Exchange and Regimes of Value: The Dawson City Trash Project

Abstract:

The Dawson City Trash Project was a walk-in, miniature diorama of Dawson City, Yukon made entirely out of the city’s trash (ODD Gallery, 2008). The art installation was the raw material of a performance: each one of the 1,000 pieces in the exhibition was free to take away by gallery viewers at any time for the duration of the show. As the artist and an academic scholar, I was initially interested in the redefinition of trash. Instead of being unwanted, disgusting, diffuse, useless, and unowned, I wanted to watch how it could become desirable, beautiful, unique and popular. Throughout the exhibition, a surveillance camera recorded participants’ actions. I watched the video to see if participants would revalue the trash-art by spending a certain amount of time with it, by interacting with it in various ways, or through the vocabulary they used to describe it. While these elements were certainly present, a much more interesting pattern emerged from the video footage: it showed an audience engaged in nuanced rules of exchange, valuation and circulation, or the economy, of the piece.

The installation had a one-rule economy: take anything you want, whenever you want. How The Dawson City Trash Project’s economy was extended, taken up, and changed by the creative and spontaneous actions of gallery visitors became an unplanned but rich consequence of the exhibition design. Arjun Appadurai’s idea of a “tournament of value,” or how the flow of commodities is always a “compromise between socially regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions,” provides a framework to analyze both the revaluation of trash and gallery participant’s engagement with the project’s one-rule economy (1986: 17).

2009