FREE COMPOST, now showing

This spring, I’m officially “an artist.”

I have my first ever gallery show, at a small space called Probably Gallery in northeast Los Angeles. It opened on April 5 and will be running for the next few months. Viewings are by appointment only, you can DM the gallery if you’re in the area and would like to come see it. (Or respond to me here, I’ll help you.)

My piece is a “sculpture” called FREE COMPOST that consists, simply, of a massive pile of compost I heaped into the gallery, along with some brown paper sandwich bags Visitors are invited to use their hands to scoop compost into the bags, which they can then take home with them.

I know this is a bit cheeky of me—it’s technically just doing what I always doing, but putting a big perimeter around it called “art”—but I don’t care. The opening was swarmed with people who took the bags of compost, altering and smoothing the pile’s unruly cascade as they did. They ran their hands through it, smelled it…a few people even fully climbed into it, and several kids went hunting for worms. (These had accumulated in the middle bottom.)

Dirt was tracked all over the gallery and the walls got smudged, but the gallery owners were game, and for that I am grateful. I have been approached by a number of artistic institutions over the years, all who are curious about using or making compost in some creative way, but these endeavors are always, absolutely always invariably shot done once they reach someone high enough in the ranks to decide they’re grossed out by it. (It’s some kind of law - the higher up you go in an organization, the more disgusted a person is likely to be at the thought of ‘compost.’)

My friend David and I once built a compost out of materials we sourced from within Vielmetter Gallery (coffee grounds, price lists, plant clippings), but someone didn’t want it displayed in the actual white cube, so we put it in David’s garden instead. I also once composted fragments of the Berlin Wall for the Wende Museum, again with David, but the landscaper was fussy about the idea of displaying the finished pile on the grounds, so that one went in the garden, too. When we re-staged the Vielmetter compost at the invitation of a different institution, we got booted out of the main hall about twelve hours before opening. It worked out, though, because the project looked stunning set up in the court yard, instead.

Another friend told me that he proposed using dirt as part of an installation at a gallery, and they told him it would be okay as long as he “sanitized” it first. For me, this is akin to the producers on Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” wanting him to “train a great white shark” after the mechanical model chronically malfunctioned. The totality of misunderstanding simply defies comprehension. I mean, really these are only a few of about a hundred anecdotes I’ve collected regarding how squeamish we all can be about dirt.

Probably Gallery is the first time ever, and I mean ever, a pair of folks have simply said: “Have at it.”

I’m gallery sitting today, and the compost has been sitting for a week, which means it’s turned the small space into a veritable greenhouse, everything is wet and hot and smells deeply of damp, rich earth, and dozens of tiny seedlings have begun pushing through the pile’s surface.

As a result, I’m modifying the project, and it’s now called FREE SEEDLINGS. I’ve brought 20 small plastic containers, repurposed from the garden, and guests will be invited to scoop a sprout and take it home with them.

Please come and take one.