Organized street cleaning wouldn’t appear until about four decades later: in 1702, authorities instructed residents to make piles of dirt in front of their homes each Friday, to be removed by Saturday night. In the late sixteen-fifties, a law banned citizens from tossing “tubs of odor and nastiness” into the streets, but neglected to mention what, exactly, they were supposed to do with their trash. “New York City rarely had a day in its history without a waste problem,” Melosi writes. The question, for both, isn’t just where our trash goes but how it shapes and reflects the world it comes from. His book, which arrives nearly twenty years after Fresh Kills’s closure, can be read as a companion to Matta-Clark’s film. Melosi writes in his recent book “ Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City.” Melosi, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Houston, is the author of “ Garbage in the Cities” and “ The Sanitary City” you could call him a scholar of waste. “Fresh Kills is a dramatic example of consumption gone wild,” the environmental historian Martin V. When Matta-Clark made the film, in 1972, it received roughly half of the solid waste in the city, and had long been the largest landfill in the world, eventually growing to about twenty-two hundred acres of trash. The final shots are of pools of water rimmed by garbage and plants, and hot piles of waste tossing off black smoke.įresh Kills opened in 1948. Like a bear with salmon, the bulldozer skewers, drags, and tears the truck, which is loaded with other trash onto a trailer, carried farther into the landfill, and interred. Gasoline dribbles, then gushes, out of the tank. The bulldozer flips the ruined car and presses it into the ground. We see endless trash-strewn fields, edged by giant machines colonies of seagulls standing guard under an elevated highway a factory resting along a large bay.Įventually, the truck slams head first into the blade of an enormous bulldozer. Then a more industrial landscape appears: New York’s notorious landfill, Fresh Kills. In the opening shot, the vehicle chugs down a marshy road walled in by reeds. The most memorable piece of the night was a film called “Fresh Kill,” which narrates the death of an old truck. films of the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark. A few years after I moved to New York, in 2016, a friend invited me to a gallery in Chelsea that was showing the original 16-mm.
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