Waste not, Want not

Touch Sanitation Performance: "Hand Shake Ritual" with workers of New York City Department of Sanitation, 1977-1980

It’s Day 24 of L.A. County’s “Safer at Home” order and the days of the week are running together. On the days I hear the familiar squeal and thud of the garbage truck on my block, I know it must be Monday. The sound is a welcome disquiet that keeps a beat when everything else outside seems to have halted, gone flat. It comforts. The truck’s clamor is a reminder that, despite a distressing and sudden pandemic that has distanced us, sequestered us, we—the civic body—keep moving. The city stays alive through the efforts of “the essential,” the sanitation workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, truck drivers, agricultural workers, take-out food service workers, and medical staff. They are necessary. They keep order. They maintain. 

“Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time,” wrote artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art. “The mind bogles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.” 

For eleven months starting in mid-1979, Ukeles aimed to alter the negative public perceptions of sanitation workers (untouchables?) by literally reaching out to them; she worked day and night, visiting all fifty-nine districts of the New York Sanitation Department, to shake the hands of over 8500 garbagemen (yes, they were all men). To each she spoke, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Ukeles shadowed the workers, painstakingly mapped their movements, and collected their stories. TOUCH SANITATION, the resulting, multi-part artwork, gave a human face to their otherwise anonymous labor. It acknowledged, in such a simple way, the people who make our mess disappear, the first defense for public health and safety, the “housekeepers of the city.”

It’s Day 28 and I’ve been keeping house. I’m trying to keep order, maintain. I paint a wall that hasn’t bothered me for two years until just now. I nurse a 10 week old baby and change another diaper. I scrub the grout in the shower because I only just noticed it. I take out the trash. 

It’s Day 30 and I think of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, forty-one years ago, touching the hands of 8500 garbagemen. I think of New York and its 103,208 confirmed cases of COVID-19, its 6898 casualties. The hand is a viral delivery system, an undertaker. Forty-one years after TOUCH SANITATION, we are forbidden from touching strangers. Shaking hands is illicit and “good hand hygiene” is a civic duty (we follow the twenty-second rule; we don’t touch our face). Forty-one years later, touch sanitation is a dystopic reality. Hand sanitizer—if you can get it—is a ready-made bulwark against the germs of others. Lest we forget, it’s a mitigator of our own. 

“We are, all of us, whether we desire it or not, in relation to Sanitation, implicated, dependent if we want the City, and ourselves, to last more than a few days.” That’s Ukeles writing in 1984. She continues, “I am—along with every other citizen who lives, works, visits, or passes through this space—a coproducer of Sanitation's work-product, as well as a customer of Sanitation's work.” It’s Day 31 and I wake up to the sounds of the garbage truck again. Today’s the day I decide to become some kind of coproducer too, because I know this going to last more than a few days. 

Catherine Taft
Los Angeles, April 2020