Turquoise Bag in a Tree The Bigger Picture, Manchester

Turquoise Bag in a Tree is an ongoing project which focuses on the environmental impact of plastic carrier bags. The project began 2003 and includes video, photography, events and interventions in public spaces. See below and follow the link to www.turquoisebaginatree.com to see this work on line.

In 2005 Turquoise Bag in a Tree was selected by Kate Taylor and Kathy Rae Huffman at Cornerhouse Manchester as one of four new commissions for BBC's The Bigger Picture in Exchange Square Manchester. I made a short video work filmed around Manchester which showed several windblown turquoise bags caught in trees in different locations and at different stages of decay. The slowly dissolving images suggest the passing of time. I also organized a number of events and interventions which took place in Exchange Square during the course of the commissions

Turquoise Bag in a Tree, video, The Bigger Picrure, Exchange Square, Manchester

Plastic Bag Amnesty, badges and canvas bags

Introduced just over twenty five years ago, we now consume between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags a year, many end up in landfill others as windblown bags in trees.
For the launch of The Bigger Picture Commissions, canvas bags were offered to those attending the preview and to passers by in a "Plastic Bag Amnesty" in the street. Collected and found turquoise bags are being added to "Rope" (see below). By using the canvas bag in replace of a plastic one when you shop, you have the capacity to eliminate thousands of plastic bags in its lifespan.

After reading the statistic, that if all the one trillion plastic bags annually manufactured worldwide were knotted together they would form a rope which could encircle the world 64 times, I decided to begin to make my own rope out of found and donated turquoise bags. I will continue to make this for as long as this project lasts.

Rope, donated plastic bags made to form a rope

Sign, custom made metal sign, outside Lamport Court

Plastic bags have become so embedded in our society that I believe some people dont notice them at all. The custom made signs which read "turquoise bag in a tree" are placed in trees with windblown turquoise bags caught in them. They are intended to highlight the existence of the bags.This one is outside Lamport Court, on Lamport Close in central Manchester.

I have made some oversized carrier bags which appear anonymously in public spaces from time to time. The giant bag appeared in and around Manchester during the The Bigger Picture commission and will feature in a new video work, The Shopper.

The Shopper is a video work in progress which explores the economics of the high street and asks the viewer to consider their own accumulaion of material goods in a lifetime of shopping.

Contemporary Art and The Contemporary Past:

Hilary Jack showing on The Bigger Picture

For an archeologist, Hilary Jack's Turquoise Bag in a Tree" showing on The Bigger Picture as commissioned by Cornehouse, Manchester, is unsettling. Jack photographs and films empty turquoise plastic carrier bags in urban situations. They have been blown into the branches of trees. People email digital photos of similar bags in similar trees to her through her website. These collections are juxtaposed with her own situated sculptural interventions: placing carefully-made or oversized bags in unusual public places, or showing an oversized video of a plastic bag in the wind in Exchange Square. The result is a compelling project that documents things that survive from the most recent past, and works with their presence in what archaeologists Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas have termed ‘contemporary past’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001). The work deals with quotidian waste that persists: by capturing moments and working on material objects it engages with archaeological matters, challenging the boundaries of our practices (Shanks 2005, Bradley et al 2004). It deals with Garbage, Consumerism and unexpected Enchantments.


Garbage
Notions of garbage, trash, junk are at the heart of this work: the excess of forgotten, discarded objects generated through the material practices of everyday life. These thin, translucent, empty bags appear to have outlived their usefulness, have been discarded as waste products. They are usually invisible or passed over, but Jack’s work documents their continued presence, their afterlives. We are surprised that they’re still here. They have not been pressed into landfills but, thrown away, have escaped on the breeze, filled and lifted up like kites, slipping from the fingers and spiraling above our heads. Superfluous, tattered and windblown, they cling to the branches of municipal trees like awkward, rustling windsocks. By engaging with garbage, the work acknowledges context – documenting through film where these scraps of carrier bag survive. Jack’s practice serves to document the shifting situations of these plain bags, and of the artist’s material engagements (cf Doherty 2004). Jack re-uses and recycles these hopeful scraps of plastic. She deals like Bill Rathje’s ‘Garbage Project’ at the Staten Island landfill, New York, with the ‘garbology’ of the modern world (Rathje and Murphy 1992). Here, artistic practice intersects with contemporary archaeology - scavenging, and creatively working with rubbish in its present contexts.

Consumerism
Meanwhile, there is a quiet activism to the project’s engagement with consumption and environmental concerns. Plastic carrier bags are commonplace, everyday items. Their textures, sounds, stretchability, how they pull heavily at our arms as we walk home, are all familiar. Yet here, they are presented as the messy remains of consumerism – empty containers for carrying things from one place to another, discarded en route. Jack reminds us that they will resist transformation and decay for hundreds of years. She raises the environmentalist critique of an unsustainable consumer culture by examining what survives from thousands of momentary purchases, ephemeral moments. This challenges the boundaries of what we define as refuse: the attitudes that Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, in their studies of changing domestic interiors, called ‘the aesthetics of waste’ (1992). The artist’s critical interventions have a delicate politics to them: one that critiques throwaway material culture, while at the same time recognizing its strange, affective powers.

Enchantments
We might imagine that modern, industrial processes of commodification have drained from the world of objects any sense of enchantment – leaving only homogenizing and deluding ‘culture industries’. Material culture studies increasingly challenge such perspectives through the notion of object agency. Ethnographers have explored the nature and limits of the power of objects (especially art objects) in social life (Gell 1998). Prehistorians working on ‘rubbish pits’ have recognized the aesthetics of many depositional practices in the past (Pollard 2001). In contemporary archaeology, and in Jack’s contemporary art, the ‘enchanting’ nature of objects is present not just in distant ethnographic or prehistoric situations, but all around us in the detritus of the contemporary world. Jack documents taphonomic accidents rather than purposeful assemblages – the stuff that remains. Her knotted rope of turquoise bags hanging from a sixth-floor balcony evokes contemporary fairy tales. In its archaeological encounters, Jack’s work invites us to extend complex intentionalities to nonhuman objects (not just to humans). The bags arrange themselves in trees. They dance in the wind. They withstand degradation. They resist fragmentation. This is what Jane Bennett (2001: 14) has called ‘enchanted materialism’: the refuse is animated, enchanting, ineffable. Unsettling and compelling for an archaeologist: a timely reminder of the common ground that is shared between contemporary art and contemporary archaeology: the contemporary past.

Dan Hicks
Archaeology & Anthropology
University of Bristol
http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/staff/hicks.html

© 2005 Dan Hicks

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References
Bennett, J. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics..Oxford:
Princeton University Press.
Bradley, A., V. Buchli, G. Fairclough, D. Hicks, J. Miller and J. Schofield (eds) 2004. Change and Creation: historic landscape characterization 1950-2000. http://www.changeandcreation.org/
Buchli, V. and G. Lucas 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.
Doherty, C. 2004. The New Situationists. In C. Doherty (ed.) Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog., pp. 7-13.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lupton, E. and J.A. Miller 1992. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Visual Arts Center.
Pollard, J. 2001. The Aesthetics of Depositional Practice. World Archaeology 33(2): 315-33.
Rathje, W. and C. Murphy 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. London: Harper Collins.
Shanks, M. 2005. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/traumwerk/index.php/Archaeologies%20of%20the%20contemporary%20past(accessed 14 march 2005) vj