Cow Plop Flop
As someone who grew up in rural United States in the 80s, I was non-plussed by artistic realism or romanticism (bucolic landscapes?!? realistic rendering of cows?!?). I attribute this attitude to my good fortune of being born in a place where those things were Real and all of that painted realism felt like romantic pitter-patter - Why Bother* Painting What Is Already There Around Us? Clearly, i’ve taken many things for granted.
But twice weekly we re-filled our glass bottles with raw milk from the Allen Farm that was a mile from home and I could say hi to Daisy —the real cow—any time I wanted. Besides their deliciously sweet brown eyes and soft beautiful faces, the most notable thing about those cows (to my young mind) was how much poop they made! It really is remarkable.
One day after school, M, the daughter of the family-owned general store that sold pasteurized milk in non-re-useable plastic jugs across the street (1 year older and 1 year wiser) asked: How can your family drink that raw milk, it hasn’t been pasteurized, it is loaded with bugs and will kill you! You should buy our store milk.
The raw milk also hadn’t been homogenized and I’m alive to report that I absent-mindedly shake my milk jug to make sure the cream gets distributed. What I miss most is skimming off the cream in winter when we could make ice cream with a hand-crank packed with snow and rock salt.
Milk was a staple. I’d guess 50% of my body mass growing up was a simple composite of crunchy peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, the Allen’s milk, and my grandma’s molasses cookies (which are more like hard tack that my brothers and I dipped into milk, whenever. To this day, our mom sends us more in the mail.).
To see some art I made with my Grandma’s recipe, check out my 2010 milk and cookies edible series when my NYC ‘studio’ was an oven.
The public high school in the neighboring town was deemed “unaccredited” by the state for all 4 years I attended. My school sued the state bc what right does the state have to declare it unsuitable if it were not also required to help (read: pay to) make it suitable. The town was an economically depressed former textile town. Notable industries were a small pepperoni plant (I loved their pepperoni), a tampon manufacturing plant that had a series of layoffs and is now gone, a struggling steel plant where the parents who worked there took 30% pay cuts to recruit a new investor, a small regional hospital where I was born, and a rifle manufacturing plant the next town over (which is really the only thriving industry left).
The State Supreme Court ruled in favor of my high school. We ‘won’!
To avoid paying to improve our school (remember, that is precisely what our school administrators were fighting for), the state just lowered its standards so we became accredited overnight! Rational!
It was in this rich environment, that our faculty advisor suggested we sell large tins of already popped popcorn to fundraise for our Junior and Senior year activities (prom, graduation, subsidize our yearbook, gift to the school). The contract said something like: for every decorative tin of popcorn we sold to a community member for $15, our class ‘earned’ $1. If (and this was a crowd pleaser) we sold x tins on average per student (we were ~127 differently motivated students, and I for one would have been a slacker for this child-labor-operation) then we would also get 127 ‘free’ rootbeer mugs with the option of printing it w a school mascot (a “cardinal”). Outraged, I proposed something different.
The Scheme:
My brother Nate was living in Texas - he told me he’d heard about a ‘cow plop’ fundraiser. So I pitched the idea to my classmates - what if we sold $1 raffles for 1 square yard equivalents of our football field. And wherever the cow shits, the person holding the ticket mapped to that territory gets $500. That meant we only needed to grift $500-from the community to then be able to gift $500-back to our community before our grift became ‘profitable’ to our class!
Now compare: If we sold 33 tins of popcorn to 33 people, the community would have spent $500. Of that, the popcorn company would have removed $467 from the community, the class would have netted $33 (but we would not have come close to qualifying for the ‘free mugs’). However, If we just sold 627 $1 squares of the football field, someone in our town would be $500 richer, and we would be able to buy ourselves 127 custom beer mugs (without the popcorn company administration-friendly reference to root-beer, we proudly asserted we were all underage - and yes, we got them for under $1 a piece), and then, we were in the black: every additional square we sold would fund our activities! So we had a plan and a-plop-party!
