Inside the Sanitation System: Mierle Ukeles, Urban Ecology and the Social Circulation of Garbage

Abstract

In the contemporary developed world, garbage en masse only becomes visible when something goes wrong.To be sure there are examples of "homeless" gar bage barges, shunted from port to port, and sanitation strikes, such as New York City's week-long 1968 work stoppage.1Such events temporarily bring trash into public visibility and consciousness, but these are aberrations that occur only against the backdrop of the comfortable invisibility of the garbage that we cease lessly produce.Since most people do not live in conditions rife with garbage, what is cast off is both out of sight and out of mind.This essay seeks to reveal the hidden circulation of garbage in New York City.It focuses on garbage not as a technological problem, or even as a narrow environmental problem, but as a pervasive social process that connects us all.In this I follow Cynthia Deitering's suggestion that the 1980s saw "a shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste" (196) and that this shift caused us to "perceive [...] our own complicity in postindustrial ecosystems" (197).2There is no better way to make garbage visible in the postindustrial ecosystem of New York City than to focus on the conceptual and process-based art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist who in her almost fifty-year career has persistently Mark B. Feldman is a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and he will be a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center 2009-10.His book manuscript, Still Wild: The Human and the Animal in American Literary Naturalism, traces how literary naturalism grappled with the implica tions o f evoluationary theory.Mark's current project on contemporary New York City investigates how architects have utilized an ecological perspective to reminagine what a city is and alter its form.His work has appeared in Mosaic, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review,Nineteenth Century Studies (forthcoming), and the Minnesota Review (forthcoming).

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