| Basel-madness may have come and gone from Florida in a single month, but an East Coast debut at SCOPE Miami was just the beginning of a longer road trip for one work of art. Andrew Junge’s Styrofoam Hummer (American Detritus), a piece that has made the 39-year-old artist a minor celebrity on the San Francisco scene, lingers in Sarasota for a pit stop at Greene Contemporary. In this well-heeled Gulf Coast town, where conspicuous consumption is standard operating procedure, the Hummer presents a deliciously in-your-face confrontation. Constructed almost entirely from foam, with a few pieces of underlying framework in wood and metal… |  |
Andrew Junge’s American Detritus – Megan Voeller
Basel-madness may have come and gone from Florida in a single month, but an East Coast debut at SCOPE Miami was just the beginning of a longer road trip for one work of art. Andrew Junge’s Styrofoam Hummer (American Detritus), a piece that has made the 39-year-old artist a minor celebrity on the San Francisco scene, lingers in Sarasota for a pit stop at Greene Contemporary.
In this well-heeled Gulf Coast town, where conspicuous consumption is standard operating procedure, the Hummer presents a deliciously in-your-face confrontation. Constructed almost entirely from foam, with a few pieces of underlying framework in wood and metal, the piece weighs substantially less than a real Hummer but maintains a monolithic presence. To create it, Junge gathered the foam—itself a major pollutant—during a residency at Norcal Waste Systems in San Francisco that gave him access to a public dumping area where Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene were plentiful. (A ban on polystyrene food packaging in the city of San Francisco goes into effect on June 1st. Similar bans already exist in Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon.)
With bits and pieces of the found material, Junge built a solid block of foam, then carved it down to create an exact, to-scale reproduction of the Hummer H1, including perfectly rendered features like bolts, door handles and wipers. At first, the Hummer was snow white; these days it’s wearing some grime—“a fitting reflection of the vehicle’s off-road spirit,” Junge remarked during a March interview. The piece can even be rolled on its wheels but, oddly enough given how long it takes to biodegrade, Styrofoam falls apart easily.
Despite the intended environmental commentary, interacting with the diverse audience attracted by the piece has forced Junge to revise his initial assumptions about Hummer drivers. Take the first driver he met during the project, a man Junge followed home with the unusual request of measuring his H1 for the sculpture. The guy turned out to be an artist himself who had sworn off smaller cars after a bad wreck. He ran his Hummer on bio-diesel. So much for stereotypes.
Since then, Junge has encountered people who’ve seen meanings in the Styrofoam Hummer as different as its being a protest against the war in Iraq and as a sincere as a homage to the greatest vehicle ever invented.
It’s not the first of Junge’s projects to exhibit a fetishistic fascination with the world of trucks and cars. As we chatted on cell phones, he was driving to work in his 1980 Chevy van—a slightly dilapidated white elephant customized with a magnet collection of US states and a self-portrait made from carpet on the roof. For his 2002 MFA thesis, he rewrote the van’s owner’s manual and lovingly documented its features in photographs, including abstract “Vanscapes” of the rusted exterior.
When he’s not plumbing the American fascination with all things automotive, Junge teaches art at his alma mater, California College of Arts, and the University of San Francisco.