We raffled ~3500 square yards (a football field is ~50x120yrd = a $6,000 potential!). We put up a fence. The football team sponsored the lime and marked the field. Cara —the granddaughter of the Allen Farm— was our invested classmate; she and her parents drove one of their dairy cows down to the football field, and yes! the sweet lady with the big brown eyes publicly shit in a square (actually 2 and we decided to give it to the square that received the majority of her prize). One citizen got $500 for landing the plop. Everyone, regardless of how many tickets they sold, got a mug w a custom cardinal, and our class of 1991 netted more than 2500 to fund our other activities. Or at least that is how I remember it.
[[[my point here is: my attempt at the gRift is an attempt to illuminate how persuasive and pervasive grifting is in the soul of this county. I am trying desperately to point to how our community is so much more than the dollars that abstractly build the peaks and valleys of the stock market trends, the so-called gross-national-product estimation of well-being, and the fraudulent declarations of only 10% poverty (when you understand how we calculate poverty in this country), etc. Those abstract landscapes of a ‘wealthy nation’ are so incredibly dis-connected from the very real destruction of Real Valleys and Real Mountains around the world, by the Real people who are either paying too much or too little for the resulting products (who pays $15 for a tin of popped —mostly air— popcorn, even today, 30 years later? and does a beer mug really only cost $1?) bc other Real people are getting paid too little to make them or too much for pandering them, and because generally, we are all paying too little attention to what is Really happening. I adore abstraction, but this $hit is real!]]]
Stay-tuned for other popcorn-like currencies (like crypto, payments for ecosystem services, and the abuse of carbon offsets)!
Driving Home the Cows, 1881
You can find it at the Smithsonian Museum.
*Of course, considering the context of the European American men of the Hudson River School of art (~1825-1875) might help me understand why some settlers from Europe might paint the glories of the ‘new world’ (perhaps they came from a land of potato famines, a more densely populated and inequitable city, or maybe they were a victim of their commons being taken in their homeland, or they could also have just been from wealthy European families, or first generation wealth in the new republic, or hired by the new-nation to map the natural resource potential, etc.). Or how African American men or European American women landscape painters from this time might have painted expressions of their freedoms in a context that generally did not favor their being free. Realist, Romantic, Gothic, Transcendentalist, or Nationalist, I do not wish to critique any art making - as I think it fuels every soul that works at it.
But I have no words for the indigenous of these lands prior to settlement by people from the East or West. I see this is a real problem and I’ll work on recovering that absence of consideration. We all know how settler policies in the ‘americas’ constitute perhaps the most massive and violent grift ever achieved. Think about it, just the land-granting policies around the civil war (1861-1865), the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866^ (160 acres to farm -if you had the money- resulted in 373,000 homesteads on some 48 million acres of ‘undeveloped’ land) -a clever strategy to fill coffers of a young nation, raffling off plots of the unowned/unoccupied/unclaimed/unrecognized/killed-off “American West”. That is one big football field for fundraising. Do you think the football team would give up their field permanently (even tho they only use it seasonally)?
^Compare the very unsuccessful “40 acres and a mule”, a policy designed to divide ~400,000 acres of Confederate land and distribute it in 40 acre allotments of arable land to former slaves after the civil war.
Estimates of indigenous living in the western hemisphere prior to the arrival of settlers vary between 700,000 in the US to over 120 million living on both the N and S continents we call the Americas. The estimates of their deaths by settlers is also highly variable. You can look at the Historic US census, for what it's worth, but in 2021, there are ~9.7 million American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) people, <3% of the total US population.
To see some contemporary indigenous art, please visit The Forge.
“Forge Project is a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice. Located on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in Upstate New York, Forge Project works to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism.”
Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Never Forget, 2021. C-print mounted on Dibond, walnut frame, 51 3/4 × 78 3/4 in. Photo: Nicholas Galanin. Forge Project Collection.
Be sure to check out his latest installation LAND or “In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra.”, on display thru November 2023 near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Photo by Josh Pacheco and published in the Brooklyn Magazine
Or perhaps take a hike.
Check out the trail maps generated by the Hudson River School Art Trail for hikes to find the vantage point where famous Hudson River School paintings were begun.
A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning, 1844.
by Thomas Cole
You can see the painting at the Brooklyn Museum, 5th floor.
