Pigs and Poop Show Photos

Thanks to the help of many, the show, Pigs and Poop: Visions on a Mobile Class, was a success. Here are images of the installation and other photos not already posted.

As for those thanks, they go to Jobert Poblete, Jaala Berkley, Ashley Clark, and Adam Luetto for all their help manning the gallery. Thanks to my partner Pete Nelson for providing the guidance and technical help in formulating and setting up the show.

In this posting, I will aim at re-creation of the gallery experience. The text was a very important element in this show and served as a secondary mediator for the viewer. I utilized different fonts to eccentuate certain portions of the accompanying quotes. Unfortunately, this website does not allow for photos large enough to show the text, so I will type the quotes beneath each photo.

Please look at previous posts for more detail on the show and its origin.

“Home is a state of mind, if you will. It’s a state of comfort. Most people are dis-eased… That’s why they’re not even home when they’re in their house.”

“Every squatter has a fucking mySpace page nowadays.”

“I’m kind of like the crotch of society.”

“I can totally live without money, for eating and clothing needs, to stay warm. I guess I’m a leach eating out of dumpsters, but I don’t think I need any justification for garbage.”

“I don’t want to own anything– ever. I feel the idea of possession is exactly that: an idea.”

“There’s a lot of people that are in society and they surround themselves with all these extravagant things and worry so much about their car and what people think and their house and yada yada yada, but I mean, whenever you’re on your death-bed, you’re not going to be thinking about that shit at all. You know, I may be living in poverty, but in my pockets, I’m rich with experience.”

“I realized that most people’s troubles have to do with money. I realized that we have all the tools and technology available to accomplish all our basic goals without the money game. In fact, more efficiently without [it] than with [it]. Mostly, I try to operate as much outside of the money game as I possibly can… The real goal, I guess, is just to accomplish a sense of freedom, because freedom is something that everyone has, everyday, whether they’re aware of it or not. I guess I’m just trying to make people aware of it.”

“It’s for the train-hoppers and the gutter punks, not them. It’s our territory. I’m not trying to be an asshole. That’s just how it is.”

Photo by Stormy

“I was really, like, on my own for a while, but after I met Joel, I found out there’s like a huge, like, thousands of kids do it, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah!,’ and I hit the road …
It’s like a tribe, you know?”

“A band or pack is not a rudimentary form, but is a complex way of preventing stable power, and of maintaining diffuse, immanent relations.”
- Deleuze & Guattari

Photo by Stormy

“The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

“The only way anything can be changed is by a full-on onslaught of revolution, which is never going to happen. People are gonna continue to be blind because that’s what the system wants them to be. Don’t ask questions, don’t ask why, don’t go outside, don’t help anybody out, just stay in your little cubicle, go in another little cubicle to make money to spend on other little cubicle boxes and just sit at home and be a good little Christian soldier, a little remote-controlled angel.”

“I’m probably never gonna settle down and like get a normal job or anything like that just cuz I can’t handle it. I don’t like it. I get stir-crazy and I go nuts, you know?”

“The State needs to subordinate hydraulic forces to conduits, pipes, embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid… The hydraulic model of nomad science of the war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space…instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.”

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

“I can’t see myself going back into society the same way, having an apartment or something. Eventually, what I want to do is grow my own sustainable farm, and just grow herbs and vegetables, goats and chickens.”

“All I see here is money and consumerism. Consume, consume, consume. Like the fucking system has you by the balls and all these people think it’s leading you by the hand.”

“I wanted to change the system. I wanted to change people’s minds. I wanted to change the ideals and beliefs of everybody walking down the street. I wanted to open up their eyes to a system that fuckin destroys their lives through Television and Volvos and fuckin Cap’n Crunch and god-damn top 40 Billboard radio.”

“When they’re young they think they believe something and think they wanna do something, think they can change the world. And then hopelessness and jadedism just takes over and you realize that all you really want to do is be left alone and get a house and work and just be by yourself and collect records and guns. That’s just speaking for myself.”

“Their box, their box, their box… People get in their box to go drive somewhere—to a box, get their food in a box, then they’re eating their food in a box, get home to their box, park their box in the box. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a box in nature my entire life. It’s a really strange shape to me. [It sucks] because that’s the only thing you know. I like to be able to see. Flowing. When I’m tripping, I hate to be inside. It’s like er! er! [makes a right angle with hands] Everything needs to flow. I don’t know how to explain it. When I’m outside, I feel better for some reason. I feel that’s what I should be doing, where I should be, for me at least. These people, that’s all that they do. They never get out of their box. It’s really sad. It’s strange.”

This exhibit was dedicated to Michael “Brett” North, who was loved by his family and respected by his community. His life was lost much too soon, taken in the East River Park by a substance originally made to save.

Michael “Brett” North 1974-2006

Pigs and Poop: Visions on a Mobile Class

An exhibition of photos by anthropologist Darci J Pauser taken in the Lower East Side of NYC and Roseville, CA.

In movement through unarrayed space, one becomes external to the striated structures of the state. With this externality comes subsistence on the very waste of the internal structures. This exhibition addresses the nomadic lives of the houseless through an exploration of consumption, development, and alienation.

Worth Ryder Gallery
Kroeber Hall
UC Berkeley Campus
Opening Reception and Artist’s Talk June 1, 2007 from 7-9 pm
Gallery Hours June 2nd-7th 11am-5pm

Free and open to the public

 See also the website for the conference where I will present my non-photo fieldwork entitled “Houseless: Agents of Our Own Destruction” on April 28th at 2:45 p.m. http://research.berkeley.edu/haas_scholars/scholars/2006-2007/news/confprog.html

The photo exhibit will include photos of not only the houseless and their environment, but tract homes from my hometown of Roseville as well. In this way, it is as much about development and my own reaction to that development as about the houseless. I hope to force the semiotic meta-dialog of the houseless and the houses into a direct and pungent confrontation for the observer, as well as force the observer to question the uniformity that occurs on both sides.

