This year's class of new first-years may be perplexed while roaming the campus by a collection of strange items surrounding and filling an above ground pool in the Rose Art Museum's sculpture garden, located to the left of the building's main entrance. Rhode Island School of Design Class of 2004 Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch's The Aboutthing (in the air) combines household objects and rubberized body parts with the outdoor elements to evoke "the flotsam and jetsam that you find in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest," says current Rose director Roy Dawes. The work is inspired by a region of the North Pacific called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area where the currents of the North Pacific Gyre have trapped stray plastic and other garbage on and near the surface of the ocean.According to Dawes, "this was a piece that [former Rose director Michael Rush] was approached to present here. Mr. Trecartin is a very well-known video artist, but this is an installation he had done in a gallery in New York."

"I thought it was a remarkably inventive piece. I loved the layering of skins and chunks of flesh mixed with the trash, as well as the theater of it all," said Prof. Peter Kalb (FA), assistant professor of contemporary art. While Rush declined to speak about the Rose Art Museum, he said about the installation, "Like many works of art, especially contemporary art, it has many layers of meanings, the two most evident being somewhat contradictory (which is also in keeping with much of contemporary art): 'impermanence' (as the piece is meant to disintegrate) and the impossibility of 'impermanence' in the face of environmental disasters such as non-dissoluble garbage on our land and in our waters."

Trecartin and Fitch have requested that the piece be left up indefinitely; that is, until the work disintegrates. Brandeis officials have other plans.

"My feeling is . once we get to a point where the water is going to freeze I think we may have to let the sculpture go at that point. I think the pool will start coming apart. As soon as I see anything like that taking place, that's when it'll go," said Dawes. The Rose's Web site lists the exhibition's end date as Sept. 25.

Said Kalb, "I am disappointed that the work is being prematurely removed-it was meant to engage a variety of entropic forces and being up only in the summer really limited the effect, meaning and audience of the work. Campus politics certainly count as a form of entropy that acts on art. . New England with its ridiculous weather was a great place to have a work that deals with the power of the environment; it is a shame to see the impact of the piece so reduced."

As visitors round the corner of the Rose's Lois Foster Wing, they are greeted with a rubbery mask impaled through its temples, mounted on the crossbar of an archway leading into the sculpture garden. To the left is a potted palm, and to the right, a wooden viewing platform holding a modern-looking black vinyl couch upon which various ceramic tiles are plastered, all covered in a yellowish, dripping glaze. The couch faces an above-ground pool filled with murky water and a variety of plastic bags and storage containers, some of which are molded together to form a little mountain of Rubbermaid containers drizzled with purplish epoxy body parts and amorphous blobs. "The piece invites multiple thoughts and, hopefully, inaugurates serious discussion," says Rush.

It embodies "this Buddhist idea of the duality of impermanence," says Roy Dawes. "It too will become garbage of a sort.