Activism,  Asher Jay,  contemporary art,  Design,  Garbagea,  modern art,  Samuel Dodson

‘All the Pieces matter’, Garbagea’s place in the Blue Marble – An Interview with Asher Jay



As 2011 draws to a close, and the final year of the Mayan Calendar approaches (read into that what you will) what will our motto of the year be? What have we gleaned from events such as the Arab Spring; the Japanese Tsunami; The ‘Occupy’ Movements; the Eurozone crisis; riots in London and other UK cities; The Last Harry Potter Movie (shock horror) and an ever deepening economic and ecological crisis? 
               How we interpret these events, and the course of action we choose to take over the coming months and years is crucial. We stand at a crux. Recents events have shown that generations X Y and Z are not standing at the ‘End of History’ as some commentators have postulated; but rather in the midst of it. to sit back in apathy and let the world change around us could spell disaster. 
              Into the breach steps artist, designer, writer and activist Asher Jay. Educated at Parsons the New York School of Design and inspired by her Grandfather’s handwritten letters to her, she has created ‘Garbagea’ “a small but proud nation of bits and pieces, bottles and bags, caps and lids, containers and pads”. First launched at the Hudson Terrace’s Terrace Art Splatters event on November 12 2011, this is literally a whole new country. Creating “a safe and sublime sanctuary for abandoned, forlorn, wet, soiled, distressed and bi-polar (circulating in gyres between the poles) rubbish, because no one else has cared enough to address their pariah plight.” This creatively stunning creation was coined by Jay over a year ago. It is a great honour to bring you the following detailed interview, which charts the in’s and outs of the project from inception to reception, explores and examines the events of this year and discusses the implications of our way of life on the planet. 





Visit Garbagea: www.garbagea.com


One of the most tantalizing prospects of this project is its collective nature and the potential to unite people. What do you make of the collective nature of art as a whole?

Society is a difficult entity to address, as it is an aggregate alignment of self serving individuals, who band together only when such an arrangement proves more advantageous to each than the default mode of isolation, rather like partially differentiated prokaryotes in a colonial configuration. The only way to bring such a diverse portfolio of personalities under one umbrella is to embed them in a sensory matrix with semantics that translate past language and cultural barriers.

Art can be independently appreciated whilst being collectively fostered, so it seldom is an either or. Most creative ventures start off either inclusively or exclusively, but in the end they have to embrace both labels in order to be successfully assimilated by the people, place and period they elect to engage with. It was once an elusive, elitist medium, and now it has become a truly accessible commodity, both in its abstract and figurative forms. Everyone can plug into the art realm today, specifically online; you don’t even need to know anything about art in order to pass judgment on a piece of work and cause a ripple of positive/negative criticism around it. The digital age has facilitated an instantaneous connection between artist and audience, giving rise to a new kind of interaction between the two. It can be said that technology has evolved the way people perceive art and imbued it with the power to reach people farther and faster than ever before. I personally find this democratization of art inspiring, because it means as an artist your viewer base can encompass every individual on this planet, depending on the medium and venue you elect to express yourself in. To me this compounds accountability; an artist should be aware of the intent and impact of their message before broadcasting it. I create bearing in mind the unifying nature of art, because everything I produce addresses or campaigns for the collective. Garbagea’s mission is to unite people by sensitizing them to the environmental issues facing our blue marble as of now, in the hopes that an informed cooperative will want to institute a new paradigm of sustainable subsistence to pave the way to a holistic future.

Do you feel art has a duty to educate? Or is it simply a reflection on culture?

There have been many movements in the past that could challenge this idea of art, as a channel to educate the audience. Art is a vessel of communication whatever the message may be. Education is but one of the possible messages it may contain but by far not the only valid one. There are people who advocate “Art for art’s sake” whereas others would claim that art must communicate a message because of the relationship between the work and the viewer. I think the methodology and styles are not only a reflection of culture as we would conceive of it. In fact, the works that inspire me are a culmination of inspirations drawn from both the present and the past. Art does not have a duty to educate, but I believe that it is a powerful tool to use for educating the viewers.

You have founded such a detailed project, the depth and breadth of it is vast, founded using the tools of reality we live by today then subverting and parodying them. How much research was needed to flesh out such sections as commerce and economy?

