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MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES / #3. Plans, page 2
the importance of an act as well as to indicate one's own relationship as benefitting
within its effects. 
 Now, the challenge in the two years' since the end of the PERFORMANCE, mid '80-mid '82, 
[besides making 18 different pieces for 18 shows using its materials], is not simply
to "document" it. that would be warmed-over material. Rather, my plan is to com-
press its citywide 10 arc energy-trail and transform its contextually constructed 
time-space at its monumental real-system scale into a total environmental art/work. 

In Sanitation parlance, during the PERFORMANCE, I "collected" 14 hours of 
video, 73 hours of audio, hundreds of pictures, countless imprints on my soul, an
incredible overlay of media, and an opening of what I call the "Gates of Acceptance"
on the part of thousands of sanmen, who have asked: "Will you remember that?"
"Will you create the conditions, the environment of this knowledge?" Now, my job is
to "dispose" of all this properly, with creativity, so as not to Waste the potential
energy at hand." Rather, to "transform" it and "pass it along" to the public for whom it
was always intended. A place to "recycle its resources"? Does such a PLACE yet
exist? Is the greatest goal to INVENT such a PLACE? 

To invent such a place, to invesitage and redefine "place", both for "real"
totally free inquiry (art) and for social "place" in a democracy, that is my plan. 
On March 25, 1983, Commissioner Norman Steisel "certified" my proposal for
TOUCH SANITATION SHOW. This massive "full-system" exhibition will occur concurrently
in two sites: a real Sanitation facility to invite the public IN to see sanmen's real workplace; intersected by a second kind of place--a progressive cultural space--so that the public can also envision sanitation workers (and all service workers) where they have a rigth to belong--WITHIN our culture, not outside and alienated from it, indeed at the very heart of urban culture which their work makes possible, at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho. this 2 site show will run 3-4 weeks in the early Fall of 1983, free to the public. The Sanitation Department, the Commissioner stated, would provide in-kind technical aid, the loan of real work facilities, approximately 20 trucks, barges, installation furnishings including lockers, showers, toilets, installed as part of the exhibition, with transportation provided to the workplace site from a central location such as the Museum of Modern Art. This is a commitment unmatched by any public agency in this City's history.

To preserve the independence and individual vision of the product, outside funds must be raised for the soundworks, video and photoworks' post-production, two new neon lightworks and other artworks, and much publicity for the SHOW, by myself and through my sponsors: Creative Time [full staff approval received on October 6, 1982 with active board approval in discussion this month] and the New York Foundation for the Arts (the sponsor of the PERFORMANCE).

Briefly, a description of the components of TOUCH SANITATION SHOW:
Part One: titled "Transfer Station Trans Formation," will take place at a real Sanitation work facility, the 32,000 sq ft 59th Street Marine Transfer Station, from their trucks on the tipping floor, backed over barges that come right inside the facility, that then haul the garbage by tug to Staten Island for sanitary landfill - disposal. Creaky, old typical of most of our facilities, tipping floor as big as a football field. Site, which will be completely emptied of garbage for the show, has