’s almost pointless because it will all end up in the trash anyways. And like I said before, I would probably cut down on the Starbucks and Chipotle, but you would still find these items in my trashcan, because I'm a girl who needs my caffeine somehow, as well as my occasional Mexican fix.

References
Jex, Maya Gibley. Trash Talk. MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation Blog. Sept. 27, 2007.
Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. 2001. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tempe, AZ: U of Arizona P.

View of my trashcan with Chipotle remnants

Bottled water outside my apartment

View of the street where I observed the other apartment building

Tropicana orange juice, which was the dominant orange juice of choice in my neighborhood

SHAPE magazine outside other apartment building

BACKGROUND:

Thus far, this class has been great as far as further bolstering my knowledge in a topic I’ve always been interested in: waste and waste management. There are a few ideas that I came across this semester that really stuck with me. The first was from the Calvino piece we read at the beginning of the semester, I’ll paraphrase it but basically it was that what we throw away is what we’ve decided is no longer a part of us, while what we keep we choose to define us. I’ve always been fascinated by disposability and how it’s led to an explosion in the volume of waste we produce. That’s why I was astounded by Rathje’s exposure of the myth of biodegration. We’ve discussed in class how when we throw something “away” we feel it disappears. But if what we throw away is actually fossilizing in some landfill as Rathje says, that means that the jewelry box I had as a girl that I loved until it broke, might still out there somewhere. Same goes for the bright orange Bigwheel that I used to tool around on as a toddler. It may seem like a small thing, but this really blew my mind. It’s something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to since our class began. And while I’ve always been a die-hard recycler, many of you have probably already guessed how that parade been rained on for yours true, as we’ve learned the hard facts about what really happens: if that circle isn’t closed it’s little more than psychological comfort for those of us who take the time to separate our garbage. In any case, I still think recycling is very important, but I’ve since realized that the only way to truly reduce the amount of waste people produce is by the actual reusing of goods. As this is something that’s dramatically decreased in the last 50 or so years, I’ve become curious as to how many people actually purchase or are willing to acquire used goods in their day-to-day lives. And what do people do with quality items that they have no need for anymore?

I came across the digital collection of the Hermitage, and what immediately struck me is the homepage's detail about what technology can be employed to search the collection. In addition to a standard search function that allows a user to search by artist or title, the Hermitage has invested a QBIC tool that allows users to search by color palette or even by creating a sketch! I attempted to try it out on a PC (which is old and slow) but I guess it didn't have the necessary plug-ins or whatever it is that you need, because I couldn't actually perform said QBIC search. However, I feel like this capability opens up a lot of doors for amateur and seasoned scholars and researchers alike because it would in theory allow users to zoom in pretty closely and potentially observe the minutae of an item in the collection. And with a collection like the Hermitage's, which is vast and dates back several centuries, this is huge in terms of conservation and access.

The advance search is pretty great also and goes to a level of specificity that I haven't really seen with other digital collections. For example, you can search by artist's country of origin, theme of the artwork, and even by a specific person depicted in the artwork. It also seems, at least with what I can compare the few other online collections I've interacted with thus far, that there is far less metadata associated with items in the Hermitage's digital collection that with others, or is less consistent (the amount of metadata there is varies from item to item). Most digital archives seem to have more metadata including format, authorship, provenance, and detailed description of the actual item.


It's a pretty amazing collection so I'd recommend taking a look! Enjoy it!

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/browse.mac/category?selLang=English

Hi Everyone -

I thought it might be helpful to see a blog used in a museum setting. My museum is hosting a blog in conjunction with one of our current exhibitions, and the text from the blog will actually be used as the basis for a print catalog for the exhibition. So I think it's somewhat comparable to our project in that you can see the style of writing that's used here, and how that reflects the mindset of this being a future, scholarly publication. It is somewhat more formal than our blog, and I think the public is interacting with it less than we had expected so perhaps the "voice" here is a little less organic. But interesting to look at within the context of what we are doing nonetheless.

http://queensmuseum.blogspot.com/

So I've been looking at various resources in order to beef-up my descriptions for the FDA. Via Robin's suggestion, I came across the DSNY's Annual Reports. They're quite helpful in getting a sense of the scope of activities the DSNY participates in.

For example, on page 11 of the 2006 report, there's discussion of the Lot Cleaning Division, which manages the Neighborhood Vacant Lot Clean-up Program. Basically the program does just what it says: it tidies derelict areas (both public and private). I had no idea the DSNY did such things. (This is of particular interest to me since in my ethnography I discussed such areas as if no one ever cleaned them. Not the case -- if one lobbies enough or the space becomes overrun with rodents or mosquitos, DSNY will come.)