One of the most rewarding things about founding your own country is the learning curve it sets you on. I had to research an array of topics on a daily basis to create each detail of Garbagea, for instance the crest of Garbagea required me to take lessons in Latin, understand the evolution of heraldic display, the use/abuse of archaic heraldry and symbolism as it pertains to crests and coatof arms. I also had to consider period typography and styles of rendering for state emblems. To flesh out sections such as commerce and economy I spent days watching relevant documentaries, looking up C-Span addresses on the matter and reading articles on what was working and failing in our current economic model. It is impossible to produce a parody on subjects one is not intimately acquainted with, so I spent an exhausting number of hours daily accumulating input from multiple sources so as to have an objective foundation from which I could spin a subversive bias. Garbagea gave me a multi-disciplinary education, and I am thoroughly grateful to her refuse expanse for the integrated curriculum she devised for me.




The Human race is growing exponentially, not just in numbers but also in terms of our desire to accumulate more capital, more material products and enhance industries; one forecasted figure is that if the global population and global energy consumption continues to rise by 1% a year for a hundred years, we’ll have a world population of 18 Billion and an energy consumption rate ten times higher than it is today. Quite simply, we don‟t have the resources to continue like this; in the mindset that the earth is a husk to be used until completely depleted. Perhaps we will find ourselves like the humans in the PIXAR film WALL-E, waiting for a broken Earth to begin again; so that we may return and start again?

This is the catch-22 of the common good, wherein having something that everyone can use implies that no one will take ownership, i.e. responsibility, for its misappropriation. This unsustainable practice of consuming earth’s finite commodities and resources without placing individual claims on it is perpetuating the ongoing denudation of natural wealth. Everyone is intent on passing the buck because no one wants to be remembered as the person who placed a period at the end of a species, so the boat that hauls in the last Blue Fin will pin it on the boat that caught the first Blue Fin whilst adding apathetically that they were not aware at the time that the Blue Fin they hooked and slaughtered was the last of its kind. Preposterously flawed end of the line reasoning; yet this is the kind of shrug-your-shoulder ops, global governments and committees in charge of enforcing quotas are exhibiting in the world today. IWC is thinking of reopening the commercial whaling sector, instead of strengthening the moratorium with a ban on whale slaughter under the banner of “research.” Whaling is the most heinous industry on the face of the planet, from the capture and callous slaughter of pods of graceful sentient dolphins in “The Cove” in Taiji, Japan to the harpooning of Minke and Finwhale populations off the coast of Iceland and Antarctica.



Impact inflation is poorly accounted for in our present economic system, and since the arithmetic of anthropogenic activities is not adjusted to accommodate the compounding debt we owe to the planet, we -humans- are ultimately doing ourselves in. I am profoundly amused by how conveniently humans elect out of being a part of earth’s biodiversity and blueprint, we think we can somehow escape its confines when push comes to shove and enjoy a fate different from all the other life forms supported by this microcosm. Earth is located within a vast supernova bubble; the emergence of life in this dead zone is the exception not the rule, so there is no planet B to get on the roster for. We might be deluded enough to believe that we can simply float around in space in a self contained vessel as seen in WALL-E, but we haven’t been able to take care of this one, what makes us think that we would somehow overcome the issues we are breeding on this spaceship aboard the new one? Maybe as Peter Ward suggests, we are just yet another self destructive species trying to pull off a mass extinction, an ambition we harbor in common with anaerobic bacteria.



I strongly recommend that everyone watches Mathis Wackernagel’s documentary (Click here) The Ecological Footprint. Everyone needs to know how to book keep in the world of today, it is the only way we are going to have a shot at the future on this blue marble. If earth’s pulse is extinguished, then that conclusion will enlist us as well.



You are based in New York – what do you make of the occupy movements?

Occupy Wall Street is a people powered movement that has its roots in New York but has since its humble origins proliferated as protests against greed, unemployment, income disparity and the corruption of commerce, globally. The campaign demands for a complete reformation of the financial services sector and presiding economic system, in its effort to address the excessive influence corporations have on government, specifically the financial services sector. The fact that this has empowered people in several other nations to stand up for the marginalized majority (the 99%) and stand by public interest is simply marvelous!

