Trashterpiece

A couple of times a week my walk takes me along one of those city streets that is a bit of an urban pot luck: nail salons, Italian and Asian take-out places, office buildings, and Dunk’n Donuts (required by zoning laws I think). Interspersed among the retail properties are multi-family houses and other small apartment complexes. You can typically breeze past these places without even noticing them—muted colors, front porches used more for storage than hanging out, yards small enough to fold up and fit in your carry-on luggage.

What seems like against all odds, many of these properties have some of the most beautiful flower and garden sections I’ve ever seen. I’m always knocked over when I come across someone’s 3-foot parcel overrun with tulips and roses and daylilies with morning glories threading themselves through the ugly chain link fence on the side of the yard. I can barely keep grocery store flowers fresh for more than two days, so I have tremendous respect for anyone who grows anything. A person capable of producing award-worthy blooms in dirt that probably has a pH reading of “don’t bother” in a location regularly crop dusted by bus and car exhaust is some serious dark arts-level sorcery.

But one of the innocuous row houses on the street has taken their yard game to a whole other level.

On either side of their narrow walkway sits a couple of raised flower beds. During the growing season there are any number of items thriving: tomato plants pressed up against the tiny bars of their cages; bushy clumps of basil; purple and orange-headed marigolds; and sawed off sections of lattice propped up near the back of the beds encourage green beans to run amok. And then there are the doll heads.  

Not some kind of plant or flower, but plastic, rubber, disembodied doll heads stuck here and there in the dirt beds. Some face out, buried up to their chins as if they were playing at the beach. Others are turned on their side, deposited, tossed, which invites a kind of speculation that only Stephen King would relish. The heads come in a variety of styles: vintage, retro Kewpie doll, generic contemporary baby doll found at Target. Boy heads. Girl heads. Bald. Painted on hair. Here’s one with an eye missing. Here’s another with both eyes bleached out by the sun as if someone had let the baby look directly at an eclipse. Well, that’s an easy fix! Grab a blue marker and “color” in baby’s eyes. Good as new! And all of them with that same lurid, slightly stoned kind of grin that must be a patented feature of whatever manufacturing plant gave birth to them. It’s the last thing you see before the doll head comes to live and your heart seizes. One million percent. One. Million.

I have been tempted to stop and take a couple of photos from time to time, but I just can’t. I’ve seen this movie and I know how it ends (see above, re. heart stopping, soul stealing, inevitable doom). I am a deep appreciator of the weird, funky, strange, quirky, bizarre. Gonzo is one of my favorite Muppets and I hope to God they never find out whatever he is. But those doll heads are a tier of creepy that I cannot abide.

Truthfully, I’m always a little relieved when the season winds down and everything gets put to bed, including the doll heads, especially the heads. Though I do wonder where they’re stored. Is there a bucket in the cellar where they get tossed or do they go into a special room? Maybe they get carefully put on a shelf in a hall closet. Have mercy on the houseguest who innocently goes poking around for an extra blanket only to be met with a ghoulish gang of baby heads.

But then a few weeks ago I noticed this sitting next to the porch:

Could be a Banksy knock-off! A NoThanksy, perhaps? Someone get me a meeting with A SERIOUS ART WORLD PERSON IMMEDIATELY! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

I stopped because, well, obviously. I laughed because, well, obviously (how much do we ever really leave immaturity behind?). My PhD brain took over briefly and I did a short run down of what was “going on with this piece:”

“F-Art” subverts our expectations of what art is supposed to be, i.e. serious, important, museum and gallery approved, an idea further reinforced by WORD PLAY! (makes farting noise in head and thinks how funny 6 and 8-year-old nephews would find this)

Art as something functional, ordinary, homemade or even trash

The tree impaled through the seat; a javelin, again, puncturing our expectations, disrupting the visual and material scene—the chair outside of its domestic interior as well as the yard itself, a quasi-wild-urban space. Also the sly wink toward, you know, expulsion of biological gas in the way the tree thrusts itself up and out of the “seat,” (get it?), but also making that kind of popular rejoinder: “What? You think your stuff smells like roses?”

And this is why I was still a virgin at twenty-five.

The why behind this Trashterpiece or the cursed doll heads (one million percent cursed. One. Million) is irrelevant. What matters is they exist at all. What matters is that garden beds can grow more than vegetables and flowers, that a few feet of frontage can double as a stage, a canvas, a blank sheet, a window into someone else’s world.