Q&A with Jaydra Johnson, author of "Low: Notes on Art and Trash"
About LOW: Forthcoming November 5, 2024, this debut volume of essays, performance art instructions, and photo collages delves into the places where art and trash intersect. Borrowing from memoir, criticism, poetry, and conceptual art, Johnson calls attention to ugly, stinky, difficult places, lingering on the artistry born of cruel circumstances. This genre-bending book delivers smart, felt commentary on a range of works, from Merle Laderman Ukeles’ “Touch Sanitation” performance to political activist Emma Goldman and Shakespeare’s tragedies. Johnson’s nuanced investigations lead readers through low places teeming with art and vitality—from landfills to prisons and from impoverished, rural towns to the sidewalks of New York City—and brings them along on her journey as a working-class artist whose life has been profoundly shaped by growing up “trash” and, taking a cue from punk, embracing it. Merging narrative, analysis, and research, Johnson also critiques the superstructures that undergird waste culture, revealing the true culprit behind our excessive refuse. LOW reclaims trash as a precious resource, animated by the outcasts who spin it into art.
Jaydra Johnson is a writer, visual artist, and educator who splits her time between Portland, OR and NYC. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Epoch Review, Guernica, and Sedition magazines, among others, and she has shown her visual work in NYC, LA, Portland, and Columbus, OH. At Hunter College, she co-edited the journal Solar while earning her MFA in Creative Writing. She was also a grateful recipient of the 2022-23 Creatives Rebuild New York grant. Johnson is the author of Refuse Report, a bi-monthly newsletter exploring the tension between high and low art, currently hosted on Substack.
How did you decide upon the structure of the book, with its mix of shorter and longer essays, and visual art interspersed?
The book was more experimental in earlier stages of writing. For one of my MFA workshops, I turned in a 20-page zine that included collages along with photos I had taken of garbage around my neighborhood. It had a cento, a few different statistical charts, some instructions for how to build a landfill, and other short anecdotes and meditations. The feedback was that it was interesting, but that it was overall too experimental to be effective.
As far as making the work more legible, I often need a form to start with—like a crown of sonnets or a letter or something with numbered sections—to organize the work and get it off the ground. I relied on this strategy while drafting Low. I pushed toward longer, more narrative pieces as the book progressed. Sometimes I edited the formal scaffolding out later, and sometimes I kept it.
Pretty late in the game, one of my advisors, Mychal Denzel Smith, suggested I look at Hanif Abdurraquib’s Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance. Abdurraqib did brilliant work with form in that book, and I basically used his exact structure in terms of having longer essays (some of them in a form such as a crown) punctuated by shorter creative pieces.
For a long time, I didn’t think the collages would appear in the book, even though that was my original vision going back to the zine. I didn’t think they would be acceptable to an agent or publisher. They were just something I was noodling around with on the side. But when I saw the Fonograf call for manuscripts, I put the collages back in because the post said something to the effect of “send us your weirdest.” So I did.
What was your process like? Did one come first, the art or the writing?
I wrote the bulk of the book while I was in New York working on my MFA at Hunter. I originally proposed a project that was more journalistic. I wanted to take reporting trips to sites where people were interfacing with garbage. I was particularly interested in what creative things people were doing with trash and in what misconceptions—about both poor people and the trash they lived with—might be challenged. COVID hit the spring before I started at Hunter, so traveling and doing up-close interviews was no longer an option. I began looking at a lot of art and online images as well as watching documentaries so that I could write more vividly about these trash-strewn spaces.
When I stalled out, I would make the trash collages. My thinking was that while I manipulated actual garbage, my subconscious would be working on the words. After a while of, like, photocopying trash in my apartment, or photographing my favorite trash piles in the neighborhood, I would run out of art ideas and go back to the writing.
Your references are numerous—the Cops reality show, Emma Goldman’s activism, Ukeles's work ballets, and Agematsu’s trash sculptures to name a few—how did you decide what would be in the world of the book, and what, if anything, would not?
Cultural emblems like Cops are a quick way to evoke certain stereotyped images that do a lot of work. Readers from a wide range of class backgrounds are familiar with them. On the other hand, I wanted to highlight lesser-known trash-related material, so I kept that in mind. I was looking for compelling narratives and objects that could illustrate my theses.
There is a part of me that loves learning and constructing surprising connections among disparate references. It’s an alternative form of collage to me. Another part of me doesn’t think my ideas and experience are enough on their own. It’s like I need all these references to corroborate my testimony.
When people find out you’re interested in something, they love to send you recommendations. I think it’s the same way grandmas end up with a big collection of pig figurines or Russian nesting dolls. Much of what is included in the book came to me in this way. My only rubric at first was that the reference was about garbage or being poor, preferably both. Of course, I cut things eventually. I kept what I found.
I also think it’s important to say that in the time between Hunter and getting the acceptance from Fonograf, I didn’t yet know the book was about art. I was shopping the manuscript around as a more traditional essay collection with the title Other People’s Toilets, after the book’s second essay. Once I knew I would submit to the Fonograf call and possibly be read by Maggie Nelson, I added an essay I wrote later (about TLC, now removed again) and started to rethink the title and concept. It was then that I realized every essay was about art in some way, whether literary or musical or visual. I added in a few more of the rituals to play up the performance art element and put the collages in, then gave it the new title, Low: Notes on Art and Trash. I think having that second unifying theme was crucial to the success of the work since, as you said, the references are so numerous.