Does anyone have a good resource to identify DSNY vehicles with their proper names? I'm trying to make my metadata as complete as possible, and because my topic is 9/11 I'm dealing with the latest vehicles in use. (Alex, you seem to have found some good stuff, any advice?) I've done some internet research and haven't turned anything up that I'm confident about. By the way, in rooting around online I found that the DSNY has some pretty cool merchandise for sale! Unfortunately, the men's stuff is much better looking than the stuff they have for the ladies.

I thought that I'd just take a moment to comment on last Wednesday's seminar and our guest speaker, Mierle Laderman Ukeles. First of all, I found her to be extremely delightful to listen to as she explained her role within the DSNY as their artist-in-residence for 30 years and the work that she had done/has done for them. Like the Gablik article suggested ("Deconstructing Aesthetics"), her work is very different from the typical "dominator model" of modern art which is impersonal, egocentric, and authoritative (recall the Richard Serra example). Mierle's work on the other hand is more closely related to the "partnership model," or art that is connective to others and is based on relationships. This notion can clearly be seen in one of her project's titled, "Touch Sanitation," which moved and impressed me because it was such a huge task that required a certain amount of dedication and determination to complete. To go around the entire DSNY, sending TelEx letters saying she would stop by to meet every San Man and shake their hand is just simply incredible to me. Her effort produced such an effect on these men because someone was showing that they cared about them and appreciated them for their service to the city. However, my favorite project that Mierle did was "Cleansing the Bad Names" at the Robert Feldman Gallery. I would have loved to have seen people of all different backgrounds and positions grab a sponge and a bucket of water and just scrub away all the bad names sanitation workers get called. What a sight that must have been, to see the community working together to bring this issue into light. And I believe that the other Gablik article ("Making Art as if the World Mattered") was right too, that even though modern art may sometimes show the cruelness of today's society and at times does not seem to offer any solutions to help certain situations, it essentially can be powerful. The artist can be a positive force and art may even be able to save a life. I'm sure the San Men who experienced Mierle's project's first hand would agree that her work has done this and it just goes to show that we need more artists like her around, people who make a difference and touch the lives of others.

As Katie requested, this post summarises what is expected of you by the end of the semester. We would like a project report which contextualises your final text for the exhibition (to be included in the paper) in the light of your scanning, archival, oral history and other research. This should be 10-15 pages (co-authored together). We are looking both for an overview of your work this semester but, more importantly, for an analysis of the key intellectual issues you became interested in and a critical dissection of how working with the different media (interviews, archives, libraries, ethnographic research) helped you to develop your ideas. We would also like you to note here any commentaries you had about the functionality of the archive, the utility of the blog (including any criticisms) and the general contribution of digital media to the project. We also want to hear any ideas you might have about the future of the museum.

In short, this assignment should draw together all of your different work over the semester and link the museum based work to the intellectual investigations you have been undertaking into the DSNY.

A tenatative breakdown or structure for the paper which you might like to follow, but which YOU CAN ALSO CHANGE OR AMEND could be:

1. Introduction - to your topic and theme,

2. Overview of what you did during the semester

3. Critical analyses of what you learned from working with these different media (what you learned from the images, from the oral histories, from other research.

4. Discussion of the usefulness and limitations of different media and the digital domain

5. A copy of your final text for the exhibition, contextualised in terms of why you focused on these specific images and ideas (this can be based on your previous assignment of course - those of you who worked seperately please liaise)

6. A summary of your ideas for the future of the DSNY Museum (and some provisional ideas/summary of what you might like to put in a Kimmel window for next semester)

All of these sections should be included but please feel free to add more or less.

The due date for this assignment is: Monday December 16th.

(which will give you time to reflect on the opening of the exhibition

On Thursday the 17th, Monica and I completed our second interview with Superintendent Frank O’Keefe. The best news- both ipods we took recorded and saved! As we discussed in class, when uploading our first interview with Mr. O’Keefe we found the ipod empty, and had to ask to reschedule the meeting and re-do the interview.

As upsetting as the entire experience was (and upsetting is an understatement, especially reflecting on the moment in the library when we realized the recording was really and truly not there), we ended up with a much stronger interview the second time around. The beginning was more nerve wracking than the first. It wasn’t until a nervous joking session when the issue of repeated questions was addressed that everyone seemed more at ease. What emerged after that was a more personal and candid interview than we expected.