Dumpster Diving: Why I Draw Trash Cans

*Why did I draw this? Maybe I just think it’s pretty.*

HOBOKEN, AUGUST 2, 2024. My pal Vicki recently asked what I was up to, and I told her I planned to spend the afternoon drawing a dumpster I spotted near Hoboken terminal. She replied that she might “amateur analyze your choice of subjects.”

I’m beating Vicki to it. First, a little background. I’ve never been remotely artistic. But last summer I sketched a chair on a whim and discovered that I dig drawing. It soothes me, like meditation except better, more absorbing. Drawing counteracts my tendency toward habituation, taking things for granted; it helps me see the weirdness.

For months I just outlined objects with a ballpoint pen. I started adding color after a fan of my scribbles gave me colored pencils. I pick subjects in a sweet spot between too simple and too complex, which challenge me without overwhelming my meager skills. I’ve rendered chairs, tables, lamps, buildings, trees, flowers, fences, rocks, docks, my feet—as well as trash cans, recycling bins, portable restrooms and a dumpster.

What’s with the waste receptacles? What’s my motivation? I can’t say for sure, my mind mystifies me, but here are a few guesses.

I like depicting things we overlook. Humble, working-class, practical things. My feet fall into that category, so do trash cans. What’s humbler and more practical than a mobile shitter?

*Obviously I felt a personal connection here.*

And yet these receptacles aren’t purely practical. Someone has taken care to design them and even to add flourishes, aesthetic touches. Who? My drawings honor the unsung creators of port-a-potties and recycling bins.

I’m celebrating waste containers just as science-writer Natalie Angier celebrates the waste consumers known as dung beetles in a 1991 NY Times article (which I cite in a recent column). These bugs literally eat shit, and yet Angier extols them as biological marvels, without which "we'd be up to our eyeballs in you-know-what.”

It’s all too easy to imagine what Dr. Freud would say about my waste-related works. Clearly, the repressed trauma, or thrill, of being toilet-trained by mommy has bequeathed me a sublimated anal fetish. Hence, dumpster art.

*Sometimes a recycling bin is just a recycling bin.*

Or maybe I’m venting my not-so-repressed anxiety about death. Dumpsters etc. remind me that everything we love is doomed, destined to become garbage, to be incinerated or buried or otherwise put forever out of sight. I draw trash cans for the same reason I adorn my apartment with tin skeletons and a ceramic skull.

After I ran this memento mori hypothesis past an advisor, she gave it a more positive spin: Garbage bins symbolize change, transformation, out with the old, in with the new. And don’t forget that not all trash gets tossed, some gets recycled.

Okay, that’s all I got. I hope Vicki, who provoked this column, is satisfied that I’ve gotten to the bottom of my dumpster obsession. It comes down to sex, death, the circle of life. What else is there?

Wait, there’s another possibility: money. After I posted my dumpster opus on Facebook, two “friends” applauded my savvy swerve into the art racket.

Nathaniel hails my dumpster as a “commentary on the postmodern, post-colonial vertigo, decline, fall, and ultimate road-rash [rage?] of post-industrial industrial America, compacted into an aphoristic micro-parable.”

Instead of just drawing a dumpster, Jim says, I should purchase a dumpster and call it art, as Marcel Duchamp did with a porcelain urinal a century ago. After the art world showers me with praise, I can sell dumpsters to collectors at a huge mark-up. “Having a ‘Horgan Dumpster’ would be de rigueur,” Jim says, for hedge-funders with roomy estates and edgy tastes.

Jim and Nathaniel are joshing me, but many of my best ideas, like conservation of ignorance, start off as jokes. Yeah, maybe dumpsters are my ticket to fame and fortune! Tomorrow I’ll call Katz Carting and get a price on a used dumpster.