M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Jeremy Deller
Memory Bucket, 2003, video still � Jeremy Deller
such as clean air acts, wilderness preservation or
endangered species legislation, have since been gutted by
the likes of the Bush administration, acting as a special
interest group is no longer a strategy that makes sense.
So what might post-environmental art be?
One expansive creative lineage might be tracked
back to the early ‘systems’ works of Hans Haacke or the
ongoing practice of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Ukeles has
been working with The City of New York Sanitation
Department and around the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten
Island since the mid-1970s and has developed an
approach that shares performative and documentary
elements with a social and political dimension. Admiring
the classical American Earthworks but troubled by their
‘unfortunate un-public aspect’ – often being isolated or
on private land – Ukeles instead turned her attention to
the monstrous Fresh Kills dump, both as a ‘50-year-old
social sculpture that we have all produced’ and as a way
of exploring the massive municipal system of disposal of
what the city has thrown ‘away’ and hoped to forget. For
her Touch Sanitation (1978–80) Ukeles spent 11 months
following garbage truck crews in every borough of New
York, personally greeting each of the city’s 8,500
sanitation workers with a handshake and the salutation:
‘Thank you for keeping New York alive.’ By exploring the
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operational function and channels of the city as an
organism – encroaching on both human and non-human
alike – works such as Touch Sanitation show a capacity to
trace previously hidden pathways and ‘up-cycle’ meaning,
if showing the habitual industrial mechanisms for the
literal burying of resources in the world’s biggest dump.
On 13 September 2001, having been shut down and
slated for remediation just months earlier, Fresh Kills was
reopened for the burial of debris from the World Trade
Center following 9/11 – incinerated human remains now
share a graveyard with rubbish. So is terrorism an
‘environmental issue’?
The reality of today’s ecological front line is that
the major battles are being lost (and occasionally won)
not in woods and marshes but in courtrooms,
boardrooms, war rooms and international protocols –
and, of course, within psychology and language itself.
(Attempts to discredit global warming favour the use of
the term ‘climate change’ because ‘people like change’)
The fact that the battle-lines have become increasingly
asymmetrical, abstract and more concerned with
processes and issues that aren’t black or white – or hairshirt
Green – makes research-based or speculative,
documentary-like modes of address in practice more
keenly equipped than ever to intervene and infiltrate.