Rusty Freeman, visual arts director at the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, shared these thoughts about the Trashin’ sculpture at the Missouri History Museum’s Mighty Mississippi River exhibit. Thank you Rusty.
The Mighty Mississippi, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
The Missouri History Museum opened The Mighty Mississippi, a multi-media exhibition
benchmarking the myriad ways the great river formed the region’s differing historical cultures,
that at various times flourished, culminating with the city of St. Louis.
What caught the eye was a particular art work in the exhibit by St. Louis artist Libby Reuter and
how it functioned within the context of the exhibitions themes and goals. Reuter’s Trashin’
presents trash as aesthetic object. How might the use of garbage as aesthetic statement
relate to the exhibit?
The Mighty Mississippi exhibition features rich layers of social, cultural, economic, fine and
decorative arts, sociological, and geographical contexts all connected by specific
cartographies, chronologies, and ethnographies. Timelines begin with the Mounds people to
Native American and the European fur trade to today. Steamboats delivered the industrial age
and are a highlight of the exhibition. Information systems include wall texts, infographics,
paintings, photographs, historical documents and objects, maps from various eras, short
videos, ambient narration and sound effects, huge backlit illustrations, and hand-held audios.
The exhibition is a visually sumptuous, inviting, deep exploration and discovery site for
schoolchildren and adults alike. The Mighty Mississippi was organized by the museum’s David
Lobbig, Curator of Environmental Life, and a companion 308 page book, Great River City: How
the Mississippi Shaped St. Louis, lavishly illustrated, was written by Andrew Wanko, the
museum’s Public Historian. The exhibition and book drive the exhibition theme that the
Mississippi River should not be taken for granted.
The most contemporary of art installations greet visitors near the exhibit entrance installed
above in the rafters. It is an installation of approximately 500 items discarded into the
Mississippi and range from plastic food and beverages containers, tools, to toys.
Trashin’ is central to exhibit themes both for its aesthetics and historical connotations.
However, Trashin’ has a brief label noting only who picked up the trash (Living Lands & Water,
Open Space Council, Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis, and volunteers). Trashin’ implies
that as the Mississippi shaped St. Louis, the river was shaped in return.
The aesthetics of refuse and garbage have a long lineage in art history. Picasso (Still Life with
Chair Caning, 1912), Duchamp (Fountain, 1917), Dadaists (1916-1922), Assemblage movement
(1960s), Betye Saar (1960s to today), Rauschenberg (second half of 20th century), Mierle
Laderman Ukeles (1970s to today), and Mark Dion (1980s to today) to cite only the prominent.
What trash as trash signifies as art is a host of social, political, cultural themes of recognition
and representation of ignored or repressed forms of life; the everyday, the no-longer-useful, the
unsavory, the unspeakable. Although The Paris Agreement is reported on, the mass media
does not broadcast much these days on the rampant and actual pollution of the planet.
However, for example, there are coordinated efforts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch (there are five such “patches” in the world’s oceans). See theoceancleanup.com
According to the research scientists of The Ocean Cleanup rivers are a major source of plastic
waste flowing into the oceans. One thousand of the world’s rivers account for 80% of the
plastic in all oceans.
Although the Romans built clean water aqueducts and developed a separate waste water
system, these ideas evolved unevenly and sporadically worldwide. It was not until the 19th
century that connections were made to cholera and waste water. The critical understand of
sanitation is a recent development in human history.
As noted in Great River City, St Louis did not have a sewer system in 1849; waste went into the
streets, as it had for centuries around the world. Cholera killed 4,500 officially in St. Louis in
1849, with many more deaths of the poor not being recorded. The city’s first sewer was
completed in 1889. The sewer by custom emptied into the Mississippi. It was in 1871 that the
city for the first time had reliable drinking water for homes and businesses. However, a large
percentage of the city in the early 1900s still carried their water home from street corner
spigots. As late as 1904, drinking water from the Mississippi was muddy. In 1915, St. Louis
opened the largest filtration plant in the world. Only in 1972 did the Environmental Protection
Agency make it illegal for cities and industries to dump raw sewage into rivers.It is a recent turning point that humans collectively have begun to consider seriously how the Anthropocene has been affecting the environment.
The inclusion of Trashin’ was a bold gesture by the Missouri History Museum. The art
installation directly confronts a contemporary, timely, and serious issue regarding how we view
the world today. As Mark Dion has said, “Science tells us what things are, but art can express
how we as a society and as individuals feel about that.”
To the curators’ point, the Trashin’ art installation of debris from the Mississippi River connects
to the long history of artists using quotidian, banal objects from everyday life to put into play
statements in the public realm or social conversation. Like Duchamp’s Fountain, the aesthetic
function of Trashin’ works here, as it has in history, to present an object that is regarded as ugly
or disgusting or unworthy of contemplation. Trash is generally unspeakable, why bother? No
topic is off limits today, but, some topics are repressed and not discussed nearly enough, in
legislatures or schools. These unspeakable topics are repressed and end up functioning in the
background, always looming, rarely addressed, except by scientists, artists, or activists.
Climate change has been discussed worldwide, for years, yet, little has been accomplished.
Duchamp, I consider, wanted to put something unspeakable into the discussion of how art was
beginning to function in the early 20th century. The word urinal could not even be printed in
newspapers of the time. Duchamp opened the conversation to what art could address in
public, the unspeakable issues. Duchamp was not concerned with the aesthetics of plumbing,
but the monetarization of the work of art, and more importantly, with creating an irony of
indifference towards social customs and sparking new and different thinking about quotidian
objects presented as art. Like Fountain, Trashin’ functions more than a mere equivalence that this art signifies symbolically this social concern, although it does that, too. Trashin’ signifies materially; its
form is the meaning.
The Missouri History Museum curators by exhibiting Trashin’ within the all-important cultural
contexts of the Mississippi opens the conversation to issues both aesthetic and conceptual in
how we think and act today in regard to the world around us. The physical placement of Trashin’ analogizes the conundrum faced today with pollution worldwide, it is out of sight most of the time, a haunting structuring absence, long ignored, hanging just over our heads.
Libby Reuter is the organizer of Watershed Cairns, an art-centric enterprise developing
awareness and support for clean drinking water and the importance of keeping local
watersheds clean. Reuter and colleague Joshua Rowan, a St. Louis photographer, document
the bio-diversities of the Midwest’s watersheds, see watershedcairns.com. The Mississippi
watershed is the largest of North America.