necklace made from orange crate found on Eleuthera Beach
My beach plastic friend and colleague Pam Longobardi, a Professor of Art at Georgia State University, has curated this gorgeous, inspired and heartbreaking digital show featuring a body of work from leading international artists who use plastic pollution (mainly of the oceans) by plastics like flip-flops, netting, rope, bottles, etc. in every color of the rainbow in their art. This digital stream was first exhibited at The Fifth International Marine Debris Conference in Hawai, and shows the nature of waste as seen with an eye for beauty and conceived with a gift of expression….
Her eyes, barely reaching over the edge of my desk, flash white with excitement. She seems transfixed by the colored beach plastic, silver rings and wire, nylon rope, ribbon, tools, earrings, pins and bracelets that are spread in front of her.
“yes,” I say, “I can.”
“You make beautiful with garbage?”, she asks again, like she doesn’t quite believe me.
“Would you like to make a bracelet?” I ask.
She looks at me and nods. Barely. Still not convinced.
I point at the bench with my tees and jewelry and the wall behind it where a long stretch of orange rope, found two days ago on the local beach, is stapled against the studio wall. Hooked on it are earrings, bracelets, necklaces long and short, from simple white crosses to clusters of multicolored pieces of beach plastic. Twenty-three in all.
I get up and take her by the hand.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
I think she whispers Latitia.
“See all these pieces, Latitia?”
She nods.
“They were made by girls just like you. How old are you?”
“Seven.”
“OK, so yesterday two schools came here, to this studio, girls and boys, some were seven and a few were older, like ten and one was eleven. And together we went to the beach and we all picked up the prettiest beach plastic, as much we could carry, and brought it back. Then I helped them make the jewelry, all these things here.”
She tiptoes and cranes her neck to see each piece. I pick her up, and carry her slowly along the wall.
“These earrings were made by a boy for his mother,” I explain, ” and this bracelet was done by a girl just like you.”
She squirms out of my arms and runs back to the work bench.
“I want to make a bracelet, now!” she calls back at me.
We pick the stretchy string, she wants pink, and I pass her the box of beach plastic with pre-drilled holes. I show her how to string them and I cut a heart from a piece of Barbie-pink beach plastic. When she is finished stringing I knot the ends, add the heart and slip it over her wrist. She holds her arm away and admires her work like she’s Holly Golightly at Tiffany’s, then she smiles up at me and says,
” I want to make earrings for my mother.”
I arrived in Abaco (North Eastern Bahamas) Thursday morning aboard (the most delicious shade of pale blue) twin-engine plane, courtesy of Schooner Bay, a new, green and self-sustainable village of which I will tell more later.
Schooner Bay private plane - love !
I had been flown in by Clint (of community development) who jokes that he met me on the internet. Clint, an avid beach plastic collector with a special attraction to the beach bobbles from girl’s elastic hair ties (“They find me, I don’t find them”) introduced me to well-known Bahamian artist Antonius Roberts (his gallery/workshop is in Nassau) who graciously invited me to use his Schooner Bay studio and teach local children where/how to collect beach plastic and turn it into art or jewelry. My wampum fee, with which Clint (a fly fisherman) lured me in, was a wealth of weathered beach plastic bobbles.
Antonius explained that his vision for the Schooner Bay studio is to build a far-reaching community through workshops by visiting artists and designers, and I’d be the debutant-artist-in-residence….
Saturday was the first ever Schooner Bay Spring Festival, with music, a bike rally, an arts and crafts market, a barbeque, open houses, and an exhibition of the work created the day before by the students from the All Age School at Sandy Point and the Cross Rocks School alongside my jewelry, tees and scarves (as the original inspiration pieces) and the powerful work, sculpture/furniture by Antonius that is made from trees, which he reclaims after they’ve been cut down to make way for land development.
I spent Thursday afternoon collecting Abaco beach plastic and setting up the studio for the kids.
At 9 am the next day about twenty boys and girls, two teachers and a principal filed into the studio and crowded around Antonius and I as we explained the project before we all piled into three cars and drove along the sandy coastal road till we reached the part where beach plastic collects in shameful mounds just over the dune.
my new beachcombing buddy
We talked about all the things that belong on the beach, like sand and shells and seaweed and dune grass, but not plastic.
I had no idea how I was going to coral the eager, lively mob into a focussed jewelry making class.
