TRASH TALK: Top, Dumpster Divers Sara Benowitz (right) and Gretchen Altabef at the opening of “Archives Alchemy” at the National Archives last Friday; their outfits and the show’s artworks employ materials the Archives were getting rid of after a renovation. Below, a detail from Altabef’s large microfilm-and-red-tape weaving.
DOWN IN THE
DUMPSTER Going through the National Archives’ trash with the Dumpster Divers.
WORDS BY Emily Guendelsberger PHOTOS BY Neal
Santos
he red-carpet chatter for the Dumpster Divers’ annual awards banquet at Famous Fourth Street Deli is infinitely more entertaining than at the Golden Globes. What are you wearing, Sara Benowitz? “I’m wearing an outfit made from mortgage documents from the 1950s, governmental red tape (which we learned also comes in beige and white), microfilm sewn together and I have the Constitution around my shoulders, held together with red tape.” It’s not the real Constitution, obviously, though until recently it was housed at the Philadelphia branch of the National Archives. Many of the flashy costumes on the 40 or so Divers packed into the awards banquet last Thursday incorporated similar leftovers from “Archives Alchemy: The Art of the Dumpster Divers,” a collaboration between the loose, found-art collective and the National Archives’ trash that would open the next day. The Archives began a renovation about five years ago, moving much of their collection to a more modern facility in the Northeast from the old marble building shared with the old Post Office at 10th and Chestnut. As with any move, stuff surfaced that had outlived its usefulness: miles of microfilm that had already been digitized, for example, and buckets of red tape. That’s literal, not metaphorical, says Leslie Simon, regional director for the Archives. In the 19th century, she says, “they used to fold
things into thirds, and then tie everything together from a court case with red tape.” The move meant liberating thousands of these documents: “We untie the red tape, or cut it,” unfold and flatten each document, then re-file everything in bar-coded folders and boxes for use or scanning. The renovation involved bar-coding 150,000 items. The annual Divers awards banquet is the opposite of the Archives, where inside voices are mandatory and everything is in its right place. There’s no schedule. For about an hour, there’s just the din of dozens of simultaneous conversations between people in sequined bolero jackets or sieves repurposed as Viking helmets. It barely quiets down when someone yells at the top of his lungs: “I have an award to present!” Like their outfits, Diver awards are handmade and have no central governing principle — if you want to bestow an award, you have to first win the battle for everyone’s attention, then do it. Some Divers rolled up with multiple cardboard boxes full of trophies and medals; at least a hundred are given out. It’s chaos. This is how they like it. “This is a group that has no structure. None,” Neil Benson, a co-founder of the group, declares. At the very first meeting in 1992, he came up with the group’s single, surprisingly effective rule: “You can’t adjourn a meeting until you know when and where the next meeting is.” And so a group that first assembled for lunch more than two decades ago still meets monthly to discuss diners, found art, their latest finds (Benson’s all-time favorite: “Katherine Hepburn’s yearbook,” which he says he found in a trash can at 52nd and Market) and whatever else is on their minds. The Divers took a ton of materials from the Archives, but they didn’t put a dent in the stuff marked for the trash. There’s so much that I even somehow ended up leaving with a disembodied book spine the size of half a baseball bat. Simon, noticing it in the debris as we toured the near-complete renovation, picked the ancient-looking thing up with a hey-you-want-this? shrug, as if it were a pretty leaf from a September sidewalk. “When we were taking the shelves down, we discovered a whole lot of spines that had become separated from their books over the years” and inadvertently kicked under continued on adjacent page
14 | P H I L A D E L P H I A C I T Y PA P E R |
J A N U A R Y 1 6 - J A N U A R Y 2 2 , 2 0 1 4 | C I T Y PA P E R . N E T