The Garbage of Earthly Delights

By Jack Stroud

As for looking like you’re ‘bouta squeeze butterflies out of your solar plexus; lolloping cave-man like around a box TV framed in brightly painted polygons of cardboard; playing tug of war with your intestines when you’re an amorphous blob; twirling gracefully on an aerial swing amidst the chaos; running in stationary slo-mo towards your death induced by an ineluctable and penetrating scream; terminally reorganizing a shelf with jars full of Rage, Indifference, Back to School, Ex Best Friend, Faceless Lover, Lost Luggage, and Naked in Public; trying to eat fruit hanging from monofilament without using your hands; getting stomped on by your puppet boyfriend, then flirting with him to a saprogenic extent; curling up under a blanket of trash; being resurrected by the soft touch of a woman with beads hanging parabolic from temple to third eye to temple; struggling futile against giant rubber bands that strap your body to the wall; and countless other ineffable and unaparent movements, La Compagnie du DUMP RUN’s Valentines weekend performance, The Garbage of Earthly Delights, was a success. 

Conceived of in December, completed on a budget of <$200, and put on in a garage in the alley behind Doo’s Donuts, the show lassoed crowds of 15-30 people each three PMs of its running. The performance as self-contained went about 40 minutes but lent itself with unsettling ease towards looping. Adding to the discomforting aspects were a distinct lack of dialogue and discernable plot; giving unique attention to their bodies’ potential configurations, the performers moved zombie-eyed around the stage from station to station, scantly aware of each other’s (or the crowd’s) existence. There was definitely some kind of fishbowl element in effect. Audience members were confounded by attempts to derive “what it meant.” The three main performers as well as originators of the concept—Francis Laird, Piper Josephine, and Sophie—admitted an affinity for misuse of common objects, citing the abundance of waste in ours, The Trash Civilization, but were otherwise unkeen on foisting any kind of overarching message they had in mind, allowing, benevolently, the performance speak for itself. 

Laird, resident butoh dancer, explained that holding a live performance now, as things are, is an act of resistance. “The online stuff is lonely,” she continued, “And a livestream can’t replace a live performance,” which, to Laird as well as her cohort members, is a form of healing. The three of them spoke also on the difficulties of being a performer right now. In-person exhibitions worldwide have all but ceased over the past year as a result of the pandemic, leaving countless artists out of work and without an outlet. Release dates and concerts get shuffled down the calendar ever further. Streaming services are swallowing the market how a boa constrictor does a mongoose—whole. Maybe jaded, I’d pretty much forgot that live performances were even a thing. 

But DUMP RUN struggled with the pecuniary aspect of performance even before the last year. “We don’t know how to ask for money,” said Josephine, “And we don’t want to have to. Because sometimes we can’t afford to pay for shows too.” Over on the edge of the viewing area, a lambent gumball machine apprised itself of oncoming or outgoing showgoers, and of the opportunity to donate. “But even if we didn’t even break even,” Josephine continued, “we’d still do it. Because we have to, you know.”

The flyer for the show advertised “a 2 hour exhibition designed for transient viewing” and included a couple reminders to please adhere to standard COVID conventions. Which, readers may be assuaged in knowing, achieved its intent. Plus, DUMP RUN devised for the show’s bouncer to have a thermometer for the viewing public’s optional use. The practicality or plausibility of holding a show in these times, I’m saying, was not lost on DUMP RUN amidst romantic reveries of Art, or something. Oh, that it could be… but persist as the situation does, they would still not have it that there be no pathologically prudent avenues (or alleyways) to this shared form of movement and expression in which they charter, and whereby they must discover new, and old ways of being, potentialities only ever realized in and of themselves: toes pointed skyward, hair brushing ground, breasts hanging weightless, luminosity outpouring.

Friday Feb. 12, opening night, showed that it was all possible; something that was only a mustard seed of an idea a couple months prior bloomed into the full deal on that night, despite the few inches of snow already on the ground and nice fat sparkly flakes coming down still. There was something spellbinding in it: the scenes of domestic life on set at once absorbingly pointless and all that much more eerily familiar; the menagerie of torn textiles; the ludicrous costumes; the lush soundtrack; the colors, forgiving and practical; the hazy light seeping in from nowhere; the pleasing effluvium of it all?

Talking with the members of DUMP RUN a couple days later, after Sunday’s matinee showing, Laird sliced a horizontal arch through the air with an open palm, indicating to the scattering audience, “That’s community,” she said, almost laughing at the self-evidence of her statement. 

•••

They got the name for the show from Heironymous Bosch’s 1510 triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is a certifiably religious opus made by a man who was himself godly. Considering his avaricious attention to detail and symbolism in the painting, it’d be surprising if he weren’t. But if he was pious at the altar, he was a flaming non-conformist at the easel.

A triptych (made of three, often-hinged panels) typically features religiously significant figures and/or scenes in the center panel. The center panel of The Garden, on the other hand, is a rollicking portrayal of nude young people bathing in shallow pools, picking plump apples, caressing each other inside giant bubbles, riding mythical creatures around in a big merry circle, getting fed baby-bird style by actual birds, sticking bouquets of flowers in each other’s butts, and a bunch of other despicably free stuff. In context, the left hand panel features the same pastoral/mythical vibes but is way less busy, God presenting Eve to Adam being the salient interaction here; the right hand panel is a dark and twisted hellscape from whence no person would return OK; 

and the outer panels hinge closed to display a gray, gray snowglobe-type world full of so much water: and this is said to represent either the third day of Genesis or the flood that, if it didn’t teach us anything, at least earned Noah his stripes. 