I was scared that I’d fail. That I wouldn’t be able to reach them and capture the ideas I wanted to pass on….
So I told them to sit on the floor and spread out their beach plastic. To find a favorite piece. Something that had color or shape, which was special.
I sat down on the floor.
Then I just started.
I started with the girl closest to me.
The next girl watched us and started cutting her own beach plastic. Then the following girl copied her. Three boys stood behind me. They watched and went to find pliers. At some point our creative resonance morphed and suddenly every kid was busy making a piece. They were calling back and forth for scissors, cutters, wire and string. Some stood around the table, others were splayed on the floor yet others sat on Antonius’ benches.
“Miss – Miss -MISS!!!”
Wire strung with clusters of beach plastic were dangled impatiently in front of my face, almost poking my eye.
“Help Miss. What next? What do I do now?”
The girls made things for themselves. Boys made things for their mothers, but the girls teased them asking whether it was really for their girlfriends…
Some copied my pieces exactly, some did their own thing, but no one sat around waiting for someone to tell her/him what to do.
The principal sat off to the side, she’d already finished one set of white earrings for herself and would make three more and a choker.
Coco, Clint’s assistant, was the allocated Dremel drill operator and kids lined up to have holes made in their beach plastic pieces.
Three o’clock came as a surprise, we’d all been swept into a timeless, creative vortex, and they all needed to finish “one more thing.”
“Please Miss. A pin, a bracelet, just this one earring.”
It took more effort to stop them and tidy up than anything else, but finally everyone stood in a neat row and one by one I made them hang their work on the orange rope. Reluctantly most of them gave up one piece for the art show the next day, but I’m sure quite a few pieces were tucked away to go straight home and be proudly shown-off.
Antonius whispered in my ear, “I think you’re changing some lives here.”
Maybe.
But what I do know is that together we Made Beautiful – a common thread that connects our lives and, like the beach plastic, will be forever…
Paper size 4” by 10” printed w. human face & the number $100 – value: $100
Painting on canvas, three squares yellow, pink and white – value: $73,000,000
100 stocks in company named Google, non tangible matter – value: $50,000
100 “carat” clear rock – value: $6,000,000
Printed yellow not green by mistake, weight 0.03 grams – value: $5,000,000
100 tons of beach plastic – value: worthless
1,000,000 tons of beach plastic – value: worthless
1,000,000,000,000 of beach plastic – value: worthless
Survival of our planet – value: ….?
I was compelled to write this after one comment on the Barneys blog about my tees said: “Puleeze! So much blah, blah, blah above. It’s garbage sewn on a t-shirt for $135.00! Only idiots will buy these!”
Are you thinking – Barbi is just too sensitive ?
I am. Its hard not to react to these negative comments. They are easy to dissect, but tough to take. It’s the knee jerk ignorance that bothers me and I want to explain.
I want to educate.
Like this comment on the Barneys FB site from Aaron Johnson in NYC:
“FYI, plastic is not eco-friendly!”
HELLOOOO!
Another knee JERK!
Like READ already!
Against my own advice I entered into a conversation with Aaron. I wanted to educate him, but he wanted to educate me. Like did I know about that garbage patch in the Pacific?
Aaron, I wrote, you and I should join forces and educate the world together…
I was glad to find out that even Chris Jordan gets defensive. Apparently some people accused him of faking his photographs of Albatross chicks who die from ocean plastic ingestion. He’s now making a movie to show the full process in REAL time from egg to death by plastic.
Get real people. Stop attacking each other over style, taste, envy of success/recognition and use information to bring about change because only when we stand together will we make the difference it takes to survive.
On Thursday I am going to Abaco, Bahamas. Courtesy of the Lindroth Corporation. They are building a new village called Schooner Bay in southern Abaco. Planned to be all green, using solar, wind and thermal energy, the houses will not be bigger than 900 sq. feet and affordable. There will be stores, a school and a 100 acres is dedicated farm land which will supply organic produce to the town. It’s someone’s dream project: To create an example, learn along the way so the findings can be used by others to help make our (homo sapiens) world sustainable.
This weekend they are gathering artists from all over for a seminar, art show and workshops with local school kids.
I will be teaching them how to make jewelry from beach plastic. Sell it locally to tourists, instead of the (plastic) crap that has BAHAMAS printed on it and is always Made in China.