Money should not be above the law; i.e. the law should govern all relationships harbored between politicians and capital market puppeteers and all transactions should be 100% transparent. People holding public office positions should not be allowed to accept colossal donations from corporations. Companies that flout the rules should be held accountable for their actions, the denudation of the environment and they should be forced to pay reparations toward communities along affected areas, such as the Gulf. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a catastrophe of epic proportions and it is an enormous betrayal! According to The Big Fix – a Green Planet production- the American people are still being lied to, for it is still an ongoing issue, and the Maconda well is still spewing oil into the gulf. BP is poisoning American soil, American waters and several American communities and the government elected by the people give them a free pass to do so, because oil not democracy is running the nation. Occupy Wall Street is confronting this deterioration of ethics in America and the world.

The occupy movements are happening at a crucial time, when the need for a complete realignment of priorities is most pronounced, and the contemporary cost-blind-cash-centric paradigm is fast-failing globally.

Note to the readers: I recommend that everyone living in the tri-state area opt out of Con-Edison and transfer to Green Mountain Energy. Being sustainable is more expensive but only by a few dollars annually (4 -5%), and saying no to fossil fuels is the first and most important step, for we cannot reorient the system to focus on the long haul if we are short sighted.


Occupy Earth first and Wall Street will follow!




It’s the festive season, what do you make of the New York high street at this time of year?

I have to admit that I, like everyone else, succumb to the holiday season’s illusive ebullience, what’s not to love about the carolling, candy canes, red green and gold? Yet, being purely experiential it is transient in its ability to distance me from the many concerns of our time, serving merely as an anesthetic. We buy into the festive season so we can assuage the pain caused by the splinter realities of our time which continue to churn beneath the cheer without respite. My constant awareness of the larger picture makes it rather impossible for me to enjoy the pretention whole heartedly. Here we are drinking eggnog, celebrating an increasingly commercial holiday and there they are, Japanese fisherman setting off to inhumanely butcher another family of dolphins, BP‟s crew heading out with another barrel of COREXIT to dump into the gulf, French fishing boats off to legally purse seine a school of juvenile Blue Fin tuna in the Mediterranean, Gladstone Ports Corporation’s employees dredging in the Great Barrier Reef…

As a species we monopolize the entire natural world and we are all about taking at this point, which means we do not understand the act of ‘giving’ all year long, so I doubt we grasp the concept much at all during Christmas. Christmas, like most other commemorative occasions, is about community not consumerism, the fact that we find expression mostly through the latter specifically at the cost of the former taints the entire tradition for me, and renders it another manipulative monetary enterprise.




Where did you find the cutting and ironic humor the project exhibits?


Deep within my cranial recesses! I am quirky, morbid and eccentric. I invariably use my crayons and neurons to render beyond the lines, and Garbagea is the by-product of such lateral thinking and creative rebellion. People invest more time to learn about topics that would not customarily rouse their curiosity when said topics are plugged into an unconventional framework. Garbagea is an educational spectacle. Using exaggerated indifference as a vehicle for humor the platform manipulates the default wiring of the jaded and cynical and reveals the hard truths presently confronting our planet to them in an atypical way.




The many facets of our Western lives – for example, Restaurant and Cocktail bar menus – have been tapped into, bringing the message to the realities of our day to day lives. People parody what they know, love and hate, which facets of Western culture would you – given the chance – keep in a heartbeat, or destroy in a moment?

I would not be so presumptuous as to discard or retain any part of Western culture as such aspects of a civilization merely exemplify basic human traits on a multicellular scale. This is why I engineer each project to address the behavioral patterns and cognitive abilities of the individuals that comprise the collective, instigating them to question blind conformity and habituated actions.     



Can you talk us through the processes involved in making this vision (for Garbagea) a reality? 

When I first learned about the plastic gyres, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the trash vortexes polluting the oceans. Until then, I had not been aware of the extent to which our current consumption patterns were impacting marine ecosystems and the myriad life forms they supported. It was when I came face to face with the devastating effects of post consumer waste on oceanic flora and fauna that I truly internalized the struggles embraced by wildlife each day to overcome what man has done to their habitats.


Garbagea came to me in installments, over a trash-centric year that clocked by in cleanup efforts that I had proposed and volunteered for in various countries. Over time people began paying attention to me and what I was saying, which is when it occurred to me that in order to incite change one has to take responsibility first. Garbagea is my way of taking responsibility for all the waste in this world, rendering refuse a tangible concern.  In placing a claim I have made it my problem, and in creatively contributing to or collaborating with Garbagea, yet others make it their problem too. When a problem is owned it can be solved. 




