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Garbage - Museums - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/arts/31conn.html?_r=1&adxnnl=...

The New York Times
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March 31, 2008

CONNECTIONS
Nothing's Wasted, Especially Garbage
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

There is nothing more disgusting than garbage that doesn't know its place. That's one reason it's garbage in the first place. It is something we are done with, that no longer belongs near us. It must be removed, taken away. Otherwise it contaminates, disgusts. The anthropologist Mary Douglas suggested that the very definition of dirt was "matter out of place": a hair on one's head is one thing, a hair in a glass of water is another. A half-eaten plate of food is a savored delicacy in one context, a mound of waste in another.

So it shouldn't be any surprise that there is a Nimby reaction to garbage dumps. Of course they shouldn't be in my backyard. That would be the very essence of pollution: breaking down the boundary between refuse and refuge.

Maybe there's also something profound to be discerned in how we look at garbage. If a fortune-teller can read the future in soggy tea leaves, what might be discovered if we look carefully at milk cartons and used paper towels, cooking grease, and moldy bread? There is much to understand about garbage, and a reluctance, because of its very nature, to look too closely. 

In folklore, for example, the rag picker and dust sweeper are often possessed of an intimate understanding of people, an insight that eludes those of us who turn away from such matters. There is also a strong element of economic class in the way garbage is regarded. The shantytowns of the world's poor are constructed out of the discarded flotsam of urban life, but one privilege of the wealthy is to be separated from garbage quickly and decisively. 

Garbage that doesn't seem to know its place may also be suggestive. It is, at least, in a modest series of display windows at New York University, at the corner of West Third Street and La Guardia Place in Greenwich Village. The windows, installed on Friday, are a result of a collaboration between the university and the New York City Sanitation Department and were previously shown at the department's quaintly named Derelict Vehicles Office, where abandoned cars and wrecks enter Purgatory. 

The windows, at the Kimmel Center for University Life, describe themselves as "the first step toward founding a museum for the Department of Sanitation," for this is an agency that, unlike its brethren the New York City Police and Fire Departments, and the Transportation Authority, does not have its own museum. The exhibit grew out of a course given last fall, "Making a Museum" that had the unfortunate subtitle, "Materializing Regimes of Value With the New York City Department of Sanitation."

"What is the cognitive, practical, and cultural role of garbage in contemporary life?" the syllabus asks.

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