[Fonograf Editions; 2024]
In my neighborhood, Thursday is Garbage Day. This morning, before I sat down to write this review, I pulled out a crumpled plastic bag (that, according to the label, previously held fifty corn tortillas), into which I dumped my bathroom trash (mostly various wrappers and bits of packaging, along with tangles and tangles of human hair) and my cat’s litter. A quick sweep through the living room collected more human hair, cat hair, fine dirt that blows in through the door we tend to leave open, scraps of paper, a broken shoelace, and innumerable insect carcasses. I dropped the small plastic bag into a larger plastic bag—the kitchen trash—which I eased out of its gray container and transferred to another plastic container that I then wheeled from the top of my sloping driveway to the curb. Garbage Day is its own ritual, the culmination of which is the disappearance of all the trash. Workers I rarely see drive to my house in their desert-camouflage-colored truck, which lifts and dumps my household waste into a giant, putrid bin where it mixes with all the other waste from my area. Then they take it away. I do not know where my household trash goes. I have never thought to ask.
But Jaydra Johnson probably knows, because Johnson has thought a lot about trash. “The United States has nearly two thousand active landfills,” Johnson states. “I’ve pored over hundreds of charts, photographs, papers, and reports, trying to understand them.” The winner of the inaugural Fonograf Editions Essay Collection Contest, Johnson’s new book, Low: Notes on Art & Trash, explores trash from several different angles. Most of our social processes involving trash are designed to remove it from consciousness: out of sight, out of mind. Johnson’s goal is the opposite. She aims to spur a renewed awareness of trash. Her writing invites the reader to see what society trains us to ignore. “I want people to see what I see,” Johnson writes, “even when it is scary, stinky, sad, and awful. I also want people to consider that there is more than one way of seeing and that you’ll never see without looking.”
Johnson attends to trash literally—including the various materials I just tossed in my city-provided forty-gallon garbage bin, and their lasting ramifications—and figuratively—trash as a class category. Johnson invokes the words of artist and writer Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, who “writes, ‘trash is a political position of abject disenfranchisement . . . To be trash is to be forgotten, disposed of, razed, evicted, poisoned, gaslit. Policed. It is to be detained, incarcerated, deported, murdered.’ To this list,” Johnson continues, “one might add scapegoated, blamed, and made to lose.” Johnson has collected etymologies and interpretations of trash from throughout history and culture, assembling a kaleidoscopic picture of how garbage shapes concepts of American social hierarchy. Low’s first full-length essay, “Broken Crown,” is structured after a crown of sonnets: Each section begins with a reiteration of the last line of the preceding section. The book as a whole utilizes an enlarged version of the same structure. The five longer essays, each of which explores a discrete facet of art and waste, are linked by Johnson’s intervening, idiosyncratic yet moving choreographies, “Rituals to See Trash.”
These rituals—most of them no longer than a page—are step-by-step instructions written in second person. They are designed to guide the reader toward intentional encounters with waste, and by so doing, illuminate elements of Johnson’s own artistic practice. “Go to Walmart,” Johnson directs, in “Rituals to See Trash #2.” “Take a picture of one item that calls to you. Repeat until you’ve traversed the whole store.” She instructs the reader to get the images printed, display them in their home, and “watch the photos degrade at the pace at which landfilled waste decomposes.” These rituals are durational in ways that account for both human physicality and material decay. As peculiar as Johnson’s instructions are, they stretch the reader to acknowledge embodied aspects of late capitalism that we all too conveniently forget and ignore. Ritual #1 positions the second-person subject as a schoolchild proceeding through a cafeteria lunch line, identified immediately by debt. “Hear [the lady with the hairnet] say your account is past due,” Johnson narrates. “Consider yourself marked.” Ritual #3 is a blueprint for art-making: repurposing trash as sculpture, then burning it as an act of performance art. “5. Gather the ashes,” Johnson continues. “Mix the ashes with water and use them to create paintings that are political in nature. Show the paintings in a gallery funded by profits from fracking.”
