Standing before the enormous accumulation of discarded sculpture and art educational by-products, I could only ask myself why I was pouring so much time and energy into a pitiful and seemingly futile cleanup project. I had been asked on occasion what exactly was possessing me to constantly clean and throw additional items onto the growing mass of art waste, while at the same time complaining about it very existence. Any fool could see that there was a compulsory urge on my behalf to regularly confront and attack the one object that represented so perfectly every difficulty that I was experiencing in dealing with my new environment and my new role as a graduate student and instructor.

Deciding what procedure to follow when confronted by the limitations of an overly bureaucratic institution can be a difficult problem. In my eyes there was no question that the mountain of physically manifested neglect had to be eliminated as rapidly as possible. With this directive in mind I set about making it happen in a very direct manner. Seeking audience with persons of influence became a regular activity during business hours, while evenings and idle time were spent digging through and rearranging loose sections of the main mass. During the months that followed, I came to accept the fact that I was obsessed with the thought of freeing the sculpture department from its own history manifested in a clot of refuse. With this realization came the decision to approach the labor as performance.

The actual performance portion of this work is made up of the interactions between myself and the heap of discarded art materials at the sculpture department’s outdoor workspace. I was expending an enormous amount of time and energy manipulating the accumulated material, and it became oddly comforting to participate in some sort of pile related scenario on a daily basis. As my frustrations mounted I would force the pile higher and redefine its outer boundaries. The metaphor that the pile and my relationship to it presented was too rich an opportunity to ignore, and I began plans to initiate a long term and extremely bureaucratic performance involving the pile and the persons who engage it daily, as well as those who my activities involved. I successfully terminated the art department’s plans to remove the pile, and convinced them that it would be better to wait and sort the materials before their removal. This idea, however ridiculous considering my previously urgent requests to have the debris removed, seemed quite acceptable to everyone involved. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the viewpoint, my prior meeting with the director of the solid waste removal component of Environmental Health and Safety was quite fruitful. After receiving notification from Environmental Health and Safety that the debris was to be removed, I abandoned my plans to move and sort the pile over a two month period, and I instead began an accelerated scheme of aggressive excavation and conservation. This alternate strategy incorporated two basic activity patterns, digging and counting. Digging involved burrowing into the heap and moving the materials from the bottom to the top and recovery of the lowest layer of the pile into a steel drum that was then sealed. Counting consisted of smashing abandoned undergraduate plaster sculpture assignments that were either found within the pile or in the plaster studio. This recovery of items from a source seemingly outside the pile is not of concern, for these materials were cleared from the building in the same way that hundreds of pounds of materials had been thrown onto the pile. The fractured plaster fragments were then numbered with a pencil from zero to four hundred and then pitched into one of the steel drums. The drum that houses the plaster remnants will be displayed with an open lid in order to provide viewer access to its contents. The second drum will remain sealed during presentation.

The physical art object that functions as the testimonial for the event consists of a pair of fifty-five gallon drums purchased from the department of Environmental Health and Safety, the same bureaucracy that was responsible for the final removal of the pile. One drum contains material excavated from the lower layers of the pile. I have decided to refer to this material as art educational mulch. The mulch layer contains what can, by normal geological procedure, be suspected as the oldest deposit at the site. The matter in this layer is in a state of nearly complete decomposition, with the exception of some inorganic materials such as glass and styro-foam. The steel and wood in this layer are well eroded by moisture and the long duration of time that they have spent at the bottom of the heap. The containers that hold these recovered materials can be sealed, or presented without their lids for the viewer to investigate their contents. The second drum contains four hundred broken fragments of plaster sculpture; each numbered with graphite pencil. One drum will be presented raised on a hydraulic lift cart, and the other will rest on a heavy-duty four-wheel hand truck that was recovered from the art department store room on the third floor of the Staller Center. It is important that the containers are kept within an art educational context, or at least some representation of such a context. The shop equipment that the barrels are displayed with bear the identification labels of the State University of New York at Stonybrook as well as other text linking them to art education. The video of the performance, which is crucial to establishing the work’s testimonial function, will be presented with the remnant objects as a projection onto the wall of the exhibition space, creating a large moving image behind each cart and drum. To further the institutional relationship, the video could be projected onto a plaster cast of the concrete wall surrounding the outdoor area where the pile materials originated. The possibility of including a large format computer printed image of the pile in its original neutral state is still another possibility. The final configuration of the individual components is variable according to the given space. Ideally, the carts and drums would stand in a space that has the same proportions of the area that was covered with debris, with borders clearly marked on the floor and text providing the dimensions.

The video depicts the pile and my interactions with it over the two-day period before its forceful removal by the department of Environmental Health and Safety, which oddly enough shares the building with the graduate art studios. The drums and the carts that the containers ride on, which were both cast members in the performance, are clearly visible in the video, establishing their role as testimonial objects. Another interesting idea present here is the simple fact that no one has to believe the video, and therefore there is no reason why the existence of the pile has to be accepted as a fact. Testimony of individuals is weak without convincing physical evidence, and even materials allegedly recovered from the scene of an event can be altered or even fabricated. The only physical evidence aside from what I have provided is the financial record that accounts for the cost of the two dumpster loads of garbage. I can only assume that this record is lost somewhere in the bureaucratic sea from which the pile was born. As the paperwork fades into obscurity, the only record of the actual event exists in memory and in the construction of a fabricated memory using the materials presented in the piece.

There is a certain kinship to the happenings of Kaprow that exists in this work, both in its materials and in its nature as an artwork that promotes a community effort to reach an end that becomes a finished piece. The irony of this relationship is that Kaprow refused the use of any art materials in the assembly of a happening, while the performance that this paper is concerned with exclusively used only art materials. The fact that these materials, tires, branches, parts of automobiles, are from Kaprow’s palette is representative of the pluralism that is very much a part of the art educational system at this time. The labor of my performance was not a group effort, that is to say, the majority of the labor during the months that I adopted the infatuation with the cleaning project was done exclusively by me alone, but the positive and tangible results of this work are clearly of benefit to all concerned within the department of art and the university community.