“First this was was a series of ephemeral situations in public space in New York 2002–2003. They become comprehensible through the publication of a book. The New York Garbage Flag Profile presents Berlin-based artist Michalis Pichler’s six month long project in which he collected and documented discarded paper cups, plastic bags, pizza boxes, newspapers and other mass-produced materials emblazoned with the American Flag. 

Photographed in the public waste baskets, gutters and snow drifts of New York where he found them, the individual items are catalogued on a facing page with uniformly formatted information about their location, the date of their collection, number of flags depicted, number of stars, number of stripes, etc. Each record also includes a full transcription of the text found on the item. The nearly three hundred color photographs in the book are organized into forensic pairs showing the collection site before and after the artist’s intervention. This clinical presentation however belies the artist’s gentle, almost reverent approach to his material -garbage, after all.” (Rachel Bers)