Walking, Decay, Endurance: Two Year-Long Works by Yuji Agematsu

Inside of a plastic zip bag marked 01.06.95 in the upper corner in white pen with small, neat hand-written numerals lies a pink, probably polyester, rosette (the kind that decorates a pair of cheap panties) and a dead cockroach (the big kind), supine, its legs exposed. The plastic fibers of the rosette, processed to resemble silk, retain their pink imitation freshness. The cockroach, beginning to dry and crumble despite its airtight plastic grave, has lost an antenna that has sunk to the bottom of the bag. The plastic fiber flower, never alive to begin with, will remain intact long past the span of an ordinary human life, to continue to display its chintzy imitation liveliness. If not for its zipped-up entombment it might now decorate a landfill or an ocean garbage patch where it would endure for generations, its fibers interacting with human and non-human lives in unaccountable ways. The rosette, made to be stitched onto disposable fast fashion, will out-exist us all. The cockroach, on the other hand—one lonely representative of the hoards inhabiting the crowded New York islands—is dead and will inevitably disappear into dust. As the saying goes about the fortitude of this species, cockroaches will outlive us all. But not this one. And not any of them in the way that the plastic fabric flower will continue to decorate the resting place of this specific cockroach as it steadily turns to rubble.

This plastic bag is tacked onto a metal sheet with thirty others in a tidy 6x6 grid marking the thirty-one days of January 1995, the first month in a year-long series of artworks called ziplocs made by the artist Yuji Agematsu. Each bag is filled with an assemblage of small items found on the artist’s daily walks through Manhattan. The items vary: bits of bone, tile, fibers, hair, lollipop sticks, condoms, brightly colored plastics, or any other generally ignored scrap of detritus ubiquitously spread underfoot as one navigates the city’s sidewalks. Their selection and arrangement evoke both meticulous criminological evidence catalogued to indict an unknown perpetrator of unknown crimes, and an archaeological archive of fragments yet to be interpreted by researchers but are assembled in the hopes that a future discovery might fit them together. As is also often true of both crime evidence bags and archive drawers full of fragments, however, it is the collector and cataloguer themselves, and the structure of their labor and life, that appear in these assemblages.

The bags assembled onto twelve metal sheets mark a year in the life of Agematsu and the daily repetition of his walks through the city. Yet in the objects’ temporal variances of endurance and decay, from melancholic brevity to terrifying longevity, they mark a dizzying range of timescales and lifetimes that intersect through happenstance and choice with Agematsu’s life. Many of the materials that he has found and repurposed will not decay in our lifetimes, and will rather endure far beyond our own personal finitude, perhaps even the finitude of our species. Many might also melt, crumble, or decay into an unrecognizable heap in the span of a few days. The monstrous and magical possibilities of transformation in the overflowing trash heaps produced by late-capitalist human civilization are produced in small-scale daily experiments here, as these strange, irregular, lumpy things of disgust and beauty are catalogued with clinical neatness like taxonomies of disaster and renewal.

In later work, Agematsu continued his daily practice of walking, collecting, and assembling, but the formal mode of display shifted. In the zips his daily found objects are assembled into small sculptures, each inside of a cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. The full twelve months of 2003 were on display at the gallery. The cellophane wrappers are arranged inside of a clear acrylic display box with shelves. Whereas the square 6x6 grid of the earlier work seemed to resist a visual association with ordered calendar...