I bristled. I bristled good. Like hackles all the way up. As I read the much anticipated Vogue article in postage size on my BB.
While walking through the Lynn University campus where I had just spoken to about 70 lethargic fashion merchandising students (I was told they were designers) but from the show of hands – I speak to the out-of-the-box part of brain – there appeared to be none. And all my “be unique follow your creative genius rara, jokes and digs” fell like dusty hat pins on the well-worn blue and crested gold carpet. Soundless. Echoless.
Oh well.
But out in the parking lot the combination of the dulled crowd and “Miami native” got my goat. Like got my goat by the balls (or teets?)
Was I not Dutch born? A former Paris model? A fashion designer from London? Former director of design @ Calvin Klein in NYC?
My ego was pretzelling out of control.
Then my sobering alter-ego said: “But weren’t you last seen as mother, wife and housefrau in Milford PA?” Huh? You think you are so hot? You should be so lucky! To be in Vogue! Huh? Who do you think you are?
(Do you have that who-do-you-think-you-are voice? I don’t think everyone has that voice, as in *Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen or Sarah Palin?)
I have a big ego and then this who-do-you-think-you-are-voice which makes me rather schizo, inside my head, and sometimes it comes out, and I lash out and then feel guilty, and confuse the hell out of everyone.
Like who’s that guilty nice bitch?
So, as I’m driving back to Miami, I’m arguing with myself. And, as usual, my ego loses and I listen to the alter one.
And I’m starting to like the idea of Miami artist. Like could I be an artist from Miami?
Go native…?
I’m used to shape shifting. I’ve had my incarnations from painfully shy school girl to cosmo model to young London designer to Senior Veepee to country mom of three…
And…
Wasn’t I looking for that new life? That new me? Was I not sick of feeling invisible as a mother?
So.
It took Rickie at Vogue to make me see. To open my eyes to more and endless possibilities of me.
It also took embellishing 750 tees with beach plastic to drive me almost insane.
thank you Vogue
I spent the last four months doing little else, as my husband, daughters, dog, friends and hairdresser will attest, but, while doing my manual labor, I had time to think.
About beach plastic. About plastic pollution, About its impact, about solutions, about re-purposing some of the plastic that is already out there. How we buy the product within; the laundry detergent, the water, the toothpaste, but do not feel we own its container. Nobody owns the container. Its not our problem. And therein lies the problem. We have come to treat plastic as a cheap, throw-away material. We forget that it was heralded as the substance that would stop us from plundering earth’s natural resources like wood, tortoise, ivory etc.
Remember Mr. Maguire to young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate?
“I have one word for you young man”
? (Dustin looking dumb)
PLASTICS!
That was forty years ago and now we’re sinking in the stuff and don’t know how to get rid of it!
Fuck Mr. Robinson and his plastics!
So now its my problem? I thought. As I slowed down to a place of understanding.
And this what I would say to young Dustin:
“Slow Down”
Stop.
Dustin, take ten minutes to really scroll through this (art by native artist?) and you will notice that every piece of beach plastic has a mysterious story. How did the barrette, the crate, the tooth brush, the toy soldier, the bead end up on that faraway Bahamian beach? Who owned it? What did they do with it and why did it get into the ocean? Did it come from a cruise ship? A seaside garbage dump, was it casually tossed away or accidentally lost?
And if you slow down enough to think then maybe you can stop just long enough to change the effect of disposable plastic and realize that you can reinvent plastic’s destiny by making it desirable and yes, maybe even beautiful.
black and white, ying and yang, ego and alter ego, there's always the other way
Interviews about the process, (thank you Viv and Christine) courtesy of Loomstate:
Bruce Weber at his Haiti show opening Iona at Design Miami opening
I’m sorry I did not get to it sooner, but if you were here you’d know that after one week of Art Basel Miami and all its trimmings from parties for Isabella Rosselini, Bruce Weber, Julian Schnabel, Sean Penn to art events in at least 320 different locations on the beach and midtown causing traffic that puts the Paris peripherique at 7am to shame, if you’d lived through all that you wouldn’t want revisit it, well, till the frenzy has not only worn off, but a sense of objective relativity has settled back in.
And also.
