Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum, The Hammer Museum / Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Made in LA 2023

Made in L.A. 2023, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive at the Hammer Museum

“The first thing that I pulled out of Dylan’s garbage was a half-finished letter written by Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash…”Holy Moley, “ I said, “Ann, this is no ordinary garbage-can, this is a gold mine!” Thus at that moment the clandestine trade craft of non-governmental garbology was founded.” –A.J. Weberman, My Life in Garbology

In the coming months, under the aegis of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s participation in Made in L.A. 2023 at the Hammer Museum, I’ll be exhibiting two new projects–one archival and one musical–entitled Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.

The phrase appears in Chapter 14 of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (1981), a semi-autobiographical novel about human contact with a “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” of extraterrestrial origin. Dick, by this time a full-blown Gnostic was obsessed with (and inhabitant of) a particular depth of American experience that he referred to as the trash stratum. He used the term to describe popular culture, especially television, but also science fiction, the genre that both sustained and constrained him.

The archival project stems from a years-long process of collecting bits of trash along the walk from home on the edge of Elysian Park to my studio inside Los Angeles Contemporary Archive in Chinatown. The process began in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and continues to the present day. I exhibited some of this material in the 2021 exhibition All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by Michael Slenske at domicile (n.) in L.A. At the time of that exhibition I wrote:…along Stadium Way, I encountered a unique, evolving ecosystem: scattered amongst the waste spaces bordering Dodger Stadium and the park were small objects thrown from passing cars or dropped by walkers or runners and small “shrines” assembled from detritus by one or more unknown local “shamans”. I increasingly had the sense that I was walking through a low intensity hex war at the level of the trash stratum.

I began collecting the best trash and bringing it back to the studio: a small broken disco ball, a business card inscribed with the image of a skull wearing a pharaoh’s crown. With the “shrines” I was more cautious, awaiting their natural dissolution and then “trading” objects: bottle for bottle, image for image…

Per Jack Smith in The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez: “No affection can remain gratuitous.” The process of collecting, documenting, and archiving these objects–at first sporadic and perfunctory–took on a life of its own, metastasizing into a long-term archival project.

The musical work, also called Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum, results from a years-long fascination with / hatred of “commercial music”. The summer after graduating high school, before leaving Las Vegas to attend Calarts, I worked in a stock room where Muzak poured incessantly from small speakers in the ceiling–an endless stream of poor instrumental approximations of popular hits, arranged by sadists, played by disinterested, overly-slick studio musicians.

Muzak’s Stimulus Progression methodology was summarized in their literature as a “process of programming music at faster tempos to counteract the tendency of the human mind and body to slow down during the late morning and mid-afternoon.” Their weirdly personalized Taylorist slogan:“Muzak While You Work for Increased Efficiency.” Andy Warhol said: “I like anything on Muzak — it’s so listenable. They should have it on MTV.

Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum, 2-channel sound, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive