2010 (prod. 2009 – 2017) edition of 75 (65 outside series)
29 x 21 ¾”. Codex. 40 pages (plus a 26 page sewn insert), inkjet-printed, color, on adhesive paper bonded to soil and soil supplement bags, cut opened into bi-folds and side-stitched. Hand bound to rusted ½” rebar spine and covered with tent canvas and pond liner scavenged from marijuana growing operations. The first 30 books are supplied in 31 ½ x 24 ¾ x 2″ wood and canvas boxes. dirt is available to all collectors.
The plastic bags used for the pages of dirt map a history of soil and soil supplement usage over the last 40 years of Southern Humboldt pot-growing. The book’s front canvas cover and all its printed pages (except one) are marked by sweeping coils of paint—white on the cover, gray on the pages—that pass across and around the book’s gathered artifacts and writings. Their loose arches echo assorted schematic plans for pot-garden irrigation in drawings taken from a pot-growing family’s notebooks (reproduced throughout dirt). The tent canvas of the front and back covers was also scavenged from Southern Humboldt pot-growing scenes. Another direct material quotation from the pot-growing life is the piece of pond-liner set into the back cover that previously had pot plants growing on it.
dirt opens with the words “illicit marijuana farms in the fertile hills around Garberville,” enlarged directly from a microfilm copy of a front page San Francisco Chronicle article dated August 24, 1977, titled “$1 Million Raid of Humboldt Pot Farms,” one of the first two major media accounts of Northern California marijuana production.
Collections: 2010 – Getty Museum and UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library acquired a pre-series release copies of dirt. 2013 – Rare Books Collection, U.S. Library of Congress; 2014 – UCLA’s Louise M. Darling Library and in 2015 – the Don E. Wirtschafter Collection acquired the book.