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."

Timewasting

Far above the fruit fly's lazy circle a red-tailed hawk glides for food. Leaning into the backyard's cushiest chair, I see chores to do like changing the chicken's water, tinkering with the museum window displays. More laborious projects like moving the limestone blocks to build up a new garden bed. I should go in and write. But right now it's time to stare at the sky and watch plants grow.

There is this work of looking around that leaves no trace, and then the hard, fun, gradual, collaborative labor of assembling atmospheres as viewsheds—land- and cityscape vistas designed to be looked at from certain perspectives (but that also sound and smell certain ways). Ross Ward was a sign painter who settled outside the ghost town Madrid, New Mexico, in the ‘60’s. One of his signs reads, “‘Tinkertown’ was begun as a hobby in 1962. It was not intended as a public display, until your interest helped build ‘our museum!’” Over the years he and his wife Carla built up bottle walls to house their collection of miniatures arranged in a long homemade display case. Their tiny objects and figurines live on Tinkertown’s Old West-style main street, where garbage becomes anything but what it was. The saloon’s bar stools are spent spools of thread. A big old roll of canvas becomes the circus Big Top. Years of public intoxication at Madrid's Mine Shaft Tavern transform into glowing bottle walls built of mortar and sunlight. If you look closely you'll find the bottle with Tinkertown's slogan: "We did all this while you were watching T.V.!" You can look at Tinkertown forever and still catch something new.

Leisure time, viewing habits, hobbies that become lifestyles or all consuming full time jobs. More than full time – never enough time to tinker on the (unpaid) labor of building DIYsneylands. Vince, who can never go on vacation because tourists drop by the Cathedral of Junk every day of the year, talks with a visitor. “This started out as a hobby. Some people play video games, or go fishing or whatever.” The wise visitor says, “You don’t even have to catch a fish.” “Exactly. Catching fish isn’t the point.” Later I see a bumper sticker “I’d rather be fishing” on the same truck as “I used up all my sick days so I called in dead.”

Tinkering, and sitting back to gaze at what you tinkered, taps this longing to be dead to labor. Realms of ordinary aesthetic production like cooking, gardening, or playing music disengage the efficiency or scientific management of goal-oriented labor that drives formal economic production. These activities unfold in special spaces for timewasting, like the front porch. You have the privilege of leisure time and spend it hard at work on your hobby. Maybe productive wastes of time like playing guitar or baking cookies is all you really want to do, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It is a block of time and sensation that slows way down, saturating a moment with its own density and repetition that starts to feel like a little eternity.

Getting around the city can also involve this slowing down and wasting time. The commuter train's flashing red light gates swing down at the railroad crossing, making traffic back up to the next major intersection. Cars swerve out from behind buses stopped to unload passengers. Sustainable forms of mobility like riding public transportation, biking, and walking generally all waste time compared to car travel. We want to be like digital information, with its magic trick of moving instantly from here to there. It seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once (but you know this is a false perception when your hard drive crashes or you lose your phone). This is why time on a walk or jog or bike ride feels like it puffs up – because you are loitering in the ordinary liminality of commuting.

Music seems to float in the in between. A song is an infinite stretch of things to know through hearing or feeling out the rhythm, or to remember in your muscles. You could waste eternity improvising variations of a song. The song and instrument teach you things in an education that never stops.

At Tinkertown, “Otto the One Man Band” is an antique machine that plays a single song on drums, accordion, and glockenspiel with the notes punched out of a player piano roll for the automaton to feel. Ross Ward also carved a band of puppet hippies on their porch playing fiddle and guitars and hooked them to a found mechanism to make them move. Feed it a quarter to watch them perform and hear the tinny prerecorded song. Before his death from Alzheimer's in 2002, Ross salvaged and repaired these machines, playing around with them ‘til they worked right. They were antiquated things beached in the ghost town. At the Mine Shaft Tavern, Ross’s paintings tell the story of Madrid’s rise as a coal company town and its post-war abandonment. In a way the whole town became garbage like Otto, waiting to be recycled and repaired by the hippies as a tourist trap, the perfect place to drop out, waste time, see what happens next.

We were drifting through town on the scenic Turquoise Trail National Scenic Byway heading from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. After a tour of the Old Coal Mine Museum, stopped for lunch and a beer at the Tavern and got to talking at the bar. A local pointed out Ross's paintings of Madrid all lit up with Christmas lights in the '30's, back when the coal company supplied free electricity. Then the company leaves town and the houses become dark skeletons. He said we had to backtrack to Tinkertown, and we were welcome to camp on his land on a hill top under red mine tailings and stars. Wasting time opens up these kinds of discoveries, as if the landscape's micro-tourist enchantments only become sensible when immeresed in spare time.

2012

Bottle Hoard

For some reason photographers love the stacks of green, brown and clear bottles we accumulated over seven years. The hoard invokes jokes like “That looks like my liver!” and concerns and critiques that “I hope you didn’t drink all those yourselves.” Those bottles are waiting for something. Maybe they’ll be mortared into luminous walls, or stacked to retain a bed of soil. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped collecting.

