s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Trashpo: Objects of Ejecta
Daniel Barbiero & Jeff Bagato

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Looking at someone else’s trash—a kind of visual eavesdropping.

Or: searching for clues. A strange twist on the oracular—augury by garbage. Examine lobes of crumpled paper. (Here the clue is indication by indirection—the inadvertent allusion.) A.J. Weberman sifting through Dylan’s trash for revelation and a reverse of Shakespeare’s dictum: Who steals my trash steals my purse.

The intimacy of the discarded. The unearned intimacy of purloined trash. Unearned because entirely unilateral.

Or does the discarded item belong instead to the public domain? By default if not intent: “Finders keepers” and all that.

Paper detritus, the itinerary of a life—to be pieced together. Sometimes literally, if torn. Trash as an unwritten manuscript, in pieces. Paper potsherds, contemporary relics, textual fragments looking for their Diels and Kranz.

Craig and Bagato as archaeologists of the unwanted. Craig collects the fragments and Bagato assembles them. But with this difference: Not to recreate the original artifact but to create something new.

A trash mosaic, tiles of torn paper loosely assembled.

Trash as personal history, unconsciously revealing the signature mark of the hand that discarded it. A signature mark destined to be covered up (literally, in landfill).

Bagato’s assembled fragments of minutiae—inscriptions without context. Bits of daily life with the daily life subtracted. Or rather their lack of context is their context, the condition of their possibility as art. An art of reflexive inference: Look at them and you can’t help but try to piece together their meaning. Which brings us back to augury.

A natural reaction to fragments. The human tendency to find patterns, to fill in the blanks. To become another Giovanni Morelli, identifying the whole from the part, claiming to find the decisive giveaway bit of information in the thrown-away detail. And not finding patterns, to invent them.

To make visual poetry out of trash—out of scraps collected and collaged, collated into cohesive formal objects of ejecta.

Trash as a primary source, an archive of personal history, the unintended tell of where we’ve been, what we’ve done, once we’re done with it.

Trashpo: Jeff Bagato.  Text: Daniel Barbiero.

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Jeff Bagato produces poetry and prose as well as electronic music and glitch video. His published books include And the Trillions (poetry), and Computing Angels (fiction).
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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases are In/Completion a collection of verbal and graphic scores by composers from North America, Europe and Japan, realized for solo double bass and prepared double bass, and Now/Here, his fourth collaboration with Cristiano Bocci.
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