Filth, Food and Whatever else we leave behind.
If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.
- Mary Douglas, ‘Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo’, 1966.
My friend Percy got me a job at a junk shop. It was the summer following the spring I had pooled some money, quit my three part-time jobs and tried to open a bookshop. But a week before opening, the cement floor began to pool with damp and the walls slimed. The landlord, already at his second home in the South of France, said there was nothing he could do.
The junk shop, which smelled of sweat and hot electricity, had grown like a cancer over what had previously been a fully operational chandlery. Unable to compete with the swelling riptide of Amazon selling boat parts and life jackets for a fraction of what he could afford to, the owner had begun bidding on abandoned storage units. Once he found a real ruby and pawned it for something near a grand, but mostly the shop filled with black bin bags bursting with clothes, greasy kitchenware and half-built IKEA furniture.
<I reach into the inside pocket of a real velvet designer men’s suit jacket and pull out a crusty vial of cocaine and a short metal straw.>
The first few weeks were fun. With our boss out most of the day sourcing more crap, we threw open the shutters and shot pellet guns into the growing pile of old mattresses stacked in the corner. The shop was located in a large warehouse on an otherwise destitute industrial estate halfway down a bypass between two Cornish towns. The summer was hot and dusty. Customers were rare so we mostly rifled through the rubbish and listed things on eBay. First we’d sell the good stuff: expensive suits, antique ornaments, engine parts; and as that thinned out we’d take our chances on the remaining scraps. Beside the façade of labour for which we were paid sporadically, we spent most of our time combing for personal artifacts that the alcoholics, gamblers, deadbeat fathers and debt-shamed heart attack victims whose collateral made up most of our stock had left behind.
<Inside a faux leather footstool that doubles up as storage, I find furry handcuffs, an Anne Summers trademark ‘Rampant Rabbit’ dldo and a loose DVD with ‘pawn’ written on it in black sharpie.>
<Percy finds a peeling leather satchel full of mid-century immigration documents and the deeds to a house in Deptford. The hard-backed passports he finds tucked in the inside pocket belong to a Polish man and a British woman born in colonial India. Together we figure out that their grandson is the alcoholic whose intervention letters we felt guilty for reading.>
Despite the lung-aching dust and the filth ingrained in my jeans, I reveled in the detritus, the mundane and salacious fall-out of human life under capitalism.
(Image from Maisie Cousins via https://www.maisiecousins.com/home)
Mary Douglas tells us that dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter. When I think of dirt I think of food: milk curdling in the sink. When my mother thinks of dirt she thinks of clutter: books and towels. Violent rhetoric rubbing too close to power states that bodies can be dirt: out of place and expendable. In her book, Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass peonie bum, photographer Maisie Cousins defies the traditional hierarchies of preconceived dirt. Despite the reductive nature of its title, Cousins’s photographs cast a vibrant intimacy over the strewn out by-products of human consumption. The management and responsibility of so called dirt falls disproportionately on women. Ours are the food scraps to dispose of, the filth to mop and the bodies to stuff and bind so that they do not leak, sag or protrude. In Rubbish, Dipping Sauce Cousins contorts this notion of dirt as something dangerous, to be managed or eradicated. Instead, she flirts with this danger, presenting us with dirt that is glossy and decadent, dripping with syrup and rotting flowers. Dirt in this context vibrates with colour and becomes something fluid and alluring. Dirt is sexy. Dirt is femme. Dirt is smoke curling under the locked doors of the binary.
<My boss comes in, red-faced and grinning. ‘Aimee, what do you know about horses?’ He winks and drops a plastic bag full of harnesses intended for SM play on my desk. The leather is shiny with wear. I dump the bag’s contents in a back corner where it remains untouched until long after I quit.>
Though the images come from a range of Cousins’s separate pre-existing works, the overall narrative they produce is as powerful as it is playful. A bare arse emerges from a shallow purple cesspool. Wiry dark hair not often seen in such glossy photographs delicately lines the crack. The following page shows a glistening pool of food waste, pale green noodles and unidentifiable globs bobbing around a discarded prawn head. It’s difficult to tell if the intention is to elevate this display of sticky, slippery, bodily waste or to bring us provocatively down to its level. Instead of inspiring terror, shame or disgust, we are confronted with a presentation of detritus that is simultaneously dangerous and sexy. Rubbish, Dipping Sauce unlocks a world of bacchanalian excess that exists a scratch beneath the boundaries that have been constructed by a society that tends towards an antiseptic and starched white cleanliness.
< Inside a Power Rangers rucksack, wrapped up in an adults football jersey, I find reams of extra-large condoms. >
In the eighteen months I worked in the junk shop, the job became slowly more depressing. The business hemorrhaged money in unwieldy rent and eBay fees and darker items surfaced. One afternoon around Christmas we found a Gothic script edition of Mein Kampf, with its dedication page unsurprisingly torn out. Unbearable as it could be, working at the junk shop made me in some small way responsible for the re-ordering, re-classification and re-distribution of the expanse of waste that simply being alive ceaselessly churns out, and I was mostly ok with it. In Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Cousins’s shows us that when faced with the realities of filth, dirt and detritus only the unimaginative are outraged. Dirt is what you make it.
Burning House Books news:
Glasgow based and want to buy books? Burning House Books is halfway through a summer residency at the brand new Good Press studio/shop. As well as browsing and buying an ever-changing selection from the BHB collection, you can also attend events organised by me! Next up is: 'Feeling Backwards' - an evening of readings around the subject of death featuring work from Benjamin Kritikos, Benjamin G. Wilson and Hannah Levene on Thursday 16th August. More info available on mine and Good Press' insta.
Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass peonie bum by Maisie Cousins and published by Trolley Books is available to buy here.