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MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES / #3. Plans, page 3

been selected, after two years' consideration and discussion with dozens of workers and art people as well, because it sits midway between Sanitation's two-fold systems--collection and disposal--and thus characterizes as no other kind of facility can, the complete span of Sanitation's public-health maintenance mandate. Five components at this site: (a)Glove/Barge Project: I will invite all sanmen to save their used-up work-gloves starting this Fall, 1982, for 4 seasons until next Fall, as a symbol both of the size of the unending work, and also to signify that the glove which enables the worker to "handle" the waste without touching it, itself gets used up, becomes "garbage" and needs to be "thrown away;" and also as a symbol of SEPARATION from the human hands which never become garbage. The gloves will be collected in each borough, then collected in the week before the opening of the SHOW by barge, (cleaned of garbage, itself an excellent "formalist" symbol of system-scale,) borough by borough, re-tracing and condensing my performance / circling of the whole City, borough to borough, and brought by tug at the opening the the SHOW slowly into the slip of the Transfer Station. This city-wide action will activate the whole SHOW. (b)Exhibition/Tipping Floor: about 15 Sanitation vehicles, collection trucks, snow blowers, flushers, salt spreaders, sweepers in frozen gestures of dumping, poised in bays over the barge: (c)Sound-piece emitting from inside of vehicles, taped voices of sanmen from the 73 hours of PERFORMANCE tapes, interspersed with an over-all orchestration of "system sounds": beeps, hoppers' grinding & cycling, filling the cavernous space with their rhythms (that everybody knows unconsciously, that signifies that we made to to another day); (d)Neon light-work: energy lines rising, pulsing, coursing out of the glove barge and running all along the 350 ft of the Station, the transformation of the handshake energy into light energy, throbbing, out to the River and back again in waves; (e)System stacks: up the ramp, along the edges of the Station, thousands of brooms, shovels, baskets stacked "like" minimalist sculptures [this is also the central supply depot] . Audience, transported by bus from central location, is literally and symbolically IN PLACE OF SAMEN. 

Part Two: Advanced cultural space: Feldman Gallery: titled "Maintenance City/ Sanman's Place: four components: (a)Public Cleaning Ceremony activates this part of the SHOW: outside, street closed, mirrored sanitation truck cycles ritually, gallery windows (approximately 70 feet) covered with graffiti saying: "Garbageman" prior to opening of SHOW. Action: these bad names are wiped away by a group of all the "actors in the system": the Commissioner, other department officials, union representatives, families, public volunteers, artists, media representatives:a microcosm of society--a prototypical Sanitation act, symbolized. (b) Inside Room One: "Maintenance city": a total environmental transformation of the PERFORMANCE"S contextual models of Sanitation's real levels: Time, space, exposure, energy:into a year's shift-clock images, a city's worth of maps, videos stacked to ceiling showing "Waste-Video": my tape "a network of flowing garbage" (moving, constantly moving images of where your garbage went, and continues) as if falling down ceiling to floor (truck to barge to burial): running along the walls of the clock faces another neon pulse-work throbbing with endless energy; total installation. Overhead: panels of an orgy of material unmarried, ordered into sources of paper, glass, metal kinds marching toward the ^dipay sign me range pictured in "Waste Video" as if running over into video image. (c)Room Two: (through the gates of "acceptance" and "rejection"):"Sanman's Place": real reconstructions of junky old locker room juxtaposed with new one, right out of Sanitation working facilities: both show same tape of sanmen talking, AUDIENCE LITERALLY SITS IN THEIR PLACE. Possibly, a panel on "Is Public Art Real? and/or "Work/Culture/Class and the meaning of Quality." Cross-mix of "experts".

As well, I continued work on two other Public Place Projects, begun in 1977, of massive landfill reclamation projects that deal with the intersection of city-wide disposal needs and local quality of life desires: a collaboration and a competition. 
x called 15 sound tracks for 15 santrucks or something like that