High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Abstract

In the 2008 Pixar movie WALL-E we find the title character in a projected future overwhelmed by the effects of a few centuries of human garbage habits. WALL-E is a curiously low-tech robot assembly of belts, cranks, binoculars, and gears who trolls his way through a larger-thanlife heap of human discard. He lives alone in a dump left by a world-wide and world-containing mega-box store, one whose incapacity to contain the unstoppable pile of refuse prompted Earth’s remaining human inhabitants to evacuate into space. WALL-E moves endearingly and deliberately through the hills and valleys of garbage, picking up, sorting, shelving, and labeling the items he finds: dolls, videos, tools, containers. In so doing, he distinguishes and defines the indiscriminate piling system that has turned discrete objects into generalized garbage, transforming those items through re-use into new, careful, and discriminating categories. Indeed, in WALL-E, de-garbagification requires categorical re-discrimination, the willingness to decide that the homogenized object world that we call “garbage” deserves to be internally differentiated once again. Encountering WALL-E’s tricked-out collector space brings to3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1fans, ashtrays, etc. The list ranges on and on, inviting its visitors to choose among differently styled objects of different eras, a collection whose categories make the infinite extension of the object world both typical and newly specific.