Shaun Pettigrew

An exercise in Junk Management by Shaun Pettigrew and Fletcher Vaughan.

“The beetle values their pile of black dung simply because they own it”

Sustainability. Collectability, ownability, amassability, reflectability, infectability, super…err… utilitarian…ability. Yeah. Right. So many abilities (admitedly some of them quite silly) and so little ability to cope. It is exactly that, mans ability to cope that has inspired Shaun Pettigrew and Fletcher Vaughan to combine their photographic and design/art direction talents to create this photo essay on the runaway train of human accumulation and attendant waste. Pettigrew who has traveled the world extensively in recent years as director and producer of a forthcoming film on seminal post-punk legends Killing Joke (The Death & Resurrection Show) has become increasingly concerned by the rapidly growing ‘junk culture’ of the human race. Succinctly, it is the spread of the Western capitalist presumed birthright to own what we want, a.ka. materialism, to the emerging world that is scaring the pants off the English-born New Zealander.

Pettigrew likens the consuming human being to a dung beetle “The beetle values their pile of black dung simply because they own it, just as we humans tend to value our amassed life savings simply because it represents an abstract concept of wealth, or ownership, regardless of whether or not this wealth actually adds any value to the quality of human life.”The Rebuild images began with an early morning stroll along a promenade in Napier. Spotting a work crew busying themselves with packing away old steam engines, Pettigrew was struck by the quality of light and the silhouettes of the steam engine parts and began shooting the scene. He was also interested to observe the crew arguing over use of equipment and thought, perhaps a little fantastically and using his license stamped with the word ‘artistic’, that the scene represented the clattering and clamouring of ownership. Ownership in this case of ‘art objects’.

He continues his beetle theory “The Male Beetle states that, “it’s fine to own something. Your property! The dream of your life! That piece of art object! The fruit of your labours!” Not only does this amassed pile of dung smell bad and seem to have no intrinsic value, but also it brings with it a world of fear and anxiety. It seems that, for the beetles, and similarly for humans, the purpose of work is to amass wealth, and yet this only leads to more work in the service of amassing yet more wealth. The implication is that a human life, filled with hard work for the sole end of amassing more and more wealth, is ultimately meaningless.”

An interesting analogy and furniture designer Fletcher Vaughan thought so too. Taken by the images he agreed to help Pettigrew develop the images and concept further. Vaughan then sourced a number of amazingly suitable “materialistic art objects” which the pair then shot and composed into and around the original images. A case of build and rebuild. When asked to describe the work in a sentence Pettigrew is suitably sesquipedalian “The acquisition of material wealth and the frivolous nature of materialism, or the procedure for handling, packing and removal of art objects – in emergency.” Aquimaterialprocedurability perhaps.