Transfer Station Trans Formation

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

September - October 1984
59th Street NYC Department of Sanitation Transfer Station.
Photo Courtesy of Creative Time

Part of the evolving Touch Sanitation Show, Transfer Station Trans Formation took place in the 59th Street Marine Transfer Station and was the first art exhibit ever held in a real sanitation facility in the United States. The Station was built in 1901, renovated by the WPA in 1934, and scheduled for demolition following the exhibition in October 1984.

Ukeles believes that “art should impinge on the daily life of everyone and should be injected into daily prime-time work-time,” and that people are “ready for the kind of public art that uses the entire city as a performance space.” In 1977, she began interviewing NYC Sanitation workers and in 1979 began Touch Sanitation. In the first performance, Ukeles shook hands with and personally thanked each and every one of the city’s 8,500 Sanitation workers over an 11 month period. Throughout the Touch Sanitation Show, she continued humanizing Sanitation workers by reminding the public of what happens to the 28,000 tons of garbage produced daily by New York City and spending 12-hour days traveling with the workers in Following Your Footsteps. In Cleansing The Bad Names, public officials ceremoniously removed windows that had been graffitied with bad names for Sanitation workers (i.e. “garbagemen”). Ukeles felt that if Sanitation workers are garbagemen, we therefore are garbagepersons.

Transfer Station Trans Formation included a 350-foot light sculpture made from 60 condemned Sanitation trucks; an array of Sanitation vehicles and equipment, such as collection trucks, snowplows, mechanical sweepers, barges, a 60 cubic yard Athey Wagon, and a huge salt mound; a multi-track sound work with voices of Sanitation workers and the sound of their vehicles; a suspended container of work gloves collected from Sanitation workers between 1983 and 1984; and a sculpture on the end-wall that rose from the barge level, cut through the building wall, and pushed through the roof.