You'd never know it from a stinky saunter through Chinatown or a glance at the tracks in most subway stations here, but apparently New York is so bereft of garbage that it needs to import. Last week the Parisian photojournalists Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron opened a temporary exhibit in a SoHo storefront featuring 25 large-scale photographs of trash. Not just anyone's trash. No, this is Star Trash.
If you've always wanted to know what brand of milk they drink in Tom Hanks's household, now's your chance. (Horizon Organic, also the milk of choice at Nicolas Cage's place. Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith use Lactaid.) Someone at Charlize Theron's place is leaning on Nicorette to wean themselves from cigarettes. Madonna's Kaballah fixation apparently stretches back to at least 1996, when an empty bottle of Manischewitz cream white concord wine turned up in the recycling bin. Someone in Liz Taylor's household bought a copy of The National Enquirer which had a story about Liz's "bizarre plan to live forever."
"You can see the personality of a civilization through the garbage," said Rostain this week, standing in the gallery at 28 Wooster temporarily dubbed the Star Trash Store. "You see the nude truth! That's why we didn't ask permission. If you ask permission, of course everything will be organized with a publicist, and it will not be the truth."
Rostain, 45, and Mouron, 49, were inspired by a sociology professor at the University of Montpellier whose students studied contemporary civilization by collecting the household garbage of French families for one year.
In 1996 they flew to L.A., bought one of those maps of stars' homes, and waited until nightfall to grab the goods from the curb. They clean the garbage, artistically lay it out on black velvet, then snap away. They returned earlier this year for another hit, yielding some timely Oscar-related material scattered in among the empty Evian bottles and Doritos packs, like a note from the environmental group Global Green thanking Theron for arriving at the Oscars in a hybrid car.
New Yorkers fed up with apartment living are probably saying a quiet prayer for the anonymity of their domestic situations, since their garbage ends up down a chute rather that out on the curb for journalists to snatch.
Rostain and Mouron score some sly political points. A 1996 portrait of the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Maria Shriver rubbish contains a cheery fax cover note from Shriver to Teresa Heinz and John Kerry. There are a few documents related to Kennedy family charities (Shriver is a Kennedy cousin). And someone in the household of the then-future Republican governor appears to have had an affinity for contraband Cuban cigars.
But most of the portraits, which sell for $6,000 U.S. (a portion of which goes to charities for the homeless, some of whom are on intimate terms with other people's garbage), just confirms US magazine's theory that celebrities are Just Like Us! Plowing through all the shots of Evian bottles and Cocoa Pebbles boxes and granola-bar wrappers and McDonald's clamshells and Corona and Michelob bottles thrown out will go a long way to convincing people that our gods have disappointingly common tastes. (Stouffer's could probably build an ad campaign over how many celebs consume their frozen-food dinners.) The one exception to that would be Tom Cruise, whose garbage includes an exhaustive list for his assistants to help track the more than 100 items he uses to keep him in tip-top Stepford Husband condition. The list includes dozens of vitamins and supplements, from Chinese herbs to Cal Max, Emergen-C, melatonin, chromium picolinate, Essential calcium and Bio Lax.
Rostain and Mouron insist they excise all material of a sexual or medical nature in order to avoid embarrassing their subjects and to dodge accusations of having tabloid souls. That's a shame, mainly because of the garbage we wouldn't see anyway: Despite her reputation, I'd bet we'd find nothing kinky in Madonna's trash.
But a culture gap led to an unfortunate gaffe. Larry King's garbage included an empty package of Depends, the adult incontinence aid. "We didn't know!" protested Rostain. "We thought it was something for a child!" (The 70-year-old King has young children by his fifth wife, and most of the garbage is filled with kids' refuse: Scooby-Doo Band-Aids, drawings, kids' toothpaste.) They pulled the photo from the exhibit, but don't seem to mind the publicity it garnered.
Rostain says a few museums have shown interest, though I can't imagine the pieces will have much staying power. All of them together don't come close to the crackling energy or implicit critique of commercialism of a single Andreas Gursky photograph. They're not so much art as journalism, which as we know usually ends up in the trash.
Simon Houpt