Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper addresses representations of the constructed environment in New York during the 1980s, considering the work of three artists who explored issues of health, waste, and violence in the urban ecological system. Key projects include Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ long-term collaboration with sanitation workers, John Fekner’s protest of toxic waste trafficking along the Long Island Expressway, and Christy Rupp’s investigation of rat habitats during the period’s notorious garbage crisis. Starting with historical precedent, I argue that Fekner, Rupp, and Ukeles rejected the imagery of depopulated sites pervasive in sixties-era deconstructions of abstract spatial frameworks for an understanding of the city as a living, multiplicitous entity that depends on biopolitical techniques of sanitation for its survival. To make my argument, I draw on the urban analysis of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2017) as well as studies in environmental history and media theory. As I demonstrate, the shift in the imagining of the city coincided with, and taps into, historical changes in American environmental politics, as rising anxiety over (hazardous) waste disposal came to eclipse, in the aftermath of Love Canal, many other topics of concern. Consequently, this paper determines that Fekner’s, Rupp’s, and Ukeles’ interventions in city infrastructure generated an aesthetics of care for the urbanized web of life, which they fashioned through modes of participation, refusal, and provocation.