“Pigs and poop” is about eating off another’s waste and is a phrase based on a story an informant told me in Berkeley, which will be elaborated upon at the exhibit. The content of the photos is what is most important to me– what each photo says about its subject and how each photo represents the houseless and the houses.

This was shot in NYC in a squat-turned-coop. I found it very interesting that this theme showed up a second time. Why the pig pooping? I feel it also says something about filth– about ‘being dirty.’ There’s also a saying: “Happy as a pig in poop.” Pigs actually don’t like to roll around in poop under ‘normal’ circumstances. If they had their choice between a cool clean lake and a pile of poop, they would cool off in the lake. However, when the lake is unavailable (like, in conditions that humans have set up for them– not the ‘natural’ condition), they will roll in poop. This is an interesting analogy to my subjects, who many would say are suffering from altered preferences. They only ‘choose’ to be homeless because they didn’t have any other options, just like the pig who can either roll in poop or overheat and die. I am skeptical of this view.

The entrance to ABC No Rio in the lower east side.

Backyard of ABC No Rio. That day, there were so many worms falling from the trees. They kept falling on me. Uck. A Puerto Rican punk band was playing inside.

A friend and an informant in NYC is peeking into a building on coney island where there used to be a freak show. I like this photo because it shows the exploratory nature of the subject. His clothing also reflects this. Unlike most of my informants, this guy did not do any drugs, nor did he drink. He just enjoyed train-hopping travel and wanted to experience different places before going to college. Notice the voodoo roll of sticks hanging above him.

Some of the photographs I took are noticably missing the head of the subject. The reason for this is the discomfort my subjects and I felt with creating such an identifiable image. As this project crosses boundaries between art and anthropology, concerns surrounding the rights of human subjects lingered in my mind. There I was as a researcher, but also as a photographer. Would the photography be considered a completely separate and solely artistic aspect of my project to my informants, as it had to the committee for the protection of human subjects? Or would it just be yet another form of exploitation and voyeuristic fetish. Although playing a part in the daily lives of the people I studied—being a person who not only interviews them, takes notes on them, and takes photographs of them, but also hangs out with, chats with, and shares cigarettes with them—did help to ease some of the exploitative tensions, they still played a part in my informants’ discomfort and my self-consciousness on undertaking the role of a researcher.

In order to further explore the possibility of creating a dialog between researcher and subject, I decided to give my subjects cameras. I didn’t know what they would photograph, I just wanted them to photograph anything they wanted to, and give them this tool of record-keeping and documentation which had begun to be so powerful to me. Perhaps they could be a voyeur and a photographer, also. I hoped it would create a dialog between what I, as researcher, saw and what they, as subjects, saw. How might the photos be framed differently? What would they see in them that I didn’t see? Would I be in them as part of their social landscape?

As soon as I picked up the first roll of film an informant took for me, I realized it was not about this dialog at all: it was first and foremost about access. I was so excited about that first roll of film that I did not realize I was keeping the photographer himself from viewing his own prints. I looked through them like a rabid dog to find any that might be aesthetically or analytically relevant. My informants took the photos, but I gave them the cameras and I got them developed, and, significantly, I kept the negatives. In truth, the vast majority of photos that were taken by the subjects were not useful for an exhibition. They were the blurry, finger-in-front-of-the-lens, posed snapshots of friends smiling into the camera, although most of the subjects posing were giving the camera the finger (which I see as relevant). But, perhaps the former has a relevance all its own…

But, as I said, these photos were mainly about access. I was able to see things they did and places they went when I wasn’t around. Here’s someone walking down the street in the city, their friend walking ten feet ahead. Here’s some graffitti of a frieght train I’ve never seen. Here’s what looks like an old abandoned office building, with a group of people sitting on couches and chairs. These latter two photos were taken in a squat in Brooklyn called the Bat Cave, a place I never had the opportunity to go to, and I had been warned against going there, anyway. Unlike the co-op ‘squats’ in manhattan, this was a structurally (and otherwise) dangerous abandoned building ridden with asbestos and soon to be torn down. I heard of someone getting raped there, and one girl I met had fallen off the second-story balcony, breaking many bones, including her jaw.

Image Experiment

With the photography aspect of my project, I have been thinking a lot about style and semiotics. Style is a way in which group demarcation can be observed. People don’t like to label themselves, but they will obliquely express ther membership in a group through clothing and other paraphernalia. Common themes are trains, punk rock, and dirt.

Here is a squat-turned-co-op called See Skwat. Although they now legally occupy the building, there is still defensiveness of ownership. The C with the lightning bolt is a play on the squatter symbol (circle with lightning bolt).

Checking out a friend’s bicycle.

Tattoos on this part of the hand are quite common. This one says “hobo” on one hand, and “life” on the other.

Filth, dirt, crust- all are held in high esteem. Notice the “filth punks” shirt this guy is wearing. The black bandana around the neck marks a train-hopper. A very dirty black bandana marks a seasoned train-hopper.

Train riding is a status symbol. Dano’s friend traded shirts with him and was later trying to get this one back- to no avail.

Packs are good things to sleep on.

The classic Doc Martens worn by a rockabilly dude, hence the turned-up cuffs. Andy also has a pompador.

This guy’s pin says “i like heroin”…and he does, too.

Notice the railroad tracks and the “ride to die” quote. As a parallel, i want to mention a photo an informant took of graffitti of a train with the words “no fear.” Daring, adventurous, adrenaline rush feelings come from these images.

Here’s your resistance.

Here’s another hand tattoo with the insignia for a punk band out of California called Black Flag.