“Memo Gutierrez’s KRAG and His Method of Making a Message from Trash” — by: Alejandro Elias Perea
Krag refers to both an illegal dumpsite on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas and a body of artwork created by Memo Gutierrez using found materials from the same site.
Memo is enamored by Krag. He keeps going back because he finds beauty and inspiration there; it is where he gathers many of his ideas. I met him at his studio and we talked about his art. Krag is an ongoing project of exploring, discovering, and retrieving the items that have been illegally dumped outside the city limits of El Paso.
He showed me Krag that day, the temperature was 103 degrees. We drove out to the limits of El Paso and stopped at a Dollar Store. I bought a blue cap and fake suede moccasins; I was wearing flip flops, and they were not enough to protect my feet from the searing sand and desert thorns. We walked through the snaking dirt roads of the site, on either side there were heaps of garbage strewn every few yards. There were so many paths to choose from, they seemed to go for miles all around us. Disparate piles of every sort of illegally dumped item surrounded us. We shared ideas about what objects could be used to make art. What he saw at Krag was a gold mine of material to sculpt with, where others saw trash he had found treasure. We discussed the formality, the color, the movement, and the materiality of whatever caught our eye. We dragged massive chunks of concrete that were bound by bouquets of rebar and held them together with dead yucca cactuses to see them as a sculptural object. We made improvisational plans on how we might merge items using wire or by stacking and balancing them in certain ways. After we started to feel nauseous from the extreme heat, we headed back to the city. Before we left, Memo made plans for his next visit. Taking note of where certain objects were and how he could easily find them again for future sculptures.
Krag is full of residential trash. Memo believes that these cast-off materials, such as photographs, letters, beds, and sentimental personal objects, are charged with an energy that attracts him to them; like the couch on which countless conversations were held, mattresses on which people were conceived and where both dreams and nightmares played out in the night. He spoke of beds, in particular, having a specific energetic resonance. Memo’s mainly concerned with energies of the home. Krag is the home to the dejected memories, the site of the afterlife of El Paso’s belongings. Memo believes junk assemblage resonates so profoundly with him because as a child his mother insisted that extra materials from a home remodeling be given to Memo to play with. From this material, Memo created small installations that resembled altars and quiet contemplation spaces. This was the beginning of a life of art creation.
On the curved surface of the Earth, all movement happens on an arching path. At Krag, two spaces, physical and metaphysical interact together. Krag is the lowest point in the bend of a gravitational field of human desire. Moving material, forced by the socio-political markets of production, capitalism, globalism, and consumerism, comes to a state of rest at Krag. Behind this energy, are the ideas and motivating factors that plan and execute the manufacture of a product. These same forces propagate the consumer identities, dictating the purchase of these products. The commodification of natural materials and the manipulation of the human mind and body are where Krag originated from. Krag is the resting place of dreams and visions and Memo reconstitutes them back to life.
When we returned from Krag, Memo and I had a long conversation about his art. I began by sharing what I thought about him retrieving garbage from Krag to refashion it into artwork. I said that I saw him on a metaphysical journey marked by his encounters with objects whose origins were very far away, both in time and distance.
The success of artwork from Krag is that it is layered with meanings, histories that conjure so many pathways that lead to personal and social discourse about consumer culture. The elements of the earth are removed from one place and processed at another; the material is then made into the object. Factories churn day and night as rumbling freight trucks go in and leave packed to capacity, one after another. Cargo ships, floating mountains of steel, stacked with products criss cross the ocean without cease. Elsewhere, tired hands toil to earn money. The products arrive at stores, are bought and paid for with dollars, but the reality is that precious time is the true means of exchange. These products are used for some time but soon break or wear out and they are tossed into the trash and many of them end up at Krag. Years may pass, and the objects are one day disposed of and carried away to Krag. They lay on the desert floor, slowly decomposing in the desert heat. For reasons not wholly understood, an artist reclaims this object. The object has been transformed by the desert sun and wind. These objects are used to create a new object that is loaded with meaning, potential energy, beauty, and complexity; it’s been rebirthed.