Wry humor is threaded through Low as Johnson confronts the absurdity of our willful destruction of the landscape and natural resources in the name of profit. Humor becomes a means of confrontation and a cramped vessel for grief. Johnson explores duration and persistence in other ways too. In “Rituals to See Trash #4,” she prescribes six months of “monochromatic clothing in penal hues.” She allows for the carbon half-life of the ritual: “5. If you remain haunted by this experiment, throw your clothing and documentation in the trash,” she suggests. “Notice whether this aids your recovery—if you are able to forget.”
Her provocations and insights are rooted in Johnson’s intimate familiarity with what it means to be branded as trash. “Broken Crown”—a staggering, complex, dynamic essay—traces Johnson’s working-class upbringing and her efforts to use education as a means to escape that context. The essay opens with the etymology of trash as slur, which Johnson traces to Shakespeare’s Othello. “Iago’s slander [of Bianca, the prostitute he calls trash] marks the first recorded instance—in the year 1604—of the use of the word trash to describe a person in this way: as low-down, classless, worthless, and of poor character, even criminal,” Johnson writes. “As an epithet, trash both objectifies and denigrates its target.” This quote is indicative of her prose style: incisive, meticulously researched, and far-reaching.
Johnson’s nuanced cultural criticism guides the reader toward a fuller understanding of what it means and feels like to be “classed as trash.” “It can hurt,” she writes, “like hunger or like arthritis or like a funeral or . . . like a police baton to the head.” But she acknowledges the multifaceted ways that the label of trash can be wielded by people on different social trajectories. Johnson’s mother refuses to identify as trash, “resist[ing] the label while at the same time reifying its derogatory power.” Johnson, with further reflection, is able to understand her mom’s insistence on relative status. “If I admit I am trash,” Johnson explains, “I get scholarships from institutions and street cred among my artist friends. . . . Absent a political understanding of how race and class function—an understanding that her [mother’s] community college’s technical training program was not designed to help her develop—she would be left with no one to blame for her hardship but herself.” The label trash still has power as a derogative because the invisible hand of the American class system traps people in place. Johnson recognizes that “the decisions my family was making were not choices so much as compromises or fates to which one should resign.” Poverty is its own constraint.
Fundamentally, Low is a critical intervention in our concept of class. Throughout the book, Johnson establishes a parallelism between the American education system and the prison industrial complex. As early as the first page, Johnson references “the class warfare of cafeteria lunch or the American penal system.” She notes that the garages of the Department of Sanitation for the City of New York (DSNY) “look so much like both public schools and prisons.” While some might find the equation dismissive of the dehumanizing brutality of prison, I would argue that Johnson does this to highlight the often-overlooked dehumanizing brutality of poverty, and the way the two are linked.
The essay “Art Under Duress” examines color through the bifocals of a depressive period of Johnson’s alongside one of her brother’s periods of incarceration. She recalls, as a child, watching a previously incarcerated uncle show off the airbrushing skills he’d honed in prison. The details are fuzzy, she admits, but “the significance of this memory is that it predicts a life interested in low art, an intimacy with the carceral state, and an obsession with the ways people use color to conjure meaning from the abyss.” Woven in with Johnson’s reflections, Low references a wide range of unconventional and outsider artists. Many of them are featured in Nicole Fleetwood’s project Marking Time, “a breathtaking survey of modern art created within carceral spaces.” The essay collection strikes me as a compendium of creativity cultivated in the margins, with a particular focus on artists who have re-envisioned waste as potential.
This emphasis in the book—on art made from what others discard—prompted me to recall where I received my own education in trash: Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Texas. My exposure to trash was, in many ways, the opposite of Johnson’s. Johnson writes about belonging to a class politically positioned as a wedge between Black folks and “the right sort of white.” I was raised in a protected, insular, upper-middle-class context in one of America’s prettiest cities, before relocating to the swampy crotch of Texas. I was a beneficiary of “what Pope L. calls ‘verticality’—the wealth and privilege that keeps some of us upright and mobile, insulated from the horizontal crawl-and-stall existence of the hole classes.” The insularity of my hometown and much of my upbringing there was designed to protect people like me from exactly what Johnson advocates for: seeing trash, economic inequality, and social stratification. “There are some holes that the ruling class would rather we didn’t peer into, full of things they would like us to forget.”
