Creative Reuse: Spring 2004

Waste: The Final Frontier

by Sarah Weimer

Peter Miro, a self-taught assemblagist, builder of miniatures, and freelance cinema propmaker residing in Los Angeles, has an enduring fascination with science fiction. This interest led him to use found objects from urban waste streams to create cinematically detailed space warship miniatures. He also constructs dioramas and commemorative assemblages from salvaged urban artifacts. Miro uses the name “Non-Terrestrial Arms” to market his reused art for collectors and science fiction fans and to explore ancillary markets for his designs.

Miro first commissioned the use of found objects in 1984 for a Hollywood Video store display. He built a monster mannequin from a wooden T-frame used to sell beach towels with an armature made of coat hanger and curtain rods. The mannequin sported a tattered suit, shoes, Styrofoam wig head, clown hair, and aged skeletal mask. Essentially, this was one of the dancing corpses in Michael Jackson’s "Thriller" video. Miro’s creation encouraged walk-ins and amused tourists; all copies of "Thriller" were sold out for six months.

He then built a spaceship from found objects to encourage science-fiction movie rentals. Miro used the folded corrugated cardboard spine from a discarded lobby placard and covered it with cardboard scraps until it resembled a solid hull. He added plastic "thrusters" from a Tupperware Popsicle freezer mold and to hold everything together, he used arts and crafts glue, wire brads, penny nails, and plastic model cement.

Another cardboard spine-based vehicle had a stacked gondola made from a triangular wooden bookend at the prow, thrusters from stereo tweeters, and half of a child toy calculator. Miro arranged the ships in the window in a diorama-like fashion and an admiring customer walked in off the street seeking to order a custom model.

The cinema-going populace took its cue from the science-fiction art direction of the day, from films such as Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The hands-on approach has evolved to the level of a "lost" art within the 70-year old technology of cinema miniature building. Model making itself dates back thousands of years, from Egyptian tomb figurines to Bronze Age ship prototypes of medieval castles and towns, etc. To this day, thousands of clubs and Web sites remain devoted to the art. Model making is also the province of engineering and design students, architects, and automakers.

Through austerity and trial and error, Miro learned that the detailed look of more costly materials can still be achieved by using basic art materials and reused objects. Every vessel he makes is an improvisation—a manipulation of found objects into a system of interdependent parts.

During the 1980s and ‘90s Miro primarily built spaceships for his own recreation. He completely filled two of his apartments from floor to ceiling with these improvised constructs that were lightweight enough to hang with fishing line. Miro dreamed of making a career change into cinema propmaking after taking cinema core courses at Los Angeles City College. He found materials from dumpsters, garages, loading docks, street corners, auto wrecks, construction sites, storerooms, etc. Miro would pluck the cathode ray emitter from a fractured TV picture tube to create a ray gun mount and use a cut of a video box liner or sushi take-out tray for an armor plate. Corrugated cardboard and Styrofoam were most plentiful; he could cut Styrofoam with a hot knife to realize a shape, and then cover it with cardboard for hull plating.

Some of the urban discards Miro uses include scrap plastic from shattered or non-functional radios, tape players, gutted televisions, calculators, consumer packaging; Los Angeles Police Department emergency flare caps, scrap wire, broken toys, business card stock, and electronic components. Some shapes were rudimentary; others he lavished with more attention to detail. The average model took several hours, with perhaps 30 minutes of painting.

Miro utilized a discarded L’eggs Pantyhose rack, complete with a distinctive dome, by covering the shelves with computer paper and cut-up phone book pages that were dipped in water and flour and dried with a fan until hardened. Another vehicle used broken coffee maker parts or an empty Xerox toner bottle.

The IBM technicians for the L.A. Times provided Miro with discarded plastic circuit board racks, which he salvaged and reused as girders and radars. Plastic caps and giant rolls of newspaper littered the floor of the Times’ loading dock, which he used for thrusters. He obtained from a drug store a discarded plastic point-of-sale display and a long elliptical column with openings for merchandise hooks, which he turned into a capital ship with windows made of clear acetate sheet from portfolio pages.

Miro moved to Riverside in 1991. Soon he was commuting to his Hollywood proofreader job and still building ships in his free time. He built a 9-foot spacecraft carrier with parts from a discarded Apollo Moon Rocket kit, stereo parts, computer keyboard parts, plastic caps from his mother’s insulin syringes, and a thruster section made from a plastic planter. His landlord at the time was a diesel cab mechanic; Miro reused a discarded exhaust filter from the auto shop and made it into a hull. He found abandoned electronic components and used these for detail parts.

In the early 1990s, Miro read a piece in the LA Weekly about found-object artists by Dr. Lizetta LaFalle (formerly Collins), curator of the California African American Museum. He wrote her a letter to introduce his work and obtain her impressions of it. She had conducted research on self-taught black folk artists dispersed throughout America, so to her, Miro was an urban "find" validating her study.

At that time, Miro was working on a miniature refinery set for an American Film Institute (AFI) graduate film. The set contained empty Parmesan cheese cans and piping model parts mounted on a particleboard base. The other AFI fellows critiquing the shots at the screening thought it effectively symbolized the rape of the earth. After the Los Angeles riots, Dr. Collins asked him to build a piece for the "No Justice No Peace" art show, an artistic response to the calamity of the riots.

Miro thought of how much of Los Angeles had been burned, and how many merchants had lost their stores. He built a maquette—an architectural model of a memorial wall in a park set on reclaimed land using Styrofoam, foamcore, basswood, silver Mylar, and model railroad grass mounted on a base of wood paneling. Inspired by his spaceships, it had a ramp in the entry where people could walk in, and it also featured a small merchant memorial obelisk at the center of the landscape.

The design was predicated on the use of salvaged bricks, wrought iron, masonry, and steel from destroyed buildings. Miro called it "The Wall Of The Peoples’ Anger," and it was his first commemorative attempt to utilize "reused art" for mass healing. While it was never constructed, except as a model, the maquette was later incorporated into a spaceship.

During 2000 and 2001, Miro worked for NEOTEK on feature film props. The company had an attached warehouse with a variety of old equipment pieces and scraps of material from former productions. Sometimes the manager gave away leftovers such as Lego parts, balsa wood model kits, spray paints, and electronic components that would otherwise be disposed.

The biggest item Miro took home was a 9-foot PVC pipe 12 inches in diameter. This became a mothership after he detailed it with found objects, Lego parts, and scrap metal. Miro discovered he could use discarded reflective material from DMV registration stickers as a model lighting source (no batteries needed). The DMV next door to his office tossed a large Xerox copier, which he gutted for its pin connectors, internal stacking trays, push buttons, and control panels—basically any interesting-looking miniature component.

Before the land around the husk of the old Merv Griffin Theater was razed for a development project, he rescued a sidewalk magazine display kiosk (one of several lined up on the lot awaiting disposal). This was converted into a spaceship with the hoard of Lego and electronic parts he had salvaged.

During the six years at his office, the dumpsters next door and across the street yielded plex tubing, computer keyboards, thinwall tubing, CRT housings, hard drives, a complete a 3-foot radio-controlled speedboat kit, and huge cardboard tubes for transporting rolled up billboard posters, which he cut down to size to make cylindrical hulled ships. Miro is intrigued by the thought of going through a landfill to dismantle stereos, televisions, computers, office machines, etc. or getting 500 pounds of disposable camera bodies to dissemble. Miro finds the sheer number of obsolete toys and consumer goods mind-boggling. He jokes that the items themselves beckon; to him, knowing which materials will make a good spaceship has become instinctive. In the art world, many current "natives" work with what the earth yields from the waste products of industrialized society.

He states that the cinema industry is a mercurial employer, so one must constantly reinvent oneself. With Non-Terrestrial Arms, Miro is seeking to create a specialty niche for his craft. He claims one can never have enough training, skills, or experience.

Miro replicated Space Above and Beyond’s futuristic space carrier vessel, which took 80 hours to build, including class shop time and his free time/homework. His teacher, Carlyle Livingston, thought it would take "four people two months to build," when Miro first suggested a 4-foot model. Livingston let Miro make a 2-foot (30 inches total) model and gave him free rein to raid his parts bins and material stocks to complete the project. Still, Miro furnished a bag of discards from his stocks that would give the model added detail: metal shirt buttons, a plastic champagne cork, brass model shop railing, pin connectors, medical flashlight ear cups, and snipped positive and negative leads for LEDs. Miro painted the vehicle with gray primer and added DMV reflectors for running lamps.

He hoped to leverage this model into an opportunity at the Association of Professional Modelmakers (APMM) conference job fair. The APMM was the first formal recognition of his spacecraft modeling efforts; he received a mounted set of digital calipers, as well as a commemorative certificate.

The total volume or weight of the materials Miro has used over the years is unknown, but he estimates he would fill at least four U-Haul trucks with completed ships and about two more with boxes of salvaged materials that were contemplated but not yet absorbed into models. Miro had calculated that his hobby cost him about $800, including storage fees for finished vessels, between 1988 and 2000.

If Miro succeeds in becoming a large-scale art producer and learning more about welding, etc. there’s no telling what amounts of materials he can rescue. Miro thinks people are drawn to the texture and character of the pieces as they are, with their spindly aerials and bulky fuselages. Films like Starship Troopers, Armageddon, Matrix Reloaded, and Batman indicate that models are still a fascinating part of the narrative. Waste streams can supply compatible parts for similar visions.

The art journals Miro has examined display occasional use of models as sculptural pieces or installation art. Miro is aiming for a certain type of collector—one prepared to spend $400 to $1,500 for a model. Special commissions/orders could approach $10,000 or more, based on the class of objects employed or requested for its construction. Technical directors and cinema purchasing departments use exotic, expensive materials for movie props, and they must incorporate the payroll for skilled union labor. Movie crews build and subsequently destroy elaborate props, unless auctioned to collectors for thousands of dollars.

Miro feels another rudimentary class of model could be more modestly priced for the lay person to accommodate a limited budget. He envisions "how-to" classes or intrastate spaceship building contests based on reused parts. Consumers may shape that direction for him, opening up a larger market for reuse materials. A nine-year-old once told Miro that he wanted a K-Mart edition of one of Miro’s ships that he could build himself "for about $89.95." That particular youngster didn’t want a plastic prefab toy; he wanted to build a model on his own.

Next on Miro’s list: finding an accessible gallery space for his work. Commercial waste streams, he believes, are a gold mine limited only by one’s imagination and agenda.

Peter Miro provided information for this article.

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