Monthly Statement:
February 2006
Total Bag Count: 1,664
Monthly Total: 189
106 black – 68 white – 15 color

This month I've been thinking a lot about the states that I find my bags in and how that might provide leads about what to do with them. Bags come my way in two general forms; wadded up clumps and ethereal floaters. For the past month I've been kicking around ideas about how to replicate these states found in nature in a way that works using thousands of bags. I've also been considering what the proper venue for the bags is. Should they go back to where they came from, or live a new life indoors?

I'm more taken with "urban tumbleweed" when it is blowing around or stuck in trees. However, there is also something deeply satisfying about watching a big ball of one thing grow and grow. Since I already started in the first show with a clump, I began this month investigating how to improve my binding technique to make for a bigger, badder, not to be messed with, bag monster. The first show's ball was weak and always at risk of falling apart. By tying the bags directly together and knotting them in on themselves the structure is very strong and dense. It can actually do the damage of a medicine ball if you throw it hard enough. I pulled January's bags out from under the bed and made a mock-up using half the month's yield (see picture). So what can the ball mean?

This whole process reminds my of the Greek myth of Sisyphus; the guy condemned for all eternity to roll a giant ball up a hill only to have it roll back down again. I've reached that moment of awareness where you understand that what you are doing is pretty useless but you can only keep going, and by continuing you prove some sort of existential point that is in some way supposed to be vindicating. Thinking like this, I could make this project a public performance piece. I could take bag-ball out on the weekend, roll it down to Fort Green Park, with its steep slopes, and roll it up and down, up and down.

Or, I could try to make it a semi-permanent landscape intervention. Most of the bags I collect I get on my walk to work down Myrtle Ave. to Downtown Brooklyn. What a better place to install bag-ball than MetroTech Plaza, the end of this well-scoured road? See picture for proposed public art installation. That place could really use some livening up.

Then there is the approach of leaving well-enough alone. I set up some fans in the living room to try and make a wind tunnel room. I thought about this months ago but was warned that someone would undoubtedly choke and die in a room with thousands of bags blowing around. Honestly I don't think its all that serious. I was quite pleased with the results. Neither I, my housemates, nor my little dog wanted it to end. I hope by next month to have come to some resolution.

Process: I am accumulating all plastic shopping bags left on the street that I encounter each time I go outside. A record is being kept of how many bags are accumulated each day for the course of the project year. For each plastic bag I accumulate I will create one reusable canvas bag.