Down in the Dumpsters: Trash as Art

Junk bonds may have lost their cachet, but one entrepreneur has found a new way to milk cash from trash. He packages it in plastic, adds a pink and green label--”100% Beverly Hills Trash”--and sells it for $4.95.

Arthur Gross plunged headfirst into the realm of rubbish last July, when he says he was teaching a graduate course in “entrepreneurial management” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He read that Beverly Hills’ mayor had declared toxic-waste disposal and the shortage of landfill space more significant problems than crime, he said.

The wheels in his head went into an entrepreneurial whirl. Trash is the lowliest thing on the planet, he decided. And surely art is the highest. So why not combine the two?

Into Plastic Cases

Adopting the name “Arte,” Gross moved to an apartment in Los Angeles’ Wilshire district and began stuffing old Doritos bags, newspapers and Evian water bottles into plastic cases.

“When I saw how cool the trash looked inside the box, I decided trash itself was art as soon as you put it into the box,” Gross said.

Gallery owners tended to disagree. So Gross launched a transcontinental “Trash-Art Tour” to promote his work and its environmental message about recycling’s importance. Highbrow art publications kept ignoring his artistry, but the national media swarmed like gulls over a landfill.

Gross said he has sold about 100 pieces of his work at prices ranging from $20 to $2,500. “In the heady atmosphere of the ‘80s, with Wall Street gyrating and global economies in full bloom, the business skills that I picked up at Wharton have been quite useful in my career as an artist and entrepreneur.”

“Beverly Hills Trash” is his attempt to make his art accessible to the masses and to do his bit to clean up the world. Gross contributes a percentage of his profits--”I can’t reveal the exact percentage, I will admit it’s small”--to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Sees Bags as Art

His goal, he said, is to personally recycle in five years as much trash as the United States generates in one minute. Thus, he hopes to encourage people across America to tack his little garbage bags to living room walls or display them on coffee tables.

Given his calculation that Americans generate about 282 tons of trash per minute, he acknowledges that he will need to fill a lot of walls and tables. But “that’s what trash art is about, taking (garbage) out of the waste stream.”

To that end, each bag of “Beverly Hills Trash”--available at select stores around Los Angeles--contains one ounce of objets trouve s , scavenged from dumpsters and trash cans of the rich and famous or businesses serving them. Treasures in bags marked “1 in a Collectors Series” included bits of glitzy wrapping paper and receipts from exclusive Rodeo Drive boutiques; a pink Kleenex encrusted with a fleck of some unknown substance; and an audio tape labeled in childish scrawl “Evan’s Space Station.”

“I’ve been in dumpsters from Wall Street to Watts, and Beverly Hills trash is the most outrageous, the most interesting and entertaining,” Gross said.

After tossing back anything with clinging food or liquid, Gross hauls the stuff home and sorts it into piles on his living room floor. Then he packages it--unsanitized--in 50 bag lots.

That’s where the art comes in, he said: “I go into, basically, a hypnotic state, where I’m just doing. I’m reacting to the environment about me--which happens to be full of trash--and assembling it into a cohesive form. When I look at them after they’re done, they’re absolutely beautiful.”

Bare-Handed Digging

Some observers might find Gross’ enterprises worthy of his name. But Gross, who does his digging bare-handed, insulates himself with professionalism: “I’ve been digging in trash now for so long, I guess I’m like a doctor with blood.”

Nothing short of a human body would disturb him as he grubs through peoples’ garbage, he added, casually counting off items he has unearthed that might make more timid souls flinch--if not retch.

Gross has found, for instance, considerable evidence to suggest that Beverly Hills residents are more sexually responsible than folks elsewhere in the country. He has refrained from putting condoms in his packets, he said.

After thinking about that for a moment, though, he had a change of heart. “I’m going to do it. Next one I have, I’m going to do it. I was going to say that I don’t think anyone would buy it if it had a used condom in it. But . . . I think they’ll buy anything. Why wouldn’t they buy it if it had a used condom in it? It would probably run right out of the store.”

Has No City Permit

(A spokesman for Beverly Hills said the city requires a permit to scavenge in its trash receptacles. “I absolutely do not have any permit,” Gross said. “I would love for them to arrest me. Here I am trying to help save the planet, there’s no way they’re going to arrest me.” He also said he does not believe what he does poses any health risk, and has never had a complaint to that effect.)

Gross bristles at any suggestion that he may have his tongue in his cheek when promoting his work. “I think my art is very sophisticated, very pure, and undoubtedly fine art.”

Similarly, while self-promotion for its own sake may be a honored tradition in the era of performance art, Gross wants nothing to do with it.

“I may get a lot of press, but I’m only a vehicle. I’m only an instrument being used by the planet to accomplish what it needs to have happen,” he said.

(By the way, he noted a moment later, he forgot to mention that he does his best work while watching the Arsenio Hall Show. “I don’t know why. He’s got an enlightened attitude. I also make pretty good ones when I’m watching Letterman.”)

Excess Packaging

Anyone worthy of their Earth shoes might be tempted to point out to Gross that a primary cause of the trash crisis is American society’s addiction to excess packaging. To convey an anti-waste theme by wrapping trash in plastic and adding a heavy paper label and two staples might strike some folks as a bit like printing warnings about the depletion of the ozone layer on styrofoam.

Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume, someone might ask, that just as millions of pet rocks presumably clutter our nation’s animal cemeteries, Beverly Hills Trash packs will someday end their migration in landfills or circling the globe on overloaded garbage barges?

“I expect that people will not throw them away,” the artist replied.