In the middle of it all Kiki got sick. On Thursday night, after a party I co-hosted for Water.org, and meeting Alastair at the Schnabel/Maybach/Sean Penn/Haiti (yes all in one breath) event, where I posed as gallery owner Angela Westwater, the one who had nabbed husband away from me for the #1/a-list/VIP studded event that evening (of my very civilized dinner for water.org to which husband did not come because Ms. Westwater’s offer was superior ). Are you getting the escalation of frenzy and stress? (I must remember, I tell myself, that when I’m 70+ and would like a handsome, younger, entertaining male on my arm to a #1/a-list/VIP studded event, I can invite any married man out there. No problem. And I will. I promise I will. Fuck it, I’ve spent a lifetime being perceived as a threat, when I am 70 and no longer perceived as a threat, I will take advantage and tempt younger men with my #1/a-list/VIP studded events).
speaking to 40 dinner guests @ water.org dinner about Arts for a Better World and my beach plastic
But I’m way off topic. That night, when I posed as Angela Westwater, because it turns out she’s way too A-list to pick up her name tag, and I turned up under her name it was assumed I was her and ended up with her tag, and passed Sean Penn in the corridor who threw me a look like he’d just blown up the headmaster’s car, but apparently I’d just missed his angry rant about Haiti and the lack of help which resulted in the sale of four Schnabel drawings raising over one million in a few minutes. Well, that night Kiki got sick. I had a few, not my fault, I was served quite a few, wines, scotches, champagnes. I was tired, bone tired. So I was sleeping like I really needed it.
Leila walked it at 3-ish, and said: “Kiki just threw up all over the floor.”
!
And.
For the first time in 14 years I said:
“I can’t deal with that right now.”
I turned over and went back to sleep.
Guess what? Husband got up! Maybe it was my total coolness about his date with Angela, but he got up and cleaned up the puke, and I experienced a very steep learning curve. Which is: I can say things like “I can’t deal with that right now,” and he’s there. Ready to jump in.
That was huge and has NOTHING to do with Art Basel Miami.
So.
My promise of blogging about my installation as it evolved, which named itself the Bottle Shack after it was built because it was not quite as slick as I had imagined but took, like all good art, a life of its own determined by material, circumstance, timing and mood, and ended up quite random and gorgeous and shacky and textured in a messy luminous kinda way, that promise was way more than I could live up to.
So this is it how it went:
It started with 2400 recycled bottles. 1000 from my local school bottle drive. 500 from Recyclable Planet a reverse vending machine where you drop off your soda/water bottles, and 1700 from South Eastern Recycling. Not all were usable. Some were really disgusting with like gum stuck on the outside, food stuffed inside, mold, grease, like you dont wanna know what people do to/with their water bottles.
We, the kids, their friends and I started by removing all the labels. In order of popularity: Dasani (tap water, hello!), Zephyrhills (from a natural spring near Tampa Florida, yum!), Publix spring water (paradox), Coca Cola, Sprite, Perrier, and so on.
While we peeled labels a wooden cube structure was built by the show’s carpenters. We strung bottles on wire with Lara, Gabriella, husband and Jennifer and hung them on this wooden cube which collapsed right away. Shit! Now I was behind schedule.
A new steel tube structure with sloppy horizontals was built next. I had to let go of my Dutch sense of perfect parallels and become more, lets say, island…?
By Sunday noon my “installation” was nowhere near installed.
It soon became a case of, if I’d know what it takes I’d never have done it. Those are the projects I like best because I go into some strange obsessive state of mind. I drilled holes in 2400 bottles. I strung them on wire and tied them. I had some help from Steven, a DASH fashion student, but was mostly alone at the cavernous hall till midnight. I crept through some time-worm-hole and by Tuesday morning I moved into my pop-up studio bottle shack and got ready for the opening party.
Which was that night and I posed in my perfect dress, in front of the shack with an American Indian Chief who had blessed the event…oh for global and good-cause culture clashing!
Tuesday night held many other opening parties. There was Design Miami, there was the Mark Newson Riva boat at the Standard, there was Nadja Swarowski’s dinner party at Soho House, there was Bruce Weber at MoCA and a dinner to follow. Huband went to most of them and took Iona (14) as his “date”. It was like Iona’s coming out night at Art Basel Miami 2010. She was chatted up by a married man who asked her if her guy was in the film business. “You mean my Dad?” she answered. He then told her he ‘d come to the dinner with his buddy, acting like he was single but the next day she saw him swinging his wife and baby in the hammock chairs outside Design Miami. Another steep learning curve in the Gordon household – men will say anything to get your attention….