Taking the triptych from left to right, then, with the outer panel coming either first or last, it’s kinda hard not to read it as a warning against earthly indulgence and sin, lust and gluttony especially, all the merry-makers in the center panel blissfully unaware of the literal hell upcoming in the 2-D progression of their lives, until it was too late, long after they shoulda known better. But this painting is also notoriously mysterious, escaping the theoretical grasp of many an art historian. It’s just so abundant. A preliminary Google search or two brought up interpretations as far spread as, “What concerned Bosch was the essentially comic ephemerality of human life,” to, “It’s the best metaphor for Darwin’s theory of evolution,” to “We may infer that there is a mirror phenomena implied between the painting and the viewers,” to “We should see these erotic adventures in the context of the history of the world.”

But whichever way you wanna flip it, The Garden was a fascination to 14th century viewers and remains one for people today. Evidence: it is one of the biggest attractions in the Museo Nacional del Prado where it hangs; countless artworks owe inspiration to it (including this, The Garden of Emoji Delights); articles on it (add another to the list) abound; and the shelves of online markets overfloweth with Bosch themed merch. You could order yourself a fullprint tank top with The Garden on it today, if that kind of thing suits you. 

No doubt, it’s just a bizarre and fun thing to look at; you could spend hours dazed and confused in the breezeways of its towering architecture reminiscent a wormhole experiment gone wrong, everyday objects mashed together between which no intermediates are supposed to exist: cauliflower, glass beakers, erns, pink granite, twigs, cheese wheel, conch shell? More hours cataloguing a new genus of Bosch’s hybrid creatures. And yet more silently gawking at every absurd configuration of body, each secretive facial expression—detachment? oblivion? bliss? 

But there is also something really sad about it. Standing large and central in the right hand hell panel, there is a pallid, half tree stump, half cracked eggshell being with the solemn face of a man. Humans and human sized creatures simultaneously occupy the inside of his eggshell torso, tromp around the disk on top of his head, and generally treat his body like a jungle gym. He is scarred and old. Surrounded only by suffering and chaos, he is turning over his shoulder to look back at you: and many suppose this to be a self-portrait of Bosch. 

Of the dozens upon dozens of human figures in the triptych, he is the only one that seems to be aware that real people will be viewing it. Whether in that paradisiacal garden or the infernal pit, everyone else is perfectly engaged in what is before them. However depraved or silly their actions may be, they make whatever they are doing count. In their being as such, there is not a bashful face to be seen. 

And this is how it was in The Garbage of Earthly Delights as well; the performers harbored a fierce ambivalence towards the crowd as well as each other. In the world of that trash filled set, standard and tacit social conventions no longer applied. Here they could writhe and wriggle and roll and scream, cry and laugh and crumble and titter; they could be stupidly fascinated by the littlest things, or they could caress trash like a lover and devote themselves to Darkness. Said another way: beholden to no preconceived notions of what is comme il faut, they could conduct bold experiments with movement and body and coexistence. 

For both The Garden, as well as The Garbage of Earthly Delights, the sets/settings were/are sheer pleasure to the senses. Whimsical and precise, each world is the result of imaginations that take the dreary refuse of everyday life and combine it into something tortured and fantastic and delightful and haunting. But what is also present in both pieces is that subversion of social norms, that lack of apprehension on the part of the actors. In full faith, they exist. They explore the limits of their being, because why shouldn’t they. 

Both pieces are an ode to us before we thought we knew what was right and wrong, before we were daily disabled by over-analysis, derivative contingencies, likeability indices, and so on. At the same time, both pieces are a reminder of what is possible, a reminder that there are at least as many ways of being as there are forms of movement. And a movement is always potential, until it is not—at the inversion of its own body, at the point of its own toe, at the arch of its own back, at the effusion of its own light. Because if there is no moving apart from the mover, then what are we?

This is the same kind of thinking it takes, I suppose, to put on a show when there aren’t any shows, or to paint a triptych that isn’t really a triptych. The recognition of potential in a physical world stuffed only with what is already actual. It means foregoing, in some ways, what is expected of you.

Friday night, watching The Garbage for its third run through, I stood beside my roommate, toes numbing through my shoes. Off to the side was a table on which sat two dispensers of ginger tea and hot cocoa, and a sleeve of styrofoam cups. Roommate dissolved over to it and came back a few minutes later with an empty cup. They nodded towards the show which was ongoing, one of the performers up front and center, cloaked in that blanket of trash, picking at it absently. 

“Should I toss it up there?” they asked.

“Nah man, I don’t know, probably not.”

“Why not?” they shrugged, “Doesn’t even matter.”

“Nah, nah. Don’t do it. It will mess with their whole thing.”

“What’s the difference? Look.”

The show was at a slow point. The audience was half what it’d been on the first run through. I looked around at the masked faces of my peers, embarrassed already. But who knew that it would result in a comedic high point of the show, she in the trash blanket picking up the cup as if it had been there all along, chewing on it like a cow would grass, then proceeding to make a phone call on it. Roommate nudged at me one more time before going up.

“Do it and I’m leaving without you,” I said.