Landscape Architecture, August 2001

The Art in Decomposition

Taped to a wall in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s unassuming office in the New York City Department of Sanitation is a photograph torn from the front page of the New York Times. In it, hundreds of Hindu pilgrims can be seen walking into the rivers of Allahabad, India, for what is considered a sacred dip in holy waters. Ukeles marvels at how the riverway is so vital that every person entering it has instinctively opened his or her arms in embrace.

For Ukeles, the image is a moving validation of the ideas she has brought to her artwork for decades. As the artist in residence for the Department of Sanitation since 1977, Ukeles has long believed that the most important landscapes are not stagnant places but those that are informed by the flow of life – the flow of water, the flow of people, the flow of garbage. Ukeles has always been drawn to places most people would rather ignore. She can often be found walking across landfills alongside landscape architects or engineers. Today, she is at the forefront of several redevelopment initiatives that will turn these blighted places into thriving landscapes. Like several landscape architects who have worked on landfills, Ukeles cannot envision such a site’s future without remembering its past.

Arguably the most prominent of these projects is New York’s Fresh Kills Landfill, located on Staten Island. Fresh Kills, at 2,200 acres, is thought to be the largest landfill in the United States. The recently closed landfill will soon be the subject of a design competition to guide its end use. More than two decades ago, armed with two National Endowment of the Arts grants, Ukeles proposed two things – that she create an urban earthwork on the site and that just such a competition take place. In 1989, as part of its Percent for Art program, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs commissioned Ukeles to design elements of the landfill and contribute to its overall end use and design. She will work collaboratively with the selected designer, including any artists on the proposer’s team, toward an integration of the design work at the Fresh Kills site.

“What interests me about Fresh Kills is it’s a compression in one place of many related to the urban condition,” Ukeles says. “This place could be a site of transformation, where people could see our power to take something that was so degraded, and such a hard thing to bear, and heal it.” But to heal is not to erase, according to Ukeles – and too many engineers and designers confuse the two. “Is it the job of the landscape designer to do the greatest makeup job in the world,” she asks, “or can this be a didactic place and also something undreamt of?”

In 1969, Ukeles wrote “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” declaring that every act of life – including those aspects we consider the most base, such as collecting garbage – could be called art. The manifesto, and Ukeles’s works that came after it, could be considered a challenge to the Earthworks artists who had gained currency at that time. Those artists placed their works in the most remote, pristine parts of the natural world – accessible only to the few. “They were wonderful images that have prevailed, but they were not very public,” Ukeles says.

One of the most enduring symbols of the Earthworks movement, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, is contrapuntal to the symbol to which Ukeles returns again and again: a running spiral. “The symbol of the Spiral Jetty is entropy, the serpent eating its tail,” Ukeles says. “In the running spiral, the force of energy comes in, coalesces into a form, which then releases to become the basis of the next flow of energy. Smithson’s work winds to a stopping point at its center, whereas Ukeles’s running spiral continues and repeats itself. A succession of waves takes this form, for example and more abstractly, so does the “continuous loop” recycling symbol.

These two forces – endless flow and an espousal of the public and the democratic – have informed much of Ukeles’s work. She takes issue with landscape architects who do not consider how people fit into a design, but she also derides those who attempt to please everyone and produce works of incredible blandness. “People need to understand your set of decisions, but you need to leave a little room for people to enter into a dialogue with those decisions,” Ukeles says. “The public completes my work.”

Such a democratic view can be seen in two of Ukeles’s best-known creations. In Touch Sanitation, Ukeles created a performance piece in which she circled the city, walking thousands of miles with the city’s 8,500 sanitation workers until she had shaken all of their hands. For Flow City, still a work in progress, Ukeles envisions a series of passages – including one made of recycled materials – that will bring people into a marine transfer station, where garbage and recyclables are transferred to barges for transport and disposal elsewhere.

But a landfill, to Ukeles, is the ultimate symbol of democracy – where the personal effects of our lives all end up. Ukeles finds great irony in the fact that one side of Fresh Kills is bordered by the behemoth Staten Island Mall and that the city constructed a large vegetated wall to shield shoppers from views of the landfill. “Here is the basis of our whole culture – buy, buy, buy and waste, waste, waste,” Ukeles says. “As these mounds stop growing, they are perceived as an alien monster, but really, these people are missing the link. This is social sculpture. We have all made these mountains.”

In fact, landfills often remind Ukeles of sacred mounds of indigenous peoples, and this was especially true at Danehy Park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now a thriving recreational area, the park is built atop a landfill that closed more than 20 years ago. Working closely with John Kissida, ASLA, a landscape architect with Camp Dresser & McKee, as well as the city and the Cambridge Arts Council, Ukeles is developing a four-part public artwork on the site, called Turnaround Surround, that will celebrate its derelict past.

The first phase (a path made with recycled glass) and the second (plantings of native grasses, trees, roses, and herbs that Ukeles calls “wavers and smellers”) have already been built. Ukeles is now testing materials for phase three, two interactive spaces at the highest point of the former landfill. One is a dance floor made of recycled rubber, on which the artist will graft an image of a galaxy, again a continuous spiral. The other will be a throne room – for the “king or queen of the hill” – that will celebrate public ownership of public space. The throne will be made of concrete embedded with recycled glass. “One of the things I like about Mierle’s piece is that it reminds people from whence [the site] came,” Kissida says.

The final phase will include a performance component in which people from 56 different cultures will place items they value into special “implant” containers in the throne structure. This will imbue the process of disposal with meaning, as opposed to disregard – “fertilizing the earth with diversity,” Ukeles says. Ideally, this will give people a sense of their power to change these degraded places, Ukeles says, and to know that “we’re not only victims of our bad practices.”

Perhaps nowhere do people need to be more supported in their efforts to heal than in Israel. Ukeles is proposing a work of art for Hiriya, a closed landfill that sits near a major intersection between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that will trace the arc of its reclamation. At night, a system of lights, powered by solar energy and methane, will dance across the mound, color-coded according to the site’s toxicity. As leachate collection and gas extraction processes begin to heal the site, the colors will grow softer. During the day, mist geysers will shoot up from the mound, similarly colored from toxic to healthy. “When you see clear water, we’re living in a healthy world again,” Ukeles says.

Ukeles was also invited by an environmental foundation to work with several landscape architects – Shlomo Aronson, Niall Kirkwood, ASLA, Peter Latz, Laura Starr, ASLA, and Adrian van der Stayy – as well as architect Ulrich Plessner, to map out remediation of the Ayalon River and adjacent parkland, which border Hiriya.

Closer to home, Ukeles has turned to another degraded waterway, the Schuylkill River, which runs through Philadelphia. In the 18th century, people were baptized in the Center City section of the river, but today no one would consider dipping a toe into the brown, polluted waterway. Commissioned by the Schuylkill River Development Council, Ukeles has proposed a trellis and pylon structure next to the river that will celebrate water purification rituals of the world, while encouraging purification rituals of the world, while encouraging purification of the river itself.

Once the artwork is complete, Ukeles hopes that people will come to embrace the river – somewhat like the pilgrims at Allahabad. But unlike those waters, Ukeles knows, sites like the Schuylkill and Fresh Kills that are far from holy, are the ones that need our attention most of all.

KIM O’CONNELL