Biomortar

Ephemerata Garden’s back wall mosaic grotto is starting to crumble, and I can’t find any mortar. We used up the last of the half-ton I bought three years ago from a bankrupt construction company to repair the Garbage Gyre mosaic and patch up the greenhouse bottle wall. Sinking foundation on the grotto’s left side is causing the façade to crack, and a Chinaberry seedling that got in the crack on the alley side of the wall is speeding the process.

Given cement scarcity since last year, I’ve been making do by bolting parts of the façade to the substrate. Limestone and clay mining operations are at a slow dig with their limited solar energy rations, and the coal kilns used in the calcination process work within strict carbon emission regulations. All available cement is first allocated to government agencies for infrastructure repair, and to public sector institutions like hospitals and schools.

In Philadelphia, the Magic Gardens’ caretakers are experimenting with bacterial biocement using castoff concrete chunks pulverized with sledgehammers. Following Ginger Dosier’s method,* they mix the powder with Bacillus pasteurii and urine to make a very slow setting mortar suitable for repair work. The nonprofit Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, instituted in 2002 in response to the art environment’s threatened demolition, preserves Isaiah Zagar’s mural works around South Street and organizes events focused on folk and self-taught art.

I was encroaching on somebody else’s land and we had to buy it. The owner came back and wanted to sell it. He didn’t care about the land, just about the money, so we paid him three hundred thousand – where you gonna get that kind of money? So Lawyers for the Arts made me into a nonprofit organization and raised the money. It became a wonderful thing for me. It scares the shit outta me too, now I got some kind of responsibility. We’ve been very lucky about code. [When Zagar started Magic Gardens] the area was a derelict area so there wasn’t a big problem. But now, nobody could do anything now. It would be impossible to do now. He bought it for 70K and sold for 300K in ten years – maybe because of art. Maybe art has that power.

When I first talked with Zagar by phone a dozen years ago, he was busy repairing one of his mosaics with a volunteer. He had become an ant at the center of the hectic nonprofit nest.

Everything is vulnerable to the weather. Any kind of thing like this has got to be eventually taken over by an entity to preserve it. To actually pay people to preserve it. Preservation is the key – but you can’t always do this. Vandalism is a big thing. People will feel that what you’re doing is ungodly. “Squash it, kill it, kill it!” But I’ve certainly been very lucky… In the nonprofit there are administrators, I have an executive director, someone for education, for outreach, a daily manager, garden guides, people who tell my story to 35-40 people on a tour. It’s very mysterious to an artist who is still living. 

Art is a collaborative social-economic venture that can inflate an excess nonprofit value within a rarified atmosphere assembled by aesthetic practices themselves. Aesthetics and cement can hold together bits of broken ceramics, cast-off glass bottles, bent bike wheels, sensations of unity, and derelict urban areas, but these borderless compositions are materially fragile and in a sense require undervalue or abandonment to firm up. Some other form of wealth rises up out of conditions of poverty or making do. Preserving fragile art environments often depends on unpaid volunteer labor at the same time it makes jobs for a few administrators and skilled restoration workers. But when cement prices inflate, mosaics struggle to take shape or stay in good shape. Philadelphia's seasonal heating and freezing has its toll on the Magic Gardens' mortar. And there are vandals who kill someone else's sense of beauty for cruel fun or righteousness.

This mortality makes evident that mosaics, junkitecture, and other urban forms in the City of Living Garbage only survive through aesthetic behavior or the relationship of care and repair between artistic characters and landscape patches. Agencies and institutions are epiphenomena that mysteriously redistribute the behaviors, supplies and moneys, and affective attachments required for preservation; their support and continuity is itself vulnerable. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pledged close to a half million dollars in restoration funds (while the Watts Towers, another self-taught architectural art environment on the National Historic Register with the Bottle Village, received nine hundred thousand). FEMA responded to controversies surrounding the worth of the Bottle Village, including a petition to block the funds introduced by City Councilwoman Sandi Webb, by rescinding the restoration money, claiming that it was inappropriate as the Bottle Village had not been regularly open to the public for years.** Webb was joined by Representative Elton Gallegly in the call to bulldoze the Bottle Village, “an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since … How in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants” when so many real world problems need money thrown their way?***

Grandma Prisbrey wanted and needed her luminous Bottle Village where she lived with her collection of 17,000 pencils. Volunteers with the nonprofit Preserve Bottle Village continue to give occasional tours, organize events like weeding parties, and rally small injections of money from individuals and private foundations. Their mode of survival is more about preserving Bottle Village by asking people to help physically create it, more than by donating cash. In 2010, Disneyland offered support by including the Bottle Village in its “Give-a-Day, Get-a-Day” program whereby volunteers earned a free day at the theme park by donating a day of work to a nonprofit, including Prisbrey’s DIYsneyland. A group from the Anthropologie store took a tour as part of its “Inspiration Day” for drumming up design ideas. By 2016, the Bottle Village had still not received enough funding for a major restoration, and Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens stepped in to help with preservation efforts—sixty years after Grandma Prisbrey started building. By 2020 masons and mosaicists had repaired the remaining 14 structures, just in time for the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that hit, like the weaker 6.7 magnitude quake in 1994, only eight miles form Bottle Village. Rebuilding is still underway, but five of the buildings are large piles of glass shards and masonry that the engineering assessment deemed “beyond repair.”