I asked Memo what his role was. Was he simply an artist? He mentioned that his art was part of the culmination of the Anthropocene narrative, the age of humanity on the Earth. As a sort of prophetic tool, his art represents the nearing of the end, like totems of the apocalypse. However, I disagreed with him. I see him as more of an alchemist or sorcerer than a prophet of doom.
Aside from such profound metaphors, the art carries a more real world message. The reality is that Krag represents the cost of human labor and the waste of that therein. People’s lives on earth are spent oppressed by a system of exchanging our bodies and minds for the money required to survive. There’s a system that’s at play in the movement of material to Krag. The heartbeat of the beast that exists to supply Krag with a never ending flow of waste has, at its core, a fabricated construct that depends on the collectively held belief that money is worth the equivalent of human life. This is why junk art is so important today, because artists like Memo bring back the evidence of the unstoppable machine of progress, and show us the insanity of uninhibited manufacture and production, and the social failure of waste management.
The flow of manufactured products through the free market to the desert dump is powered by unseen forces, they’re human, yet unnatural. The powerful vacuum of greed and power is driving the river of trash, it is the waste of material and human energy.
Where Memo saw his role in an apocalyptic narrative, I saw a story of salvation.
Indeed, junk is often referred to as “salvage.” The Latin root of this word, salve, means “to save,” in particular when relating to sunken vessels. The dump is the final site, the end game of our dysfunctional codependency to consumerism and manufacturing, a system that seems to have no emergency stop button. The Technium has become self-automated, and there is no stopping it now.
Ironically, the desert dump is a welcome relief to all this madness. The junk bakes in the sun, and freezes at night on the desert floor. Often desert creatures will make an unnatural home in it. The desert accepts it as it does Memo, solace and even inspiration is to be found at Krag; the fury and frenzy of the capitalist consumer torment finally finds the stillness of peace.
The idea that all things have a spirit is often attributed to Native American beliefs. Memo has, as all Mexicans do, indigenous ancestry and Krag is located in historically Native American territory, the desert of the South West. Memo gives consideration to this spiritual materiality and to the origins of the basic elements that are given up by the Earth to be transformed, traded, consumed, and discarded. The desert at Krag becomes the all-forgiving embrace of a mother. Dust to dust ashes to ashes, we all, human and material, return to the earth. Elements lifted from the ground to make an epic journey in an arching path across the Earth, the end of which is the desert, the homecoming of the spirit. In this sense, the junk artist that gathers their material at Krag makes a pilgrimage to the site of the reclamation of our souls of our former belongings.
The illegal dump is a site of the transformation of human thought, where the artist can manipulate physical reality through art creation. Memo’s art objects that are created from the trash at Krag contain all of these multiple levels of meaning and narratives about the nature of the world today. Memo shared with me his concern of having to move away from Krag to pursue making art in other cities. Junk from another geography would not be the same as that at Krag, his longtime resource for art material. Our trash, although thrown out and pushed away from sight, remains highly personal. What we wish to push away is often the closest thing to our personal identity, our secrets, and our deepest shames.
Krag is a fractal, the disorder within the order.
Our human bodies are often viewed as a site for order in the universe. We see our junk, our death, and our excrement as the disorder. Making art from the garbage at Krag is Memo’s, and all artists’ that utilize waste, efforts to create order out of the chaos.
Memo’s goal with his art is to create a dialogue about our dysfunctional relationship to the material, but also to ourselves and our humanity. Memo plays a part in the prevailing social narrative surrounding the politics of visual culture. Toward the end of our conversation, I urged him to talk about his role as a producer of cultural objects, and to the significance of creating art from Krag and his is role as cultural curator. He has no desire to be anonymous, yet he doesn’t want his personality to affect the way his art is viewed. Memo wants his art to be seen independent from it’s maker. Regarding what Memo thinks about his response to contemporary issues like climate change and the destruction of the environment, he said he understands that the message of his art is both personal and social. He wants to be acknowledged in this regard as a kind of artist/archeologist, a researcher, and an investigator of the human condition in these times.
