Maintenance Art
How to mend, how to care, how to dignify, how to remember
Friends,
If you’ve been reading Still Life for a while, you may recognize this term: “maintenance art.” It’s an approach to art developed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a Jewish feminist artist, and every now and then I find myself thinking about her ideas and her approach to art and social life.
Take this example above: “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,” an installation at the Whitney Museum in New York City back in the 1970s. When they asked her to make something for a show, she decided to use her artmaking to elevate people hidden in the wings. For two shifts a day at the museum for five weeks, she met the custodial staff, talked with them about their lives and passions, took their photos, and asked them while they were working, “is this maintenance art?” At the end of the five weeks, she put all the photos on a single wall, focusing on the hidden people who made it possible to view art in the first place.
Now there’s an easy way to misinterpret this: “oh how cool is this, she elevated all these lowly people by saying their artists and putting their photo on the museum wall!” No, the point is not the value of the wall, and the art isn’t elevating them, exactly. People already have dignity, no matter the work they do. A portrait of someone you love could be hanging above the mantle or creased and folded and slipped into a dusty book—it doesn’t matter: the value of the image comes from the priceless person and not the other way around, right?
She’s creating art that pushes museum leadership to focus on the very people who keep the building going. See the difference? It’s less about bestowing something, since the custodial staff are already human, already creative. Putting the museum’s custodial staff on the wall focuses our attention, and it criticizes social hierarchies that coerce us to dismiss and ignore and dehumanize others. It’s about using a deliberate art practice to clear out all the distractions, to remind us that it’s always and only about people. No people, no art.
Here’s a thought experiment to get at what I mean: Imagine the Mona Lisa without people. Clear out the room in your mind. Let the Louvre of your mind empty out. And then let all the other paintings go, let the canvases go, the frames, all the old pigments and the art handlers, the ancient sculptures, all the staff from the intern to the star architect, let the entire building go, too, let Mona and Leo go and whoever the carpenter was who built the blank canvas centuries ago. Let it all go—because if there are no people, art and culture doesn’t exist (And if you want another experiment, next time you’re near a famous artwork, face the crowd. Do you see the living, breathing art? Portrait after portrait after portrait…)
So what is maintenance art, then? You can read Ukulele’s manifesto if that interests you, and here’s my attempt: it’s any art that is confident enough to be embedded in the actual daily labor of living our lives, art that points us to the systems we ignore and the people who work within them, art that reminds us “oh yeah, I live in a neighborhood not just a home,” art that pushes us to remember community is a real thing we can actually build, algorithms be damned, art that reminds us to cultivate an awareness that, yes, all human beings have dignity.
In the short selection below, the artist describes a performance piece where she shook hands with every trash collector in her city. And while Ukeles focused specifically on city staff, I like to think of any artist or writer or poet or art-lover or pastor or therapist doing similar work. “Custodian" is a kind of vocation isn’t it? One who cares, who protects, who maintains, who mends, who does the slow daily work of cultivating a social life where people aren’t hidden anymore, where we don’t have to argue over and over for what seems so obvious: everyone is welcome here.
Take care,
Michael
"Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles on Maintenance and Sanitation Art" in Dialogues in Public Art by Tom Finkelpearl
These workers would say, “Nobody ever sees me. I'm invisible.” I mean, they're out performing their work in public every day in New York City. Why aren't they seen? l mean, the disconnection between what is in front of your face, and what's invisible, what's culturally acceptable, thus formed and articulated, and what is outside culture, thus formless and unspeakable, was almost complete. It was so severely split, that l thought to myself, “This is a perfect place for an artist to sit, inside of this place, because things are so bad that they've become very clear.”
The level of denial was so extreme outside in the general culture, and at the same time, inside the Sanitation Department, that I felt I couldn't find a more valid place to make an art that aims to create a new language...
l saw “Touch Sanitation” as a portrait of New York City as a living entity. To create this, l decided to do the opposite of what social science or the mass media does. Social science samples, abstracts, selects. The media takes a huge, vastly complex system and boils it down to a sound bite. I wanted to do the opposite. I went to every single place, every single facility throughout the New York City Department of Sanitation. l tried to face every single worker, person to person, as if there were no means of mass communication.
l faced each person, shook hands with each person, and said to each person, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” I was saying that we have to start over again, that culture begins here with maintenance and survival. Culture and survival are twins; they go together. Art begins at the same time as basic survival systems.
Art doesn't wait to enter after everything else is all put together. The only way to do this was the simplest, human way, by walking out into the city, and facing each worker, and walking out into the streets, and staying behind the trucks, and listening to people, and seeing the city from garbage can to garbage can, from bag to bag, from street to street, through all the weather.
"The Journey" by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
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That Mary Oliver poem was just what I needed today. Thank you for sharing ♥️
Excellent