We
are drowning in paper. From cramped urban apartments to monumental
landfills, sheets, stacks and reams saturate and consume space.
Suddenly swamped by a steady, decade-long tide of printed matter,
a Bronx man was trapped for two days in his ten-foot by ten-foot
room in December 2003. Wedged in but standing upright, Patrice
Moore was buried when his collection of books, newspapers, magazines
and junk mail collapsed. Fifty garbage bags of paper and one
hour later, emergency personnel finally “unpapered” Mr.
Moore down to the waist. From floor to ceiling and wall to wall
were copies of Vibe and Scuba Diving, ad sheets and books that,
according to the New York Times, “he ordered with a variety
of names and never paid for.” Mr. Moore intended to sell
the books and papers on the city’s streets, but instead
found himself entombed by communications in a windowless room.
Another
urban landscape, vastly magnified in scale, is similarly flooded
with heaps of paper. At the edge
of New York City on Staten Island four mounds of refuse spanning
over 2,200 acres form a shifting terrain that also threatens
to collapse. This monumental site, the Fresh Kills landfill,
is composed
principally of paper. All manner of discarded print, from newspapers
to magazines, posters and flyers, congeals in sprawling mountains
which, together with assorted food scraps and household remains,
tower up to a sizeable 225 feet. Newspapers dating from the
late 1960s have been preserved in the tight and dark spaces
of rot.
A site that documents recent cultural histories of consumption,
the landfill looms to such an impressive size because nearly
50 percent of its contents consist of paper. |