But I wasn’t there. I was at my own opening with my team.
My first ever art opening in fact. I’ve done countless fashion shows and their after parties, I’ve given many of husband’s book launch parties but I’ve never had my own Art Opening! 100 sq. feet of me. Of what I wanted to express at that moment in time. In my time. In Miami’s time. In the world’s time. An opportunity to make a statement.
I took on plastic pollution.
I worked in my pop-up studio and showed how to turn catastrophe into beauty hoping to inspire. Hoping to educate.
My favorite was when kids poked their heads through the bottles and asked me all sorts of questions which usually started with, “what are you doing in there?”
I loved it when Michele Oka Doner breezed in like a luminous fairy, with a posse of Micky Wolfson’s glamorous women friends. They all came inside the shack, and then called out to Micky to join us. Luckily he declined. The shack was not built to hold visitors, it was built to be peeked into…
I joined Alastair and Iona at the Swarowski dinner. I flirted with Michael Tilson Thomas in the elevator, having no idea who he was other than rather cute. I saw my long time Dutch friend Li Edelkoort, we kissed and hugged like long lost loves knowing that the next time could be years from now. I embarrassed my dinner partner by making rather harmless comments about the other guests but when we parted he said I was his favorite new friend and he was the first to visit the Bottle Shack the next morning. A rather nasty writer called Derek to my right told me gleefully that Julie Gilhart had just been given the boot by Barneys.
Julie! My champion! The one who had introduced my beach plastic tees to the Barneys buyers! I e-mailed her when I got home and three days later she came to my Bottle Shack. My new favorite friend. The wonderful awesome Julie Gilhart! Not rattled at all by recent events, but inspired by its possibilities….
Julie and Barbie
Loomstate‘s Berrin and Vivienne came down to Miami too.
To see me and their tees inside the shack. They took millions of pix and did an interview movie and we had a long noisy lunch at Joeys. They placed a great story about the Bottle Shack in Ecouterre and posted a glowing report on their blog. Thank you Loomstate!
Sunday 5 pm it was over!
I had loved it. It felt like I was whole again. After several years of not knowing how to redefine myself in a way that was fulfilling and meant something in a modern global context, realizing I had grown out of being a traditional fashion designer and did not know exactly how to fill the void. My creative void that was like a gaping hole, which made me unhappy. Unsettled.
Once a year the art-circus comes to town, given legitimacy because the prestigious Art Basel, as in Basel Suisse, as in most uptight city/country in Europe, is behind it. I’m sure its been asked before, but surely Basel and Miami in the same breath are an oxymoron?
Anyway.
It all started with Art Miami and then Basel came and then everyone who is anyone in the art world followed. And then the design world… for catching some rays before settling into the long dark northern winter? Who knows. They, the art world, thought it was an excellent idea, and so now there are many, many satellite shows. One is called Scope, one called Pulse, one called Red Dot as in SOLD (so you cant have it), one called Nada, and so on….
Now, you may remember, last year husband and I were Art Basel Miami sluts, like we didn’t care, we hung with every and anyone, at every and any party.
BUT.
I must speak for myself when I say that, even though I enjoyed the unbearable lightness of it all, I wanted a bit more green, as in Green. Like some art that dealt with issues of the planet? Was that too much to ask? Like a bit less stuffed deer and doe and fawn, less Michael Jackson likenesses and a bit more Chris Jordan?
So. As Basel approached this year, and I sat assembling beach plastic tee after beach plastic tee, which gives me a lot of time to think since its manual labor, I thought to myself….. I should be at Basel… like Barbi does green, or blue, at Miami Art Basel week.
Well.
This year has been the “Year of Be Careful What You Ask For”, for me (after three years of getting shit I did not ask for). Like I wished to be in Barneys and they called me for 900 tees, driving me into beach plastic nervous breakdown. I think Barbi does Basel (yes that blog title I shall use next week), and low and behold, I get a call….
Sounds good doesn’t it? Sounds like it could be me, no? I mean who cares about art if its not for a better world?
Isn’t one definition of art that it gives the beholder a sense of hope, of seeing and experiencing a whole new emotion? A new paradigm, a moment of connection to the divine? The divine in another human being who somehow connects for a moment to what is true and enlightened and real? And isn’t the divine a moment of connection to our spiritual origins? And does nature not have something to do with this?