When I lived in Third Ward, I worked at a neighborhood art nonprofit called Project Row Houses. PRH had been founded some twenty-five years before, in the early ‘90s, when Holman Street, where it’s located, was besieged by blight, crack, and municipal neglect. A group of friends, seven Black artists, had been meeting informally to play basketball and talk about the hurdles they were facing: institutional racism from major art organizations downtown, disconnection between the cosmopolitan art scene and the Black community, and a lack of tangible strategies to address the problematic circumstances proliferating in their neighborhoods, Third Ward and Fifth Ward. PRH started when those artists—Rick Lowe, Jesse Lott, Bert Long Jr., Floyd Newsum, James Bettison, Bert Samples, and George Smith—acquired a block of dilapidated shotgun houses in what was considered the worst part of Third Ward. They renovated the houses to serve as art exhibition and education spaces: reclaiming an asset that had been slated for demolition and repurposing it as site for creativity.
Many of the ideas articulated in Low echoed the conversations I used to have with Jesse Lott and Rick Lowe at the domino table. When Johnson cites the artist Pope L., saying, “Marked by this trauma, I have a choice: either be ruled by circumstance or be circumstance and tap the energy of predicament,” I hear Brother Jesse: “One cannot be a victim of situations and circumstances while one is participating in the creative act”—a catchphrase followed by his signature thunderbolt laugh. Every time Johnson likens the American school system to the penal system, I picture Brother Jesse in the passenger seat of the van I drove him around in, chanting under his breath: “Jail or college, jail or college, you choose how you get your knowledge.”
PRH was where I first learned about Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has served as the Artist-in-Residence for the Department of Sanitation for the City of New York (DSNY) since her initial appointment in 1977. Back in 2016, I was making a weekly schedule for which staff member would take out the trash when my research surfaced a “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” written in the 1960s by Ukeles (whose name my word processor keeps autocorrecting to Useless, an ironic and hilarious malapropism). At the bottom of my trash schedule I included one of the Manifesto’s more famous quotes: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage?” Ukeles is one of the foci in Johnson’s essay, “Other People’s Toilets,” which explores Johnson’s time working as a maid alongside Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation Performance, in which she set out to shake hands with all 8,500 employees of the DSNY. “Ukeles looked [at garbage], and she wanted others to look, too,” Johnson writes. “She found it ridiculous that people could not or would not see the art of the work happening right in front of them.”
In Low, Johnson is doing similar work to Ukeles: prompting her audience to look afresh at what we dismiss, inviting the re-evaluation of what we fail to recognize as worthy of value an attention. Johnson’s essays confront, inform, and challenge. Her writing is rich with texture and detail, momentum, and ideological associations. In terms of contemporary cultural criticism, I hope to see Low: Notes on Art & Trash achieve status and recognition on par with the works of Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss.
Johnson’s final essay, “The Art of War,” is a desperate, breathless screed about militarism, waste, and climate catastrophe. A twelve-page paragraph, the entire essay appears to explode forth during a subway ride through Brooklyn. Johnson narrates the sights and associations of her commute, which build to a pounding crescendo of global corporations, landfills and SuperFund sites, litter, and meditations on late capitalism and complicity. The book ends with an inventory, as Johnson claims “custody of the [reader’s] eyes” and retrains them on her subject: “Trash at the bus stop. Three paper coffee cups. Wendy’s Hot & Crispy fries bag . . . Plastic water bottle. Plastic lid. Plastic straw. Plastic clamshell takeout container. Plastic handle of an umbrella. All this plastic will outlast us, and we don’t even know by how long.”
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic currently based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Belmont Story Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. McKenzie can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.
This post may contain affiliate links.