To Isaiah Zagar, the five destroyed structures are mosaic shards for a new composition. His team plans to pulverize Prisbrey’s old hand-mixed mortar to use as the grit for biobricks. The broken glass from bottles dating back to the 50s and 60s**** will be used to mosaic the bricks’ outer sides, and a new building will be constructed out of the resulting modules. They are learning to cultivate their own B. pasteurii colonies to make the restoration project more independent of money; the other main ingredients are our everyday urine stream and worthless cement chunks like highways after earthquakes. Zagar talks about how things like mosaics, mushrooms, and  B. pasteurii spread as spores with roots in particular cultural landscapes, something that's "in the air, they spread in the air ... For the mural projects in Mexico, the roots are all in the Renaissance. Diego Rivera – he loved to see the murals and mosaics in the churches. He dug it. ‘I can do this thing, I can do it. I can give it a twist,’ and then others followed him." The roots of preservation and reconstruction are more ecological, with the model of a landscape that never stops making itself out of its own life forms. The roots are also biotechnical, and artists and self-taught biologists are saying "I can do this thing" and giving their own twist on scientific bioengineering.

If you have any B. pasteurii or know how to culture them, please get in touch so we can repair Ephemerata Garden’s back grotto. The Cathedra of Junk could also put the biocement technique to work in its constantly growing amoeba of mortar, bottles, and junk.

2024

*Mike Larson, "Professor Uses Bacteria to Make Eco-friendly Bricks,"  Engineering News-Record online, July 7, 2010, http://enr.construction.com/products/materials/2010/0707-EcoFriendlyBricks.asp 

**FEMA eventually dedicates close to 20K for an architectural engineering assessment for rebuilding and preservation. 

 *** Quoted in Patricia Leigh Brown, “Reading the Message in the Bottles, New York Times, February 6, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/06/garden/reading-the-message-in-the-bottles.html
****See wonderful letter to Grandma about bottles at http://www.myspace.com/bottlevillage/blog: "Nowadays, most of the bottles are plastic and they are EVERYWHERE! ... We have these big gray 'Recycle Cans' and I know you'd get arrested for messing around with those cans... Well Grandma, all that stuff and all those bottles you got from the dump; it's hard to find today, except maybe on eBay."

Busybody

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.

Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.

When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.

Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.

Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.

Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.

Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.

The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.

*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.

a guidebook to Ephemerata Gardens

“The City of Living Garbage” is a guidebook to my backyard, a holographic catalogue of a whole city/world crammed into a quarter-acre of land called Ephemerata Gardens. Parts of other Austin yards are grafted into Ephemerata Gardens through flows of things – windows, doll heads, morning glory – and practices – building junkitecture, cultivating tiny wetlands, excavating rain catches, making soil. Each piece of living garbage takes us to another site in Austin, vernacular art environments around the US, or global sites that practice informal accumulation and recycling of urban waste. Each thing comes into being through trash, decay, or pollution, transformed into unanticipated life forms and landscape patches. Each is sustained by the creative labor of human and nonhuman agents in long-term relationships of mutual education and full-bodied sensory labor. Together they make habitats that thrive on urban waste, a utopian resistance to the ecological apocalypticism that permeates global climate change and other environmental discourses. They are post-apocalyptic in that they start off with the substances of the trashed world and end up in relationships of care and repair.

Like Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Gardens of mosaics on South Street in Philadelphia, the City of Living Garbage inhabits a dream of junk art environments seeping out of their backyard confinement and taking over the city. Zagar moved to South Street in 1968 and began what became a lifelong project to mosaic everything--first walls of alleys, then entire buildings. Zagar stockpiled ceramic shards of all kinds, then composes mosaics out of the beautiful fragments. Each fragment resolves into a busy composition at the scale of the mosaic, and then up a scale to the city itself – a mosaic of mosaics. Zagar wrote on some of the tiles, and signs pop out of swirling fragments: “art is the center of the real world,” names of jazz musicians or the builders of art environments, and prophetically, "All wars ended on planet earth 2038." At Zagar’s Magic Gardens, a vacant lot transformed into a multilevel labyrinth, mosaic stairs take you down into an underworld of body parts and mirrors dancing across surfaces. Zagar spoke of art like a quack ecologist: “No one can predict where art will emerge. It’s like a mushroom, with roots that extend for miles and miles underground, unseen. If the climactic conditions are right, the fruit will emerge.” It might emerge without recognition as aesthetic, in the sculptures of monk parrot nests, jerry-rigged home plumbing, or the decompositions of compost heaps.

Here, art is an aspect of ecology, and vice versa. Rather than being the special purview of trained people, aesthetics are something that just happen, infusing places with patterns and possibilities of inhabitation. Aesthetic improvisations strive to make a living and a home for their practitioners. Sometimes they break codes and magically cross categories and borders, becoming something else. They transform thermodynamic matter in mysterious ways, into rhythms of color or flashes of sounds.  Wind in leaves and falling water compose a different-feeling atmosphere than the sounds of desertification or traffic. The patina of aging bottle walls feels different than rusty galvanized sheet metal. We may not know exactly what bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and macroinvertebrates enact the art of composting, but the collective works its magic, offering up the conditions in which the intensity of gleaming purple eggplant and bright yellow crookneck squash might dot the garden.

Seasonal colors amplify time or mortality; they enter us through the eyes and then the mouth, then find some way out, too. The vibrant colors get lost as little pixels in a screen flood of colors washing over urban senses, propelled by electricity, satellites, fiberoptics. Color grays when screens fail or the power goes out. Mosaics last much longer in color transmission time, while the bloom and fade of garden hues depend on our coordinating multispecies and elemental labor--saving seeds, cultivating soil, tending with water, primping dead leaves, managing sunlight. This guidebook collects and preserves some of these ephemeral practices. The City of Living Garbage is a chancy refrain laid out across Austin's futures, a place to inhabit and wander inside, a place to build. The writing is a form of bricollage or gardening that cultivates improvisational aesthetic expressions, a mosaic of places and moments that could only happen thanks to trash. A public dreaming of possible real worlds caught up in the catastrophic mess of this one.

2038