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

Feldman, Mark B.

doi:10.17077/2168-569x.1082

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Toxic sublime images of wastelands and garbagescapes, such as the work of Edward Burtynsky, though aestheticizing environmental crisis, can result in a sense of helplessness and fear, with human agency usually out of the picture (Peeples 2011;Hodgins and Thompson 2011). Feldman (2009) points in contrast to Mierle Ukeles' performances as artist in residence with the New York City sanitation department, which involved direct contact and learning from workers, and environmental experiences linking citizens to trash as part of a complex, dynamic living system embedded within larger economies, bringing humans back into the picture. The aestheticization of what has already been categorized as unwanted opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking about the meaning of garbage post ipso facto its arrival at the place where, for all intents and purposes for most citizens, it has already disappeared.…”

Section: Aesthetics and Trash: The Toxic Sublimementioning

confidence: 98%

Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

Lithgow

Wall

2019

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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The assemblages of (post)industrial neoliberal society include the production of vast quantities of post-consumer materials categorized as waste, which for many appears to vanish from everyday spaces. But rather than make it disappear in any final sense, recycling and disposal processes simply move it in new forms into new places within the global flows of waste. In urban contexts, the abject category of waste must be expelled from the sanitary spaces and subjectivities of daily routines, yet its corresponding absence in everyday perception obviates the urgency of action. One approach to unbundling the abject residue of contemporary society without instigating castastrophic rupture of social orders is through the aestheticization of the expelled. Artists working in the realm of abjection can serve as agents disrupting and redefining boundaries and social imaginaries of the status quo. In this paper we examine an artist-in-residence at the Edmonton (Canada) Waste Management Centre, arguing that the Deleuzian assemblages erasing the material consequences of garbage can be short-circuited in a municipal setting by redistributions of aesthetic experience. In this case, the artist residency embedded in human and mechanical assemblages of waste disposal allowed the artist to transform materials into an aesthetic spectacle recategorizing the abject as sympathetic and a vital component of social and spatial discourse.

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Section: Aesthetics and Trash: The Toxic Sublimementioning

confidence: 98%

Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

Lithgow

Wall

2019

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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“…Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art" (Ukeles, 1969, p. 3). What evolved from this interest in elevating everyday domestic actions as performance art was a body of work that established Ukeles as a leader in connecting private and public spheres, connecting the domestic to the systematic to address waste infrastructure in urban communities (Feldman, 2009). Her 1978 performance piece, Touch Sanitation, resulted from a series of interviews with New York City sanitation workers in which she discovered the dissatisfaction of workers with the general public's negative perception and treatment of workers.…”

Section: Precedents In Feminist Environmental Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

#FOGWASTE: urbanismo participativo para uma melhor compreensão do contexto

Napawan

Snyder

2016

SDRJ

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Participatory urbanism is on the rise in communities struggling to develop quality public spaces in constrained environments. In light of the growing practice of community-based strategies to shape urban place-making, this paper argues for an increased role of community engagement in urban place-understanding. It presents the work of feminist environmental artists of the 1970s as a precedent for participatory approaches towards infrastructure awareness and environmental stewardship, and discusses opportunities for expanding the impact of their approach through digital media integration. Lastly, the paper concludes with a contemporary casestudy as an engaged model for improving urban systems function. The case study presented represents a collaboration between the authors and the City of San Jose to engage pilot communities with a greater understanding of the connections between household practices of waste water management and urban sustainability.

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Genealogies of Environmental Media: Feminist Art and the Choreographic Body in Social Works

Lerner¹

2022

Media+Environment

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“Genealogies of Environmental Media” analyzes a feminist genealogy of art and media practice that reconstitutes the relationship between bodies and environments through what Shannon Jackson calls “social works”—artworks that are engaged at the nexus of aesthetics and politics. I attend to social works that focus on the environment, and in so doing, reveal a feminist strategy of performance that I refer to as the choreographic body. The choreographic body enacts the labor of performance and alters the embodied experience of spectators and participants. As media bodies, choreographic bodies are semiotic and historically contingent, advancing environmental work in ways that foreground how the performing body exposes environmental infrastructures that are occluded from view. In the social works I analyze, the choreographic body occupies a site of reflexive mediation that bears on the environment, lacing feminist art with media histories. I trace the changing status of the choreographic body alongside environmental social work beginning with filmmaker Maya Deren’s choreocinema and dancer Anna Halprin’s community dance to illustrate how the choreographic body developed as a feminist strategy—shifting from explorations of the body in front of the camera in the outdoors, to dance’s shifting location from inside the studio to outside on Halprin’s dance deck and in the wider California community. This foundation then recasts performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles through the lens of dance as an overlooked, but central, part of her environmental practice. I read Touch Sanitation and Marrying the Barges: A Barge Ballet/Touch Sanitation Show in light of how she utilizes the choreographic body as an overlooked feminist strategy. This positions the bodies of participants in a larger choreography of performance. Finally, I analyze Invisible-5, a travelogue/audio tour of Interstate 5 in California that brings awareness to environmental injustice, as a way to think through the shifting role of the choreographic body in more recent work and ask where it might lead us as scholars and activists.

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

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

#FOGWASTE: urbanismo participativo para uma melhor compreensão do contexto

Genealogies of Environmental Media: Feminist Art and the Choreographic Body in Social Works

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