Redevelopment Eden? The Politics of Public Earthworks

“Landfills are the city’s largest remaining open spaces, not, like classic earthworks, splendid in desert isolation,” Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote in 1992, advocating for “public earthworks” that occupied urban wastelands. The deindustrialization and rezoning of American cities after the 1970s created new opportunities for the public artist to redesign disused tracts proximal to large populations, whether landfills, brownfields, or blighted lots. Yet such opportunities were fraught with unique ethical entanglements. Artists could find themselves fulfilling “a kind of sanitation service,” delivering “tidy, mugger free parks,” as Robert Morris assessed the new demands of public art aligned with the needs of private industry and development. How to reconcile the pursuit of spatial justice with charges of “redevelopment Eden”? This paper will consider the ethics of public art as land reclamation, looking specifically at the role of artists in transforming ravaged urban landscapes into parks during a contested period of rezoning and real estate speculation following the recessionary 1970s. My central case study will be Ukeles’s Turnaround/Surround (1989 - ), a permanent public work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designed for a closed landfill bordered by freight yards, fragile wetlands, and a public housing complex that had concentrated poorer residents near the active dump. Critic Kate Linker’s cynical term “redevelopment Eden,” along with Rosalyn Deutsche’s prescient critique of artist-designed landscapes in relation to gentrification, raise the question of how we might retrospectively assess such projects in light of the dramatically uneven development of today’s city.