Cumulative Garbage Sculpture

Consider the yogurt you ate in 2003. That yogurt tub is sitting in a landfill, thinking of you. How about the plastic grommets from the sneakers you threw out in 1989? They are a little deeper, but there too.

It is cliched that we make a lot of garbage. I propose that it be collected for one or more individuals and kept separate. At the end of the year, anthropoid sculptures would be made of the individuals using the garbage. These would be as big as necessary to accomodate all the garbage. There would be 1 year, 5 year, 10 year and 20 year versions.

In the (reluctantly acknowledged) interest of practicality and the grant cycle, one might mock up suitable sized sculpture with chicken wire and then affix the garbage to the outside. Sanitized garbage might be used because poop diapers and the like might stink up the museum. One could then compare garbage avatars from various nations to see a representation of how much trash we make.

I am OK with sanitized garbage, and perhaps not actually making the sculpture out of garbage really generated by one individual (though that would be the conceit). But one cannot use the same trash from the same suburban landfill for all the sculptures. People must be depicted with trash from their locale. The Bangladeshi family must be made of authentic Bangladeshi trash. Likewise, should one venture to depict an Amercan or other Westerner from previous era, the trash should be era-appropriate.