So. A better world through art sounds good to me. Thats the place I want to be.
Fuck the brands like Gagosian and Marlborough, aren’t they just like out of control Wall Street brokers?
OK. OK. I’ll shut up. Before I dig myself in too deep. No, I do not claim any superiority or connection to the divine. I just want to experience more. Like something I haven’t done before. I want to feel good not poor. I want to feel part of something not inferior. You know what I mean?
For now that’s all you get. I’m busy you know. very very busy.
But.
Stay tuned.
I will record all right here. From the day I start, Sunday, and build my amazing recycled installation and somehow move into it.
Here’s the name of the installation and an idea….of what’s to come:
Iona’s project for the weekend was to create an image with an unconventional material. Since our house is filled with enough beach plastic for 900 tees this material was kinda obvious.
So.
She created and image of Jon Kortajarena, her favorite male model, in blue beach plastic bits awaiting sewing onto tees…
Not a bad job. In fact if you had to write yourself the perfect, anything goes, job description wouldn’t it go something like this?
“I’d like to work on a beach. A perfect soft, pink sand beach somewhere in the Caribbean, but Hawaii or Tahiti would be fine too. This would be a quiet beach, one untouched by development. The water would be perfect shades of turquoise, going from pale to dark, and long waves roll in from the reefs a few miles off the coast. They crash at my feet, their sounds become like my heart beat, regular and reassuring. A light wind blows off the water, carrying a salty smell that sticks in my nostrils, still there later when I lie in bed listening to the frogs singing in the hurricane shutters. I will sleep well, because I’ve been outside all day with the sun on my back, bent over, scanning for material in the sand at the water’s edge, the ridge further up the beach caused by waves from hurricane Igor a few weeks ago, then I look along the dune, and between the dune’s grasses. My professional dress code is a bikini and a hat, even on casual Fridays. Sunscreen is my only mandatory regulation. Occasionally, when I get too warm or just when I feel like it, I wade into a particularily pretty pool and float, the waves rocking me like I was back in my mother’s womb. Curious fish surround me, a barracuda comes at me fast, but then veers away, just letting me know that he’s keeping his eyes on me. I look at the island from the water, the curve of the cove, the palm trees and casuarina’s, the cliffs, the occasional vacation home painted pink or yellow or green. Maybe my office is in one of those cottages….”
A few years ago, when I first walked the beaches of Eleuthera I became mesmerized by the bits of colorful beach plastic along the surf line, scattered and stuck in the sand. I now wonder if, at that point (I certainly wasn’t thinking job description), fate took my hand and softly whispered, here, look down, these colored bits should not be there, they are pernicious, like poison, but you can do something, this pollution may be a future for you, a place where all you have learned and who you are can come together with creativity and purpose…
But like in a romantic dream, reality has turned that corner where the above idyllic job description foreshadows a nightmare.
The melancholy I feel when I take my first steps in the sand this time, is not just the melancholy of my memories.
(Why can memories be so melancholy? A longing for our family time spent here, when the girls were too young to worry about what they might be missing, like Facebook, friends, and other artificial stimulation?)
It’s not just me, there’s melancholy in the air. I can feel it all over the island. Tourist season doesn’t start for another six weeks and there is hardly a car on the road. The small shops are deserted, their shelves half-empty. The locals ask me about the American economy.
” No jobs man, when America sneezes we catch a cold,” they tell me.
Sneezing as metaphor feels too exuberant to me, what they mean is that when America holds its breath in fear, they suffocate. But I don’t say this. I just nod and tell them I know what they mean. Times are hard everywhere, I say, but don’t tell them that maybe our golden age is gone forever.
My melancholy takes a turn towards despair, when I reach my favorite beach. The three mile long curving stretch of pink sand looks raw, windswept, covered in seaweed and caught in this seaweed is garbage. Plastic bottles, toothbrushes, crates, detergent containers, tops, cups, plates, knives, forks, spoons, barrettes, combs, beads, single sneakers, flip-flops and shoes in every size, pots, cones, hinges, signs, and I wonder, while the ancient Greeks, Romans, Incas, Indians, left us musea full of ancient pottery, jewelry and tools, will this legacy of our plastic culture, ever be displayed and admired in musea of the future?
museum worthy?
synergy?
mimic nature?
