Junk As Art

ON A HAZY day this June, I was hopping from stranger’s loft to stranger’s loft, dodging swarms of sweaty beer bottles as I navigated the Bushwick Open Studio weekend.

The crowd’s assertive dress and distinctive swagger disrupted the otherwise normal neighborhood fare of hoopties swooping, chorizo grilling and children busting open fire hydrants. While trying to focus on the art, I found myself unable to do anything but stare fixated for hours at the cracked sidewalks in between venues, scanning them like a geriatric wielding her metal detector. The sought treasure? Heroin stamps, or paper packets emblazoned with tiny pictures that tell a story of how drugs are marketed, bought and sold in New York.

These marginalia, tucked away in the concrete crevices of our city, inspired the formation of the Social Art Collective, a group of public health workers, artists and writers who have come together to [organize an exhibition, opening June 23], that will feature a series of heroin stamps culled from city streets.

Over the course of reporting this story, I was asked to help hang the work, though when I agreed to take part, never did I imagine that in addition to developing a highly sensitive radar for curb-side refuse, I would also encounter an intricate social narrative unfolding across all of our neighborhoods.

Many of the stamps, culled from streets in Bushwick to Madison Square Park, Williamsburg to the Upper East Side, dispel the easy stereotype that junkies are vagrants in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The Heroin Stamp Project began to take form when sociologist Pedro Mateu- Gelabert was doing field research in Bushwick in the late 1990s. “There were many abandoned buildings in the area and injection drug-users were using them as shooting galleries. The floors were littered with little stamped glassine bags,” Mateu- Gelabert says. These images became the focus of much of his scholarly work, and eventually by teaming up with thencolleague Liza Vadnai, currently in marketing at MTV, and public health researcher Ashly Jordan, they have brought the idea to fruition in a full-fledged gallery show.

New Yorkers are accustomed to the assault of brands on bus flanks and subway walls. So, while the saying goes that drugs sell themselves, if there were a place where it would be difficult to move product, it would be in over-stimulated New York. Sure, marijuana has always lent itself to precious names like “Mother Kush” or “Super Headband,” but rarely do we think of marketing when we consider harder drugs.

Mateu-Gelabert claims that New York is the sole global city where heroin is “sold as a ‘quality’ product seeking brand loyalty.” The project makes clear that in a city where competition abounds in a highly sophisticated market, no sector of commerce is left untouched.

Of course, recent grads perched on beanbags in Vitamin Water-saturated workplaces aren’t the people dreaming up the concepts for heroin packaging. Dealers themselves develop an iconography that illustrates their targeted brand story, constantly finding new ways to transmit meaning to their consumer base. The heroin stamps target a wide demographic by appropriating images from popular culture. The act of pairing familiar symbols with drugs fetishizes and normalizes heroin use in a casual way. More recent, of-the-moment stamps trace Barack Obama’s silhouette, or are labeled “Lady Gaga,” drawing on a pre-fabricated celebrity or cult status that bolsters sales and attracts new customers.

The images presented in the exhibition also underscore how often drug dealers’ graphics glamorize heroin by highlighting its fatal nature. Pairing playful symbols and bright colors with messages that range from grim (“Last Temptation,” “Game Over,” “No Exit”) to violent (“No Pain,” “Kicking Ass,” “Smoking Aces”), the heroin stamps broadcast that heroin is cool because death itself is glamorous.

Overtly political or social art projects can devolve into the preachy dogma of D.A.R.E. So, rather than sacrifice substance for a message, [The Heroin Stamp Project] distills a site-specific narrative to describe the pervasiveness of addiction. By confronting viewers with the immediacy of a larger-than-life image, the collective hopes to derail the conversational cliché that dominates public opinion. In fact, very little about the exhibit readily offers opinionated stances. This exhibition is reactive to our specific time and place, borrowing the seductiveness and aggressive nature of the branding imagery to spark debate.

The show’s biggest irregularity is that none of the works—ranging from the heroin stamp prints to installations of actual heroin stamps of enigmatic provenance—can be attributed to a single artist, or really any artist at all. Instead, they represent a joint product assembled by the collective, but actually made by the users of New York City. This drug-using population, given a platform by the collective, are themselves all co-authors of these works that transform the discarded remains of addiction into creative artifacts.

>>THE HEROIN STAMP PROJECT Through June 29, [White Box], 329 Broome St. (betw. Chrystie St. & Bowery), 212-714-2347.