Filthy! Dirt at the Wellcome Collection

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Gillian Whiteley gets mucky at the Wellcome Collection

Trash, garbage, rubbish, debris and waste – whether human, organic, inorganic or manufactured - has been a central focus of my research and writing for more than a decade. So a trip to the Dirt exhibition at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road was certainly something I relished.  After making a trip to the Wellcome in January to meet up with Susan Signe Morrison, an American author of a cultural study of excrement in the late Middle Ages and academic expert in ‘waste studies’, I visited the show again in its final weeks for a closer examination.

One of the first things encountered by visitors to the exhibition was an observation from the British anthropologist Mary Douglas that dirt is defined by its context – in fact, as she said, there is nothing ‘absolute’ about dirt at all, its merely ‘matter out of place’. Hence, in an exploration of the essentially relative nature of dirt, the exhibition was organized around six themes: Home, Street, Hospital, Museum, Community and Land. Each of the six themed exhibition spaces included historical and contemporary exhibits and artefacts, documents and books. Multimedia formats provided a fascinating account of the social and cultural histories of domestic cleaning, urban sanitation, public health and hygiene, rubbish-collection and disposal.

The scope of the exhibition was ambitious – probably a little over-ambitious,  taking in many different perspectives on ‘dirt’ from the development of housekeeping regimes in Delft and scientific discoveries of bacteria in 17th-century Netherlands to the plight of current day dry-latrine scavengers in New Delhi.  In addition, each themed space included contemporary artworks, some of which – such as Serena Korda’s wonderful Laid to Rest project – had been especially commissioned for the show.

Inevitably, given the density of information presented in this kind of show and the highly selective nature of the items exhibited as ‘evidence’, some of the themes were more successful than others in conveying a coherent account of the issues. Some of the choices of exhibits seemed rather haphazard and, overall, the exhibition lacked unity. In particular, some of the artworks – such as Susan Collis’s Waltzer – were not fully integrated into the displays and, a cynic might say, they sometimes felt like contemporary artsy padding.  In addition, it adopted a conventional mode of gallery display which presented the casual visitor with a selection of items for serial perusal (and, occasionally, a kind of gratuitous inverse form of titillation). Hence it failed to provide or encourage any real questioning of the more urgent global – or even  local –issues of the political economies of sanitation, public health and ecological aspects of ‘dirt’.

Nonetheless, some of the individual exhibits were absolutely fascinating in themselves and I certainly found plenty to interest the visitor. Particularly good was the exploration of the stinking streets of London in 1854 - with its mapped ‘miasma’ (‘bad air’ which was, mistakenly, thought to be the cause of cholera at the time) and its army of scavengers, dust-collectors, recyclers and toilers. London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by the Victorian journalist, Henry Mayhew, featured here with accompanying images of  ‘toshers’,  ‘sewer-workers’ and ‘bone-grubbers’. Then there were examples of real figures immortalized in Pierce Egan’s prints in Life in London (1821) such as Peggy Jones, the ‘Mud-Lark’, a well-known red-haired 40-year-old woman who apparently used to fish out lit coals from the Thames at Blackfriars with her bare feet.

Elsewhere, and further illustrated in the accompanying publication, were Arthur Munby’s 19th-century photographic portraits of his ‘maidservant’ (and eventual wife) Hannah Cullwick. At Munby’s request, Cullwick dressed up in various guises and kept ‘diaries of drudgery’ to satisfy his somewhat disturbing ‘fascination’ for working-class women. In the exhibition, the fetishized images of Hannah as a ‘slave’ and ‘scrubbing the floor’ were rather casually described as an aspect of ‘slum tourism’, a topic which demanded a good deal more socio-political analysis than a cursory comment. Nevertheless, the inclusion of such material by the curators is laudable and certainly raised many questions about ‘dirt’, morality, social class and ethnicity, which could not be addressed fully in an exhibition of this kind.

Indeed, the lavishly illustrated publication Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (£20, Profile Books, London) produced to accompany the exhibition does provide an excellent additional source of historical documents, images and six specially commissioned essays.  The illustrative material includes historical posters, prints and photographic work from various collections, which have rarely been reproduced. In keeping with the exhibition itself, the book incorporates an eclectic range of material from Brian Ralph’s luridly mustard-hued graphic novel, Club Crud to a wonderful vignette of reportage, R.H. Horne’s ‘Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed’ (1850) a short piece about a day in the life of Gaffer Doubleyear, Jem Clinker and the searchers and sorters of one of the great dust-heaps of London. The essay by Rose George on ‘The Blue Girl’, a reference to one of the most interesting exhibits – an alarming ‘before and after’ nineteenth century portrait of a young Venetian woman showing the characteristic blue skin affliction of cholera - examines the history of the epidemic of this deadly disease and its colonial connections. An unattributed caricature print from 1832 – John Bull Catching the Cholera – depicts a skeletal cholera victim, dark-skinned and Asiatic, being clubbed back through the ‘wooden walls of England’. This gives us an all too familiar and persistent image of the defence of white England against the colonial uncivilized ‘other’.

The final essay in the book, Robin Nagle’s ‘The History and Future of Fresh Kills’ provides a valuable account of one of the most interesting and extensive public landfill projects currently in process. At its peak in 1987, Fresh Kills, a huge landfill site (spanning 2,200 acres) just off the island of Manhattan, was taking in 29,000 tons of New York’s garbage. When it closed in 2001, it was the world’s largest municipal landfill site.  It was re-opened after 9/11 to receive the debris from the destroyed World Trade Centre but the presence of human remains amongst the wreckage generated political tension and public outrage.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been collaborating with various other artists and architects on the Fresh Kills for many years as the project to transform the site began before it took in the debris from Ground Zero. I interviewed her in 2006 at her office at the New York Sanitation Department office, where she has been in artist-in-residence since 1977. She talked about her various activities and projects over the last 30 years, much of which has been dedicated to revealing the political significance and social value of the largely ‘hidden labour’ carried out by refuse and sanitation workers.  Fittingly, the Dirt exhibition featured a series of Laderman’s works, including extensive interviews and footage from the Fresh Kills project. By 2030, the project aims to reclaim the colossal space and transform it into a public park and, as the exhibition literature notes,  ‘to discover whether a land deemed irrevocably polluted can become a symbol of renewal and hope’.

Besides the publication of the accompanying book and the BBC TV series Filthy Cities broadcast in Spring, the ‘Dirt’ exhibition has also been accompanied by a whole season of activities. These included a programme of Dirty Tours, Dirty Events, Dirty Banquets, Scratch and Sniff Cards, Filth Fair, and Family Days, many of which were held at locations beyond Euston Road such as the Eden project and Glastonbury.  All in all, with the great Kings Cross dust-heap, Santiago Sierra’s huge blocks of sculpted human excrement and Serena Korda’s ritualized burial of her dust-brick stack, in disparate ways, the Wellcome Trust’s filthy season has reminded us just how much dirt continues to be an integral part of our daily life.