Can you comment on Jonathan Haggard (Designer of the Garbagean Tumblr site theme). In reference to his works ‘F*ck Yeah, Space!’ and ‘F*ck Yeah, Earth!’ do you feel such pieces ‘balance’ Garbagea’s message by showing exactly what is at stake? Should we continue on our current path? What do you make of his other works?

Jonathan Haggard is explicit, inclusive and succinctly expresses himself without remorse; he exhibits all the intrepidity of a true artist, and all the conceptual clarity of a graphic designer, which makes him an invaluable asset to contemporary art and the conservation of nature. I love Johnathan Haggard‟s F*ck Yeah, Earth and F*ck Yeah, Space platforms! They celebrate earth and space and imbue viewers with a sense of awe toward both the known and the unknown, which is the Gregory Colbert (the genius behind Ashes and Snow) way of lending a voice; I shaped Garbagea to approach the natural world from a blatantly anthropocentric angle so as to highlight the flip side of the same coin. I think both sides of the story need to be told and heard, as both are equally valid.

Your piece, ‘A web spun of black’; the malicious shadowed silhouettes here are terrifyingly ominous, how do we get out of the trap we have spun ourselves? How do we convey this plan of action to those who are not already of this creed?

At the end of the day, it is moot to preach to the choir. It is important to mobilize people who wouldn‟t ordinarily give a moment of their day to conserve anything beside cash, to care about something bigger than their individual microcosms. The most effective way of spurring change is to embody the transformation you yearn to see in the world. Gandhi was definitely onto something with that train of thought. You cannot make people do things that you yourself are unwilling to do. I have made a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes in the past year and a half, which has earned me respect from my peers, who now follow my lead and stand by the initiatives I support. I believe in two credos: 1. Think big but start small. 2. Plan globally, enact locally.

With the rise of popular social networks, there seems to have been a rise – as Film Maker Adam Curtis suggests – in repetition; “the creation of communities of solipsists, interpassive networks of like-minds who confirm, rather than challenge, each others‟ assumptions and prejudices. Instead of having to confront other points of view in a contested space, these communities retreat to closed circuits ; locking themselves off from new thought. Then again, it’s impossible to hide how useful these sites are; what’s your opinion on them? And do you feel that they help facilitate promotion of art and projects such as Garbagea or do they stifle them?

I think the real challenge is to birth projects that are broad scope enough to encompass as many disparate areas of interest as possible, such that the forum appeals to cliques, and cross sections alike. E.O. Wilson’s “Creation- an Appeal to Save Life on Earth‟ is a splendid example of this, and I’ll admit the tome reads effortlessly. E.O. calls upon both religious and academic factions to coalesce under the banner of ‘reality’ in an effort to save biodiversity, because people need not see eye to eye on everything in order to effectively address an urgent crisis. On a similar note Garbagea offers a meeting point for demographics that would not normally converge to come together and contribute to a critical cause. At its core Garbagea is a non-commercial, inclusive online dais and pop-up store dialogue with mass appeal engineered into its building blocks through wit, sarcasm and clever artistic renditions of a horrifying reality assailing planet earth today. To answer your question, I do not think it is about how closed circuit communities can aid or inhibit the growth of a venture such as Garbagea but about how Garbagea can pander to their curiosity and use that connection to bait them in to caring about the larger picture.

 

The mythological stories based around these new ‘gods’ of the country. Does the mythological element here tap into the mindset that sees such things as global warming and waste simply annoyances contrived by left-wing media?

Garbagea’s dark lords were certainly concocted in an effort to mock minds that are ignorant enough to brand pressing actualities of the zeitgeist such as ‘global-warming’ and ‘waste’ as mere annoyances contrived by left wing media. The degrees of separation from reality that would allow a person, in this day and age, to say something that ill informed would also qualify them for institutionalization.

There’s a fantastic theory book by Fishcher, ‘Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?’ Somehow a mindset has been created which says there is only one viable course ahead; the one we are currently on, yet despite the fact that there are alternatives; especially to pollution and waste, none seem to have caught the public mind. Why?

