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Junk
With Portia Munson
Featured in "Life 360" on PBS
Friday, Nov. 9, 2001; 3 p.m. EST
One person's junk is another person's masterpiece...
Are you a thrower or saver? Have you always thought there was a reason
for saving all those colorful beer bottles and used cans? We all have junk, but what we
each do with it is probably different. Oddly enough, there are some people who
intentionally look for junk to accumulate. But isn't junk useless?
Portia Munson doesn't think so. She even makes an art of it. Ask Munson your questions about her fascinating art online, Friday Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. EST.
Portia Munson is a visual artist who produces various types of art -- from
traditional oil paintings to the display of collected found items. Her
critically-acclaimed work has been exhibited throughout the United States,
Canada and Europe. She is most recognized for her Pink Project, which was
shown in the Bad Girls show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New
York in 1994. Portia Munson is now working on a piece called Lawn, which
will be a giant installation in an interior space made of green and plastic
discarded items. In her words, she "uses things that are not considered
valuable" and she turns them into valuable art. She believes "plastic
things can become meaningful, even though they are disposable."
Other stories about junk are in this week's episode of "Life 360," a Friday
night series on PBS (check local listings). Each week, "Life 360" invites
independent filmmakers, writers, comedians, musicians, and others to take
a theme apart, put it back together, and stand it on its head to discover
unexpected perspectives. This week, Life 360 examines "Junk."
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
washingtonpost.com:
Some examples of Portia's work:
Pink Project
washingtonpost.com:
Some more can be found here.
Washington, D.C.:
How did you get into using junk in your art?
Portia Munson: It sort of like many different answers at once. One is that I started by being attracted to the color pink. So I just would collect anything pink that I found and I would just find discarded things... things at yard sales, things on the street and started putting these things together. And I think I was drawn to color I guess out of trying to come up with my own identity as a girl. I started pretty young. So collecting all of these pink objects, now for over 30 years, I have a lot and I start to get at the meaning of this color through the disposable stuff our culture mass produces and that became really interesting for me to see what things are made in this color and in our culture it falls into a few categories of objects. Things for little girls, things that are for cleaning products, beauty products, sex toys and pet toys. Those are the general categories and that was really interesting.
From there it just became -- because of doing that piece, I went into collecting other kinds of junk in other categories to try to come up with their meanings. Right now I'm collecting green plastic and very interested in thinking of that in terms of the environment. This color green .. what does it stand for? The environment and nature, you know sort of thing. So, I'm doing the same thing with green.
I did another piece in between the pink and green stuff called garden that's made up of anything that goes in a garden that's mass produced.
Fredericksburg, Va.:
Your art makes me think of this fortune cookie message that I once got that said, "You see beauty in ordinary things."
Where do you get your inspiration?
Portia Munson: Ya, I think that's true. I see beauty in ordinary things and I think what I'm always trying to do is I feel like my work is a success when it is beautiful, but I'm always trying to get at the deeper meaning of objects and look at the underside. It's successful for me when it's beautiful but also disturbing in a constructive sense -- revealing. At it's best it does that.
Washington, D.C.:
Were you trained as an artist. I mean, did you go to art school?
Portia Munson: Yes. I went to lots of art classes, went to an art high school, Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union BSA, then Scougheegen Institute of art, then an MFA from Rutgers in New Jersey. I have also taught in the past, but it is a different thing from being an artist. My students liked me, but I'm a better artist than a teacher. I taught at Vassar and SUNY Purchase.
Collages?:
I was trained as a "fine artist" and have a career in computer graphics. I recently developed an interest in collages (the magazine and glue type.) Do you have any experience with this medium? Any ideas on how to develop it?
Portia Munson: I don't know exactly what to say about it. The first artists really doing that were the dadaists and surrealists and if you're not familiar with them, you should look into what they did with collage. It's a wonderful way to work.
Portia Munson: There's an interesting outsider artist called Henry Darger and he used collage and tracing and his work is really quite interesting.
Vienna, Va.:
Does your art make a statement about materialism or capitalism? What statement are you making, or would you rather the observer come to their own individual conclusion?
Portia Munson: I hope my work is just open for interpretation, so yes I leave it open. I feel as if I also hope my point of view comes across in the work and I think that it's hard for me to say, I mean -- I would say I'm an environmentalist and a feminist and what I mean by that is that I think that I'm really interested in this obsession with consumption that our culture has. And so a lot of my work is really looking at that. And I was born in the beginning of the sixties and just being a woman in the world, I feel fortunate to live in this country. Gender issues are definitely something I'm concerned about. Right now, my real top interest is environmental issues and how we consume so much stuff which also translates into polluting.
Washington, D.C.:
Do you still work in other mediums? Like paint?
Portia Munson: Yes. I do. And my sort of my original medium which continues to be my stabilizing medium is painting. I paint in a traditional way. I paint will oil paints on linen, small still lifes. They're traditional, but generally of discarded objects.