I peel off my backpack, spread my towel and sit down. I’m surrounded by plastic. I pick what I can reach and make a pile. I feel like I’m on the edge, one step away from overwhelmed. Is it too late? Have we lost control? The way I felt when watching the BP oil spilling uncontrolled. I teeter on giving up. Whatever I do, however much of this I pick up, clean up, sort and take home, it won’t make any difference.
Still I get up.
Still I pick up.
Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. White. Black. Grey. Pink. Orange. Funny, there’s never much purple.
Within an hour I have three bags full. I’m only half way along the beach when I run into Bob and Kathy.
“Not enough plastic here for 900 tees, hey?” Bob jokes.
I’m disoriented, like I came out of deep meditation too fast. What does he mean?
“You should have seen it just after Igor,” he says, “Its all been swept away now!”
“I don’t want to know,” I say. “There’s plenty here.”
Sometimes I find messages in the plastic:
Ironic ones to make me laugh…
if only...
Encouraging ones to keep me going…
One that reminds me to check my messages…
One to make sure I will fly home…
I spent two full eight-hour days on the beaches.
I gathered plenty but I wonder, how much is enough for 900 tees?
When I get back to my house on the cliff I sort it and clean off the sand, seaweed and algae by putting the beach plastic in a colander and using the hose of the outdoor shower.
Then I let it dry in the sun.
I’m alone with my harvest.
It looks pretty all laid out by color.
I’m no longer sad.
I feel at home and I’m happy….
for more of my beach plastic work over the past few years:
Beg Borrow and Steal Show at the Rubell Family Collection
Its over.
One week of feeding frenzy art exposure that had as little to do with the act of the individual expression of divine inspiration as a car show. Art Basel Miami, exhibited at the convention center and other locations around town, was all about the commodification of art. Like the stock market. Thousands of people milling around halls and halls, and booths and booths stuffed with art ready to take the gamble like they were looking for a lucrative stock portfolio.
An art overdose. An art oxymoron. OK. I know. You gettit. But let me tell you, among all that art and trend, there was hardly any Green. I’d been pitching the story of “what’s new in green art” to websites like Planet Green, Inhabitat and Treehugger, but phew I’m glad I got no bites because there was nothing to report. No thing. Nada. NADA was incidently the name of the edgier art show at the Deauville Hotel in North Beach, walking distance from my home, where the Beatles had played in the sixties and it hasn’t been renovated since. The stale baroque carpet and duck taped doors were supposedly cool and funky, and so all the cool and funky peole stayed there. But my favorite show was Pulse, at the old Ice factory, where that whacky halloween party took place a month ago, the best art, the best setting, the most together mix of people. Pulse’s old warehouse environment did not diminsh the art as much as the convention center (still reeking from last month’s wine show) did. Like Pulse had Maria Jose Arjona, the Pain Resistant performance artist who stood on blocks of ice spiked with large nails, which became exposed as the ice slowly melted. As a fakir she stood all day, blocking out pain, cold and the sight of drones of people ew-ing and ah-ing, watching, pointing and laughing. One woman in the audience said, “OH NO, her hair keeps falling across her eyes.” “Please,” I said, “thats the least of her problems. Like hypothermia and tetanus come to mind…?”
Is art shown at a trade-show still art? Or is it f-art? I mean there are trade shows for everything commercial. Cars, wine, porn,furniture and fashion all use trade shows as a means to connect to their markets. But isn’t art more? And best understood within the context of the artist’s life, mind, raw loft, rickety farmstead? Call me a romantic, but I want the entire art experience. I used to do trade shows myself. Every season, sometimes four times a year, in London when I had a collection called Giraf and then again in New York at the Javitz when I did a kids clothing line, called Baby Gordon. And I can tell you, with authority, that trade shows are like being cast into outer philistine space. They suck unless you’re really really hot. But boredom and not inspired creativity was modus operandus at Basel Miami where the art representatives escaped on their MACs, traveling to virtual worlds (Googling old boyfriends?) beyond their tiny cubicle and the bourgeois crowds.
Of course there were some really cool things with which I shall now debunk myself and I took lots of pictures for Alastair’s WSJ blog, best Basel Miami blog on the market, and when I picked the projects I liked to photograph I also picked my favorites, all of which are posted on Miami Street Style, and some here:
Barbi Does Miami 
