For the sculptor Bob Johnson, who recently installed his latest RiverCube in Harbor Park along the Connecticut River, someone else’s trash really might be treasure.
“[They are] works of philosophy, labors of love [that] belong to the rivers,” Johnson said of his RiverCubes, his most famous creation.
Johnson’s sculptures, weighing anywhere from 400 to 1200 pounds, are industrially compacted cubes made up of discarded goods collected during clean-ups of local rivers.
“I go to the river, scouting on my own and asking people if they know where the junk is dumped [to find out] what’s going on in particular areas,” Johnson said.
In the end, Johnson has a diverse group to thank for the items he uses: Urban youth groups, garden clubs and Eco-Art graduate students all contribute to the cleanup efforts. Once collected, the trash is crushed and the final product, the RiverCube, is displayed in proximity to the cleanup site.
Johnson disdains the use of the word “waste” to describe the discarded items he collects.
“I believe the concept of waste is fictitious,” Johnson said.
He prefers the term “flesters,” a word he defined as “anything that we presume to be in some way isolated from its context. [They’re] fragments of formerly functional contrivances [that] are touted as universally useful objects.”
Sound vaguely academic? Wesleyan thought so, too. Last fall, Johnson teamed up with his old friend Professor Michael Pestel, a visiting lecturer at the Graduate Liberal Studies Program, to run three workshops with students in Pestel’s GLSP course “Earth Works, Environmental Sculpture and Eco-Art.”
Johnson, Pestel and the Eco-Art students spent hours collecting flesters near the Connecticut River, Prout Stream and the Long Island Sound. They encountered everything from a red plastic Dodge fender, a steel table frame and a Sears ride mower, to a child’s plastic bathing pool, all of which were then hauled to a metal crusher in Springfield.
“The resulting object, a StreamCube called ‘Prout Fishing in America,’ was then installed on our property at the entrance to the stream grotto along with signage and a dozen haikus I’d asked students to write about the experience,” Pestel said.
The installation at Harbor Front Point on the Connecticut River is the second of the two that the group made.
Although proud of his work, Johnson dismisses any commercial opportunities for his RiverCubes.
“I don’t want to sell them,” Johnson said. “I feel they should return to the rivers [which are] their roots.”
And neither does he aim to make any political or environmental statement through his sculptures.
“Each ‘cube’ has a name, a history, a future and a story to tell,” he said. “They tell their stories mutely. We witness and testify, laugh and frown.”
Johnson stresses that the point of his work is not to make people ashamed of the human distortion of our natural environment, but instead to provide a “whimsical reminder, a quirky intervention of our consumer culture at large.”
“The cubes intend to provoke thought and incite action,” Johnson said. “They mean different things to different people who encounter them in different contexts.”
After building RiverCubes in Boston, Connecticut and his home state of Pennsylvania, in addition to photographing discarded materials around the River Tiber in Rome, Johnson wants to take his concept to the next level. For him, RiverCubes are only the first small-scale application of a philosophy called “Artful Trash Management.”
Johnson describes Artful Trash Management as a “system of strategic practices that creatively harvest waste streams.” This vision is an “analytical response” to the current practice of collecting waste and creating landfills.
If Johnson’s visions come true, RiverCubes will be a catalyst for developing practices that creatively reuse byproducts.
Pestel, who team-taught his Eco-Art classes at Chatham College with Johnson, compliments his former colleague by pointing out that
“Bob’s work is the combination of a developed eco-philosophical ‘manifesto’ and the fact that he is actually doing river clean-up actions, not just talking about them,” Pestel said.
Whatever his long-term plans might be, in the short term Johnson hopes that his RiverCubes spur other people to take action.
“[I hope they serve as] focal points for ongoing social events, discussions and conversations about refining our relationship to rivers in a way different from how we have generally used them as industrial dumping lands,” Johnson said.
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