Rat Bastards Revisited

Sheer curiosity and a promised stockpile of 16mm film reels landed us at a junkyard in West Berkeley in the middle of a random weekday night. The warehouse — home to the large-scale recycling operation known as Berkeley Shredding — was a compulsively organized maze of displaced objects — a hoarder’s paradise, a treasure trove for any “second-hand” enthusiast. There’d be containers of electronic waste — motherboards, circuitry, etc — to more obsolete media like turntables, tape decks, vhs players. We spent hours sifting through the piles of rejected junk, listening to the owner rant about one of her workers, Johnny, who hoards bags of chocolate in the cassettes container, or about how the business is expanding far beyond its reach. Shaking her hand upon leaving, satisfied with our findings, the owner mutters something: “What’s that saying? Another man’s trash — ” She gave us all one last look up and down — “you kids are crazy.” And just like that, we drove away in our old beat-up Corolla filled to the brim with film reels, tape-decks, turntables, a rusty centrifuge, and musty cook books, all clattering in the trunk, as she rolled the chain-link fence of the warehouse to a close with a wave.

This night spent at Berkeley Shredding brought with it a forced perspective of a dark reality. It is impossible to conceptualize, or even visualize, the extent of the waste a single community can produce until you are directly confronted with its physical presence — in all its breadth and sheer volume. It serves as a reminder of the responsibility we have of caring for, tending to, and dealing with these forgotten though still enduring objects before they end up in a large pile of dirt somewhere just barely out of sight. For the brains behind the operation at Berkeley Shredding, it is clear she feels burdened with this responsibility. It has manifested itself in a compulsively run and tightly managed system of recycling, reusing, and reselling. But there is almost too much for her to handle. She has settled for making deals with overzealous twenty-something year olds drifting through estate sales in search of old media and nostalgic second-hand items who she then brings to the warehouse in the middle of the night, selling them whatever they can get their hands on for mere pocket change for the fulfillment of their own pre-digital crafting fantasies. For her, the deal works because she has found new homes for the trash — that is her only concern. For us, we got to exercise our own kind of counter-cultural consumer practice.

We take for granted, however, that our actions could be considered “counter-cultural.” They’re unique, perhaps, and in the eyes of the owner at Berkeley Shredding, crazy. If anything, our contrived thriftiness is really just the product of misplaced nostalgia and a desire for authenticity at a time when newness feels inauthentic. But these predicaments can actually be traced to a longstanding history of counter-culturalism practiced in the Bay Area for decades, particularly, the legacy of the Rat Bastards Protective Association which operated in San Francisco during the 1950s and 60s. The Rat Bastards were an artist collective that practiced trash-collecting around the streets of San Francisco, using their findings to create assemblage pieces that not only commented on the reality of consumerist culture but also subverted the pretenses of creation and conceptions of waste, championing through it all a DIY artistic aesthetic.

Take for example, Bruce Conner’s assemblage titled Looking Glass, completed in 1964. The materials he used are a frightening catalogue of any garbage can or garage sale: Mannequin arms, dried blowfish, painted wood, mirror, fringe, shoe, heart-shaped, cut and pasted printed papers, paint, nylon, fabric, jewelry, beads, string, doll voice box, fur, artificial flowers, feathers, garter clip, tinsel, and metal on Masonite. Years after this piece was assembled, any viewer can see the natural wear and deterioration that comes with the nature of the materials used. The materials have aged in a rather unflattering way. This, however, was a desire of Conner’s who sought to embrace the “flux,” and the disintegration of his objects. When he initially found and used them, they were already dirty and worn beyond repair. He purposefully left them in “their rotten, lost state” for use in his assemblage. And any further erosion to the objects, in Conner’s mind, was critical to the art piece.

What is arguably most haunting about these pieces, however, is the sheer fact that they still exist. They serve as a gritty reminder to the viewer of the immortality of our waste — if not here in the museum, they’d be elsewhere — a trash dump, at the bottom of the ocean, wherever else our waste hides both in and out of sight, sitting for decades, forgotten, but still enduring. In this way, Bruce Conner’s assemblages challenge the viewer in a similar manner that Berkeley Shredding did for us. Its not like Bruce Connner did what he did simply out of concern for the environment — that may have absolutely been a part of it — but a large component of what he’s doing is being provocative. He’s trying to be challenging. How would you feel looking at an art piece that is a conglomeration of your forgotten junk, assembled together and presented before you in a gallery space? Is there a need for a modern-day Rat Bastard? If anything, Conner’s pieces model significant modes of reaction to the kinds of problems and phenomena we sensed upon leaving Berkeley Shredding and that he identified in the creation of his assemblages.