Well the public knows only what they are told by mainstream media, which is not as unbiased as the public would like to believe. Plus we have the big oil oligarchy that is currently running “western democracy” crushing patents to alternative energy systems/technologies and bribing elected public officials to veto bills that run in favor of alternatives, so of course such sustainable recourses have not caught the public mind. I think everyone should watch the film “Big Fix” by Josh and Rebecca Tickell, it is a compelling look at how the current economic blueprint is debilitating communities across America (and the world) through the microcosm of the Gulf Oil Spill.


Options and solutions are not going to see the light of day until people toss out the existing framework in its entirety and begin construction on a whole new model, now with any luck Occupy Wall Street will incite just such a transformation. I am so grateful to see so many enterprising, empowered individuals amalgamate under the Occupy banner to acknowledge and supplant a failing system.


PBS shot an incredible television documentary called “Fixing the Future” that plots out a new, non-Wall Street way of subsistence, one that is already taking seed in Bellingham Washington, Lummi Island and Fargo. David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy underscores that by anchoring the private sector in public interest, we can democratize ownership and root it in community in ways that can scale sustainably. It is imperative that we reconnect broken ties between producers and end consumers, investors and industry, because it is the missing links that have allowed for the steady deterioration in the quality of life, the dilution of biodiversity and the liquidation of natural capital, globally. “Fixing the Future” portrays the success enjoyed by several communities that have reoriented their financial markets to unconditionally encompass the health of the environment fostering them and to focus on the long haul by adopting local living economies that are emphatic about livelihoods and income stability for the collective.


“The New defines itself in response to what is already established. The established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new” (Fischer). What would be your ideal ‘new’? And how far is your work a direct response to what is already established?


With the world population exceeding 7 billion, it is nearly impossible to say that an idea I deem new would not have been thought of in some permutation before or during my time. No thought in and of itself is new but the manner in which you draw connections between them can be. My ‘new’ is anchored in the way I perceive the world, which is unique to my eyes and senses. My experiences and identity furnish me with an inimitable framework, which sets my internal associations, method of execution and aesthetic sensibility apart from other contemporaries. The more I imbibe the more canvas I am able to cover, for my compositions are only as big as my life is at those given moments of creation. My work is not a direct response to the work that is already out there though it may pay homage to some of my muses. It is only natural for a person viewing an artwork of mine to compare it against the archive of knowns they have been previously exposed to, but as an artist, I can attest that my body of work comes from my own observations and travels.


Where are we heading?


This question scares me, mostly because no one has the answer to it, not elected officials, not religious leaders, not economists and certainly not me. In fact I find that every time someone has attempted to answer this it has repeatedly been off mark and led to a “black swan*” debacle, like the subprime mortgage crash, the September 11 attacks, or the resurgence of the whaling industry under the banner of research. In arrogantly assuming we can cast an exclusive trajectory for ourselves at the cost of biodiversity and natural resources we are merely expediting the process of our own decline.

I am constantly amazed by the expanse of unknown that cocoons my pocket-sized existence, which on an evolutionary scale is a humbling time speck. Most people fail to cognize the larger picture. I think the best thing people can do for the planet, apart from sterilization, is to grow more aware of how stunted anthropocentric views are. One of the prerequisites of sustainability is modesty; if we cultivate a healthy dose of that we could have a shot at a collective future.
Last but not least, as a design professional I know that the process of arriving at a solution kick-starts with a well conceived question, and as a species we humans have not only been asking questions that are incomplete but ones that we already know the answers to, which is a profoundly shallow paddling pool of obsolete data. So where are we heading? Hopefully we will chart a course from oblivious to conscious, because otherwise our current compass ruse is going to guide us right into a post apocalyptic nightmare, a reality hallmarked by acrid skies, toxic seas and torched terrain.
*The ‘Black Swan theory’ was postulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his tome the ‘Black Swan’ which deliberates our inability to know the answer to this very question –where are we heading?- on account of the non-computable nature of consequential rare variables from the unexpected unknown. Taleb laments that it is invariably these unanticipated events that contour the face of terrestrial history.



I urge all readers to explore for themselves the plastic gyres of Garbagea at http://www.garbagea.com/
And  http://garbagea.tumblr.com/










T.O.O.K.s (Trash Objects Offer Kinship) by Asher Jay, constructed from found objects, a.k.a. litter


“Be the change you want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
“Light up the Darkness” – Bob Marley

All Images Copyright to ©Asher Jay 2011 www.asherjay.comhttp://www.garbagea.com/

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