The Forward, November 25, 1994

Talking Trash with Mierle Laderman Ukeles: An Artist Finds Meaning in Garbage

The scene is the New York Public Library, and the subject for the evening is trash. Visitors are milling about artworks and installations that chronicle 150 years of sanitation – or the lack of it – in the city, subject of the exhibition “Garbage! The History and Politics of Trash in New York City.”

In the center of it all stands Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a tall, blond artist who knows an awful lot about garbage – where it comes from, where it goes and what happens when it gets there. She has a particularly strong affinity for the people who move it – for the last 17 years she has been the official artist-in-residence of New York City’s Department of Sanitation. The department was one of the various city agencies that provided materials for Ms. Ukeles’ “Ceremonial Arch Honoring Service Workers in the New Service Economy,” a 15-foot-high sculpture that is the centerpiece of the library’s show.

At first glance, Ms. Ukeles might seem an unlikely champion of sanitation workers. She is 55 years old, a mother of three – and an observant Jew. But that, she says, is why it all makes sense. “The whole subject of this garbage show is dirt,” she explains. “How do you get clean? These are central Jewish subjects in the heart of Jewish ritual, Jewish law.”

Ms. Ukeles may well be the most observant Jew to forge a successful career in today’s avant-garde art world. She is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, a prestigious SoHo gallery, she has shown across the United States as well as in Europe and Asia and she has been commissioned to create an impressive array of public art projects. But in shuttling between her two cultures, she doesn’t find herself completely accepted in either one. The observant community, she says shuns her art. And her artistic colleagues find her commitment to Jewish practice befuddling.

“Most rituals in the art world – openings, conferences, symposia – occur on Friday night and Saturday so that it has been over many years extraordinarily difficult to be a practicing Jew and participate as a member of the artistic community,” Ms. Ukeles comments. But that, she says, is not the most upsetting thing – although Jews form a big part of New York’s art community, they are clearly, for the most part, non-practicing Jews. What is more disturbing, she adds, is the community’s attitude toward her religious practice. “I often feel like I’m the weirdest of the exotic types in the art world,” she says. “People do everything you could possibly imagine, and it’s accepted without comment. When I say, ‘I have to leave now because the sun is setting’ – the whole exquisite connection to the natural world – people never heard of it.”

Ms. Ukeles grew up in Denver, where her father, an Orthodox rabbi, was a philosophy professor and chairman of the Board of Health. She moved to New York to attend Barnard, got her master’s of fine arts at New York University and began turning out abstract expressionist paintings. Her philosophy of art changed when she had her first child, who is now 26. “This notion of connection to a living being,” Ms. Ukeles explains, “that’s an ecological model of interdependency and connectivity. This was antithetical to notions of the avant-garde that I was completely devoted to in my art practices.”

Ms. Ukeles began work with environmental themes in the ‘60’s and became the sanitations department’s official (though unpaid) artist in 1977. That is when she began the piece she is best known for in the mainstream press – “Touch Sanitation,” an 11-month performance that involved her shaking the hand of everyone of New York’s 8,500 sanitation workers. In 1983, the sanitation department asked her to develop “Flow City,” a huge installation designed to let the public see what happens to garbage at the 59th Street Transfer Facility. (It is currently stalled for lack of funds.)

Despite her art-world success, Ms. Ukeles says, one of her biggest disappointments is the lack of response from the Jewish community – especially to an installation and performance involving a mikvah she built at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1986. “I figured, here’s my opportunity to be a whole Jew and a whole artist, to tap into this root of Judaism, this ability to transform oneself from uncleanliness to cleanliness. I wanted to make this profound connection between creation and my special cultural learning. I thought that I was initiating a dialogue – but there was a great silence.”

Ms. Ukeles attributes that silence to the “lack of creative culture” in observant communities. “If there were a stunningly creative Jewish culture, which I think there’s not right now, there would be many ways for an artist who is interested in these subjects – dirt, clean, transformation, the ecology of the community – to tap into Jewish learning, so that there would be huge expectations on the part of artists for the Jewish community to be responsive to these issues and to provide a rigorous dialogue for artists,” she says. “If there were a real dynamic Jewish culture, any artist dealing with these issues would be surrounded by rings and rings of the most learned members of the Jewish community saying, ‘Are you aware that this rabbi of the third century said, Do you know how to go from dirty to clean, that rabbi from France, that rabbi from Germany…’ That’s a living culture.”

The ceremonial arch in the garbage show (which is on view through Feb. 25) reflects yet another approach to Jewish themes. When she was growing up, Ms. Ukeles remembers her father warning her that if she were ever in Rome, she should never walk under the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the enslavement of Jews. “It’s 2,000 years later and it’s still a symbol of great shame and hatred,” Ms. Ukeles muses. “Arches of triumph throughout history have always been the essential mark of victory, usually of violent military victory. The arch for the Jew is always a symbol of degradation.” With this piece, she sought to transform that image. Its columns are composed of items selected and donated by various city agencies: Mailbags from the post office, hoses from the fire department and springs, cables and wires from the transit department are among many other objects the artist describes as “materials of power.” The crowning glory is thousands of gloves from the sanitation department. “My attempt was to take the form of arch and to say, The victors are all the workers of the city,” Ms. Ukeles explains.

Ms. Ukeles currently spends her days in her office at the sanitation department, researching drainage, anaerobic microbes and other such subjects for her biggest project yet: the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. (She was hired through the Department of Cultural Affair’s Percent for Art Program, which stipulates that when the city embarks on capital projects it must set aside 1% of the budget for artworks.) Ms. Ukeles is concerned with the “end-use” program, which involves reintegrating parts of the landfill for public use as they become full. “I’m at the very beginning of my research,” she says. “It goes all the way back to sacred earth mounts, cultures transforming degraded places into sacred places. Dirty and clean in the earth are very close to each other.” Here, too, she says, Jewish practice is deeply relevant. “There’s a blessing that you say every day when you come out of the bathroom,” she explains. “Thank you, God, for keeping open all the channels of my body, because I know if they were blocked I wouldn’t be able to be alive.”

There is no termination date for the landfill, which is the world’s largest. “It will be done when its capacity is reached,” Ms. Ukeles explains. “And hopefully when there are alternative ways to deal with the garbage. If we don’t have alternatives, you’re going to keep your garbage in your living room.”

ROBIN CEMBALEST