How did discovering punk change your life and how you’d think of trash?
When I discovered punk, it was a relief. I realized it could be cool to be a reject. You could have a party about it. The punks were saying all the things I was thinking about war, inequality, capitalism, belonging, love... That was really when my political consciousness took off. I was also into the aesthetics of dressing in rags and shaving your hair off in ugly ways. Because I always felt too poor and too weird looking to be acceptable to other people, it was revolutionary to find a world where those qualities were revered. I was still trash, but what the subculture and the music articulated for me was that to be trash was to be a saboteur and a provocateur. It was to live as an agent against the state and all its oppressive machinations. It was about freedom.
Who were you reading as you wrote the book?
T Fleischmann - Time Is a Thing The Body Moves Through
CA Conrad - Amanda Paradise and Ecodeviance: (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
Claudia Rankine - Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Hanif Abdurraqib - Little Devil in America
Cody Rose Clevidence - Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night
Olivia Liang - Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency and Lonely City
Eula Biss - everything
Dodie Bellamy - everything
Anne Boyer - The Undying
Don Mee Choi - DMZ Colony
Lucia Berlin - Manual for Cleaning Women
N+1, The Believer, ArtForum, the various Reviews of Books, and similar
Is there a piece in Low that surprised or challenged you more than the others?
I wrote “Art Under Duress” while I was sick with COVID in a stupid AirBnB in LA. That essay had been brewing inside me for a year, and I was surprised that it came out under those circumstances, but I guess it also makes perfect sense in that I was confined and isolated and in a really dark place emotionally. I had been planning to write some more for the book and felt moved to make something of my mandatory quarantine. I pretended I was at a residency. The way that it came out shocked me because it was so different from the early idea.
“The Art of War” was challenging because it arrived to me over one weekend, and the structure resisted editing. Many people told me to change that piece, to make it more narrative or break it up into sections. I spent many hours trying to edit it to be more accessible, even though I didn’t want to. I ultimately found a way to make it a little more narrative and to be honest I regret that.
The book touches on many kinds of work, including teaching, cleaning, and art-making. What did you learn from these forms of labor?
Oh gosh, everything. Because the work I’ve done is undervalued, I’ve had to develop my own metrics and my own why. I feel lucky to have met the people who have labored alongside me because they’ve had astonishing stories. That includes my students, who are doing an incredible amount of unpaid labor. My co-laborers inspire me with the ways they resist the violence of the institution and band together to survive. Public school teachers are scary good at this. We do some of the most inspiring organizing I’ve witnessed.
Each form of labor has informed my political perspective. In my head, I am always writing a version of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Erenreich. Narrating my life as if I were a character or profile subject has helped me get through a lot of difficult labor and make meaning of it. Not to be overly earnest, my work has shown me the strength of the human spirit and taught me how I want to live.
You also consider depressing spaces—prison cells, mental health hospital rooms, stark rental apartments—where do you see these spaces overlapping and diverging, aesthetically or otherwise?
I am super interested in the aesthetics of these environments, which are engineered to control and manage the underclasses. When you’re poor, a lot of what you’re interacting with every day is ugly and drab. Art is seen as a luxury, and you can’t afford it. You don’t deserve it. You wouldn’t know how to appreciate it. Something as simple as a nice color of paint on the walls is considered too nice. The public schools I went to and now work in are hideous. All these environments look so similar: housing projects, public schools, prisons, the DSNY garages, public hospitals. Now you see it in how every overpriced post-gentrification apartment is gray on gray on gray. I think it’s one more way to keep people in their place. Just as the majority of our interpersonal communication is nonverbal, these visual environments signal a lot to us about what and who a space is for.
What do you hope readers will take away from Low?
I’ve always kind of felt—and I think a lot of people feel this way—-that the world is totally upside down. The more I call things to question, the better I feel. I would really love it if Low encouraged people to reflect on concepts like value and taste. Like, go out and poke around in the trash. See who is coming to collect your cans and maybe talk to them. Turn the world upside down. Look for art in low places. There is so much beauty in ugliness.
What are you reading now?
Go Tell It on The Mountain by James Baldwin
Playboy by Constance Debrey
Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch
Fucking emails!!!
Hinge profiles :(
Lots of material about clowns—the art and history of clowning, famous clowns—for an essay I am working on
Chris Krauss
My friend Torey’s writing over at The Art Newspaper and on her Substack Rat Bxtch
Can you say what you will be working on next?
I am actively working on a second book that’s all about difficult (ugly, unintelligible, violent) art. I started going to a lot of punk shows again in my mid-30s. But punk shows are not very enjoyable to most people. They are loud and the music is bad if you think about it from a classical perspective. You can get physically injured, it’s hot, they start late, and they are often hard to find out about. Writing about that led me to some performance artists, including clowns, and others who are making stuff at these really rough, freaky margins. I put out parts of the drafts on my Substack Refuse Report, which keeps me accountable and engaged with the writing even with all my competing commitments. I recently started teaching high school again, and I can’t produce at the same level as when I was freelance and adjuncting, so it’s going to be slow and steady.