Baltimore, Md.:
What were the works of art or artists who originally inspired you to become one yourself?
Portia Munson: I don't think I was necessarily inspired by any particular artist. I realized I was one from the time I was very young and it was partly a way of communicating and it came out of being severely dyslexic and I had a hard time in school and it was a way of expressing my intelligence. That was more like how I started. Then, of course I've been inspired by artists along the way.
Washington, D.C.:
Where do you find the junk for your art? And how did you think of using junk for art?
Portia Munson: I studied with people like Barbara Kruger and Martha Rasler and hans hacka and they were all sort of political artists of the seventies. And the message that I got from them -- they're conceptual, minimal -- the thing I learned from studying with them was that if you have something you want to say then you just figure out how to say that. So, I am a painter first, but I realized I can't say everything I want to say just using paint. So, I looked for other things I could use, like this discarded stuff. I like to leave myself open to working with anything.
Washington, D.C.:
Here's a question a lot of artists struggle with -- how do you find your own voice?
Portia Munson: I feel like my work is most successful is when it's work that is completely interesting to me. I just completely follow what it is that I'm interested in and what I want to say, so in a way just being really true to yourself. Follow what you're interested in. Some of my best work, I've started -- like the pink stuff -- collecting it for myself. I wasn't even thinking of it as work that I was going to show. You do what you're interested in and keep at it.
Silver Spring, Md.:
When you put together a display, do you already have an idea of what you want to say with it, or does the idea develop as you're working?
Portia Munson: It's kind of both. I usually have some sort of idea and then as I work it sort of fills itself out. The ideas come out of it and that's part of making work that's sort of exciting. You find out things and change it.
Bethesda, Md.:
Are your pieces created and then stay the same forever... like held together with glue or something? Or do they change slightly as they're installed in different venues? Do you add to them over time?
Portia Munson: Well, it's different for different pieces. I have two different pink pieces that are pretty set. One is glued and the other is in cases. And then the other pieces are kind of constantly evolving. Except one piece I did, "The pink project" the table, all the pieces are there, but I have to reassemble it every time.
Arlington, Va.:
Where do you get your "junk" or "material?" I hope you don't go picking through dumps or people's trash cans!
Portia Munson: I've lived in Provincetown for a couple of years and in all of Mass. and in one of the Life 360 programs is or was about the dump on Martha's Vineyard -- but we have these wonderful dumps where you bring your trash, but they also have swap shops -- stuff people don't need anymore, but is still good. So it's like a free thrift shop and I used to go every single day and sometimes more than once a day and collect. I've also spent time walking on the beach finding stuff. When I travel I buy cheap little pink and green things and ship them home.... ummm, thrift shops, dollar stores. I especially like it when I find things that have been discarded.
Arlington, Va.:
How did you get involved with Life 360 and how does your story fit into the show?
Portia Munson: I got involved because someone works on the program who was a student of mine and I haven't seen tonight's show and I'm not sure but I think its because I take the discarded stuff of our culture and make art with it. I think that's how it fits in.
Falls Church, Va.:
What do you say to people who say your work isn't art, but still just junk?
Portia Munson: I haven't really had anybody say that and I think just hearing about it it may sound like junk, but I"m very much into having the work I make be aesthetically pleasing on some level. I've had artists say to me, that the pink table for example, looks like a painting because the color's so rich. The color is very intense, so they're very colorful and at their best they have this thing of being beautiful, but a little bit repulsive. Because as you get close you realize some of the stuff is dirty because I found it in the street.
Washington, D.C.:
What is it about your work that defines it as art? Maybe describe one of your works, tell us what it is meant to convey and how your interpretation conveys that.
Portia Munson: I'll describe The Garden. It's a room filled with anything that would go into a garden, but is man made mass produced. So it's made up of plastic flowers and stuffed bunnies and floral dresses and the walls and ceiling are all covered with floor length floral dresses. There's a vanity covered with anything having to do with grooming, but is decorated with flowers. So the whole room is very dense and there's a videotape that's embedded in the piece of flowers being pollinated and opening. It's thinking about beauty and how we define it. And also about nature and how we mass-produce nature and also how women are often equated with flowers and nature. It also has a strong floral smell from different things. So it's sort of about this idea of manufactured beauty and nature. There's lots of different layers of meaning that you could get from it. It's also a little bit about death. One thing I'm fascinated with is this idea of manufacturing nature and beauty and how in your homes you can surround yourself with things that represent nature -- and it's not directly real nature.
Portia Munson: It's hard. These are works that -- I haven't sold a single installation or a work that's made of junk, but that's also not my motivation. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn't be doing that stuff.
In a certain sense I'm a sort of anthropologist and very much interested in what people get rid of and who we are. I think it's really interesting to look. I live in an old dutch farmhouse in the Catskills of New YOrk. I've been making a garden there for 10 years. I save everything I find in the soil and it kind of is like a history of what had happened at the house. I see it as a history piece and I'm always trying to look at who I am, who we are through what we've thrown out.
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