Recycled bottles in Austin are taken to a sorting facility with the rest of the curbside recycleables, but they are not melted down into new bottles or washed and reused. Glass is trucked to the FM 812 Resource Recovery Center (formerly called the FM 812 Landfill), joining a hoard that must make my stack look like a little shard. The City grinds up some of the glass and gives it away as “glass mulch,” free if you bag it yourself.  You can use it in landscaping instead of decomposed granite to add some color and sparkle, or pretend to be a circus performer who dances on broken glass.

I was surprised how fast our bottles accumulated. A big party could bring in over a hundred. At one point the yard had multiple stacks that got so high the bottles started rolling off the top. Now wine bottles are hidden in the storage shed, gallon jars line the chicken coop, and all the beer/soda/sparkling water bottles are in an eight foot long stack about fifteen bottles high and three deep against the shed.  The stacks are kept in place by gravity, a pattern of arrested flow. They would roll away if not buttressed by cinder blocks on one end and a wood scrap and concrete stairs on the other. The pattern has the grace of holding together without money and permanence. Bottle wall building requires a surprising amount of mortar, but stacking just takes time.

The front of our house is festooned with bottle cap snakes. Like our stacked bottles, the caps seem to index a habitual drinking habit (or at least obsessive collecting, or having too much time one your hands, or the willingness to waste it, or something not quite right). John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House in Houston is similarly armored with all that remained of what he drank over eighteen years, a shameless display of what had piled up through everyday consumption routines. The creator of the Mano Poderosa art yard, Mary Kraemer, dispels the drinking stigma by pointing out that the half-buried blue bottles that line her garden labyrinth come from the Ecology Action recycling center. The glinting bottles drink in the sunlight, concentrating its presence in the garden.  

Although our bottle stacks are so orderly they are photogenic, the bottle pile signals disorders like hoarding or alcoholism, bad attachments to forms of waste or getting wasted. As living garbage, the bottles are filled with danger and promise. They are tiny habitats that might have been filled with beer yeast and bacteria, or where mosquitoes might breed (something code enforcers scrutinize). They are at once cast-off traces and unrealized projects. The stacks reveal and embody the slow, steady piling up of routine desires and immanent possibilities. What would your bottle hoard look like, if you saved them for a few years? What would you do with them all?

2012

Honda - Made In Japan

A teardrop mirror floats around our garden. The Honda hood ornament is bashed in on the bottom so the reflection ripples. Mortar seals the back, some of it smooth and flecked with rust, the cast of some missing metal bar, but most of it cracked crosswise off a larger body of concrete by a sledgehammer blow. A holy fragment of the Cathedral of Junk that came to live at Ephemerata Gardens in 2010, when Vince Hannemann and helpers tore down around 40 tons of Cathedral to satisfy the Department of Code Compliance.

The Cathedral of Junk is a world class DIYsneyland, a do-it-yourself roadside attraction/art environment pilgrimage site. People have gotten married there, put on plays and concerts, celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. It has been captured on film by Japanese tourists, documentary film makers and photographers, and a Bank of America film crew. Suddenly after twenty years the Cathedral is no longer invisible to the Department of Code Compliance. Someone called in a complaint (not that it hadn’t happened a half dozen times before), and for whatever reason, this time the event activated the little bomb that had been imbedded in the Cathedral all along.

Overnight the giant sculpture becomes an unpermitted structure, well within the 5-foot no-build easement along the property line. Also, the property is zoned residential, but it is being treated as a public space, with 10,000 visitors in 2009. Vince is forced to close for a painful half-year, a limbo of back-and-forth with the Code people. Tear more down; not good enough; tear more down. Once the dust settled he could host no more than 30 carloads of tourists a week (so walk, bike, or bus to the Cathedral). Vince mortars in glass bottles to buttress the lower part of the sculpture/structure, and rumor has it he is working on making it levitate.

After surviving Code, the Cathedral’s body of living garbage is shifting from a kind of bird nest of salvaged metals to the magically contradictory medium of concrete light, better known as “bottle walls.” Cement's common use in large-scale built environments “secretly [deploys] malign alchemical forces to make consumerism into the dominant ideology, concretize the imaginal, and … oppress the masses with the heavy hard time of rationalized labor.”* Vince plays with cement's alchemical magic to build a vessel for luminous atmospheres. From inside, the holey walls glow blue, green, and brown, illumination puncturing the solid world. Mortar envelopes the bright windows and the metal skeleton, making a single, strong block of masonry work that is equally light and airy. Before this mode of composition, the Cathedral was mostly held together by gravity and wire, long pieces of metal puzzled into each other like twigs in a nest. Now Vince feeds an amoeba of masonry and glass, one eighty-pound bag at a time. Bring him some nice bottles if you visit, and you can return a few decades from now to find them.  

The singularity garbage can accrue depends on our relationship of care and attention. Imagine all the anonymous Japanese car parts that have settled like mist in global landfills and scrapyards, only a select few salvaged for homemade Kami shrines to machine gods. The carbon dioxide exhaled by the Honda while alive joins all the rest of the emissions in the atmosphere. By now a few motes of radioactive dust made in Japan have settled in the Cathedral and Ephemerata Gardens. The reactor meltdowns change the dust everywhere, adding another layer to the Anthropocene sky.

*Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Black Pyramid/Concrete & Cement,” Cabinet 27 (2007): 17-19, p. 17.