Visibility and Worth in Maintenance Work and Art – Mierle Laderman Ukeles
by Yagmur Kültür and Lena Stolze
The ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!’, written by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and published in Artforum in 1971 is divided into two parts: the first simply titled ‘Ideas’ is further subdivided into 5 parts, from A. to E. The second part is her proposal for The Maintenance Art Exhibition ‘Care’, also divided into three parts, namely Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance. This proposed exhibition would display maintenance work as contemporary art. With this approach, she expands on Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the readymade in a way that also found actions and found habits are included in the scope of art.
Under ‘ideas’, she develops a binary of two forces or ‘systems’ that she calls development and maintenance. Development is, according to her, individual, purely creative, avant-garde, dynamic, with the possibility of major change and connected to the freudian death instinct. Maintenance in contrast is eternal, perpetual, equilibrium, sustaining and preserving, keeping the home fires burning and is connected to the life instinct. Ukeles does not explicitly link this binary to a gender binary, and hasn’t spoken to wether she sees this division as gendered. However, she goes on to more explicitly gender maintenance work in a subsequent list of work she considers maintenance with instructions like ‘call him again’ or ‘stay young’. We can therefore say that development may be implicitly male and maintenance implicitly female.
This Manifesto was written by Ukeles, according to her own account, after her marriage and birth of her first child made her acutely aware of the division between the work she was doing in public as an artist and the work she was doing at home as a mother. Feeling split into two, she decided to correct this by using her social power as an artist to define all her work as art. (Interview with Art in America Magazine published Mar 18, 2009) Under The Maintenance Art Exhibition ‘Care’ she proposes a concrete way to correct the epistemic injustice that has been committed against maintenance work and the people who do it. In the first, Personal, part of the exhibition, her working will be the art work. in the second, General, part of the exhibition, she expands this power to everyone who does maintenance by interviewing an unspecified number of people of every class about what they maintain and exhibiting their answers to spectators in a museum. In the third, Earth Maintenance, part of the exhibition she proposes cleaning or otherwise purifying polluted air and earth
Her subsequent work followed the trajectory of her manifesto closely. In her earlier work Maintenance Art Tasks 1973 she displays her and her husband’s own private household activities to the public with the medium of photography, where she documents twelve to ninety images per activity to represent the dimension of time. In these photography series, there is little gender differentiation. This apparent refusal to make explicitly ‘feminist art’ or ‘feminist statements’ distinguishes Ukeles’s Manifesto from the writings of some contemporaries such as Silvia Federici, one of the founders of the International Feminist Collective in Italy, who also published a provocative book Wages Against Housework and also distinguishes her performative and photographic practice from other female artists at the time like Hannah Wilkes, Cindy Sherman or VALIE EXPORT. Ukeles starts in the private, personal sphere but quickly moves into more ambiguous spaces, cleaning and maintaining art institutions.
Her performances in the 1970s such as the Maintenance Art Tasks performances at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973, represented her critical position to the avant-garde art consistent with her statement ‘‘Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials.’’ (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!’, 1971) However, though she remains quiet on some topics, it’s clear that she is influenced by some of the same ideas that Federici was interested in, most importantly perhaps the idea of reproductive labour. ‘This is 1968, there was no valuing of “maintenance” in Western Culture. The trajectory was: make something new, always move forward. Capitalism is like that. The people who were taking care and keeping the wheels of society turning were mute, and I didn’t like it!’ (Interview with Art in America Magazine published Mar 18, 2009)
For the General portion of her body of work, she conveys the power to define maintenance as art to other people, first to maintenance workers in a museum (‘I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day’, 1976) by asking them to define their activities at certain points in the day as either Art or as Work, but most notably to the Sanmen of New York City. In her performance Touch Sanitation (1978-80) Mierle Laderman Ukeles shook the hand of every one of the 8’500 New Yorker Sanitation workers who would accept the gesture. According to New York Times ‘each () (worker) look(ed) at her as if she was the first person who ever deigned to give them so much as the time of the day.’ (Randy Kennedy, An Artist Who Calls The Sanitation Department Home, New York Times Sept. 21, 2016)
With this performance, she not only expands her working field as an artist but she also brings the concept of maintenance work to a wider understanding. In addition to her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Ukeles published Sanitation Manifesto in 1984 as she has been an Artist in Residence (unsalaried) of the New York City Department since 1977. This Manifesto expands on her ideas by defining sanitation as the ideal model for public art. As for the Earth Maintenance part, since 2001 Ukeles has been involved in re-shaping the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, not physically but maybe holistically purifying it.
From this combination of her writing, photography, statements and performances we can see that a driving force behind these works has been to bring attention (as currency) to maintenance work and its working class. Attention and visibility as the constituting factors of social value is a logical conclusion for any performance artist to come to, and in many ways this interpretation has been proven right. It is also clear how the purification of the earth as seen in her later work and the last part of the manifesto fit into this narrative, since attention towards the space and earth increases its value and cleanliness for Ukeles. This is evidenced by her proposal to use pseudo-technical procedures to clean polluted earth. However, the testimonial injustice that is inflicted on the non-artists that clean and dust the world we inhabit still persists. Many of her efforts did not bring the perspectives or testimonies of life of the maintenance workers to the attention of a museum public, but brought the existence of maintenance workers in general and the artist’s perspective on this existence into view. The efforts to see all work as maintenance work must therefore go on, in the true spirit of the Manifesto: ‘say it again – he doesn’t understand.’
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, with two unidentified workers, in ‘Touch Sanitation Performance,’ which took eleven months, beginning in July, 1979. (Subtitle by The New Yorker, November 7, 2016)
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/mierle-laderman-ukeles-and-the-art-of-work
Accessed 23.11.18
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/draft-mierle-interview/
Accessed 23.11.18
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, 1971
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Sanitation Manifesto, 1984
Randy Kennedy, An Artist Who Calls The Sanitation Department Home, New York Times Sept. 21, 2016)