TEN HUTS

Nonfiction
Built with love from garbage cans

TEN HUTS

By Jill Sigman

212 pp. Wesleyan

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

I liked this book. But I have to say right off, it’s not for everyone.

For one thing, there’s no plot. Jill Sigman is a dancer, artist and a PhD in philosophy. The book contains essays and photographs about her Hut Project from her and from experts in anthropology, art history, performance studies, philosophy and dance.

I wish I had seen one of the Huts. Sigman builds them of found materials, whatever she finds lying around the margins of whatever space she has been allotted. “The huts are a labor of love, perhaps a seemingly hopeless one…the search for materials – in dumpsters, garbage cans on street corners, under overpasses, at waste transfer stations…The many hours of piling, wrapping, tying, weaving and balancing of objects…” Then “undoing knots, sorting materials and giving away objects at the end of each hut… All of these actions conspire to create a space where there was no space before.”

In her essay, Sigman spends some paragraphs denying that the huts, built as they are from castoff objects, are an indictment of our wasteful capitalism. Of course they are.

Perhaps because they are made of waste, they are spaces outside of the consumer world and off the map of ‘normal’ social transactions…Strangers might watch a performance in a hut and then eat food I prepared for them – sautéed mushrooms grown in a permacultural system on and around the hut, salad made of sprouts growing in a split drainpipe, tea brewed from herbs planted on the hut sipped from a found teacup. Eating in this way is weird; it’s magical; it’s like being on the edge of the universe.

The heart of the book is Sigman’s descriptions of each hut (there are actually eleven), generally with sketches and pictures. Of Hut #2, the artist says, she was so unimpressed that she has only a lousy cell phone photo of it.

For that one, though, she had found a huge stash of Ace bandages which influenced her way forward. The way the elastic shrinks made it hard to use it as a wrap; instead she tied things together with it. “I stuck to very primitive ways of attaching things, staying away from adhesives and hardware because they allow you to defy the forms the materials want to take.”

When she ran out of Ace bandages (she never reused materials), she looked for other elastic items like tights and pantyhose. When she got to Hut #10, it was held together mostly by women’s hosiery and a few baby socks.

Hut #3 was inspired by a recreation of a Lepate Native American wigwam. Hut #4, built in a building in Brooklyn, was the first hut Sigman slept in. Although, or perhaps because, the huts were built of refuse, they are a sophisticated idea. “I was aware of my privilege in choosing to work with waste.”

“I try to give away as much as possible when I take down a hut… to keep the hut materials out of the waste stream.” People take away about 85 to 90 percent of it, the artist estimates.

In most cases, the huts are not aesthetically pleasing. But for the viewer interested in process, they offered much to look at and ponder about. By the time she made Hut #5, the artist felt depressed by seeing all the non-biodegradable waste. She recruited a colleague to design a permaculture system growing herbs, sprouts and oyster mushrooms, which she prepared and served to visitors.

Sigman began to incorporate dance into the hut exhibitions. “…for me, performance can include things like talking and serving tea; the border between performance and ‘real life’ is fuzzy,” she writes. Hut #6 was built in the lobby of the Norwegian Opera as part of a dance festival; materials for it, in squeaky-clean Oslo, came largely from leftovers from the Opera itself.  

Back in Brooklyn, Sigman built Hut #7 in a creepy former hospital/homeless shelter. A locus for New York’s waste, this part of the city provided hut materials so toxic that she had to wrap before she could use them. Yet this hut reached into the community and hosted more visitors and more activities than any previous one.

Hut #8 was built at Parsons School of Design from plastic bottles. Components of Hut #9, in Aarhus, Denmark, were discarded electronic devices. #10, at the Ringling Museum, was something of a circus.

She hadn’t planned to build more, but succumbed to the challenge of doing one more in a natural setting – where she learned that she missed urban trash, “its edge, its grunge, its personal histories.” For Sigman, waste does not exist. Her colleague Eva Yaa Asantewaa writes, “A magpie picking at unwanted objects, she recovers history and revives potency and, yes, a sense of wonder.”

This is a rich and mind-bending treatise.

~

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.

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