Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 6, 1995 TAG: 9506060093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The New York City Sanitation Department's artist-in-residence sees inspiration in anaerobes, beauty in bacteria. She sees art in methane gas.
Visitors to "Methanogenesis," an exhibit drawn from an artists' workshop with Ukeles last summer at Mountain Lake, may draw their own conclusions. The diligent may learn at least a thing or two.
The summer-long exhibit is located in the Norfolk Southern Gallery of the Art Museum of Western Virginia.
It includes landfill liners, drawings inspired by bacteria, an anaerobic chamber, and other odds and ends related to Mother Nature's waste-not, want-not process of rot and renewal. There also is a video to explain it all.
If it doesn't exactly add up to Renoir, exhibit curator Mark Scala thinks it beautiful nonetheless.
"Sometimes serious art will take a little bit of work to get at," Scala said. "What I'm hoping is that people will be intrigued by this."
Ukeles has long been making spectacles of trash.
A garbage aficionado (so to speak) for decades, she has for the last 15 years been the New York Sanitation Department's unpaid resident artist. She has received a grant to create art work for the city's Fresh Kills Landfill, which is the nation's largest.
She also has choreographed street sweeping vehicles in Rotterdam, and lit the Rhone River at night with broken cobalt glass. She has made sculptures from trash and old garbage trucks. She says she has shaken the hand of every one of New York City's 8,500 sanitation workers - a performance art project called "touch sanitation" that took years to complete.
Ukeles once covered a New York City garbage truck with reflective Plexiglas, so that everyone it passed would confront the unmistakable link between themselves and what is hauled away each day.
"Methanogenesis" is less performance art than documentary, or maybe trophy chest. The pieces that make up the exhibit all are drawn from last year's Mountain Lake Workshop - which since 1980 has brought well-known artists to the picturesque resort west of Blacksburg to collaborate with students and area artists.
Founded by Virginia Tech professor and artist Ray Kass, the workshop in the past has featured such luminaries as folk artist Howard Finster, Japanese sculptor Jiro Okura and American avant-garde composer John Cage.
At last year's workshop with Ukeles, students worked with a Virginia Tech biology professor, James Ferry, to re-create the 18th-century experiment in which methane gas was discovered. The copper megaphone-like instruments in the exhibit were used in last summer's experiment at Pandapas Pond - in which methane gas created by decomposing organic matter underwater was gathered above the water's surface and set on fire.
Workshop participants also drew pictures inspired by looking at bacteria. And they played, blindly, their arms inserted through holes in plastic sheets, with the bentonite clay backs of factory-made landfill liners.
Ukeles said she was looking for a "shudder response" from those working with the goopy clay on the backs of the liners - something analogous to the response most of us have to decomposing matter.
Her feelings about the liners themselves are ambivalent. Designed to keep leachate from seeping out of landfill sites, the liners combine impermeable plastic with ancient impermeable clay, she said.
"They take these two materials, the natural and the artificial, and put them together. I find them both beautiful and repellant at the same time," she said.
Once in the ground, Ukeles said, the landfill liners thwart the very natural processes by which nature makes waste useable again.
"What happens ... is you don't let the soil do what it's capable of doing," Ukeles said. "They are like mega prophylactics. And I think we need to confront them."
Viewers of "Methanogenesis" are invited to walk between hanging landfill liners - thus becoming, for a moment, the material trapped in between.
The scrawls on the clay backs of the liners, meanwhile, draw a parallel to the works of early 20th-century surrealist and Dadaist artists who sought to explore the newly recognized world of the unconscious.
For Ukeles, the world of methanogens and the carbon cycle was a discovery of similar magnitude. "I was comparing it to the discovery of the unconscious," she said of the scratches and scribbles in the clay.
Scala, in his curator's notes for the exhibit, described Ukeles as belonging to a growing group of artists known as eco-artists, eco-feminists or environmental protest artists "whose subject is the destruction of nature by human industry and expanding habitation."
"There's no question she has an agenda," Scala said. "But it's a worthwhile agenda."
Ukeles, for her part, dislikes most labels - though she admits to being partial to "eco-feminist."
She also insisted the exhibit is not designed to deliver any message.
"Nobody's asking them [viewers] to love anaerobes," Ukeles said. Instead, she said, "Methanogenesis" chronicles the discoveries of those who took part in the workshop - herself included.
"I'm a complete newcomer to the world of microbiology," Ukeles said. "But I am a discoverer. This strange and kind of creepy anaerobic world is right inside our own guts. Once you got over the shudder and revulsion ... it makes you feel your own power."
Anaerobes, Ukeles believes, are also not without their charms.
"I was so struck by the variety. They're very social. They have food that runs all through the whole colony. They're truly very communitarian," she said. "Which I found kind of wonderful."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***