Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an artist who turned the work of maintenance into art. Her frustration at inequalities in labour and the struggles she faced in dividing herself between the roles of artist and mother led her to create ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969’. The manifesto compares the systems of development and maintenance, showing how society values and praises development while maintenance – the work that sustains life and is essential to our living – is more likely to go unappreciated, unnoticed, underpaid or unpaid. She also introduced her proposal for an exhibition called ‘Care’, in which maintenance work would be displayed as contemporary art. It was outlined to take place in 3 parts – “personal maintenance, general societal maintenance, and earth maintenance.”
10 years ago, Mierle Laderman Ukeles stated that “this manifesto is a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of maintenance, for these are the workers of survival and sustainability. Look around, thats most of the people in the whole world.” I felt so engaged by Mierle Laderman Ukele’s manifesto, as it is still so significant now as it was 52 years ago when she wrote it. Sociopolitical issues surrounding labour are at the core of her work and she highlights these as she calls for people to acknowledge, appreciate and value maintenance work and the people who do it.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s commitment to her work has been lifelong, and she has stayed in the offical role of artist in residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation since 1978. I’m particularly interested in her performance work ‘Touch Sanitation’, during which the artist met over 8,500 employees of the sanitation department. With each worker, she shook their hand and thanked them for keeping New York City alive. She listened to their stories, shadowed them as they worked and documented it all through photographs, writings and other media to make the workers seen and change negative public perceptions of them. This work operated to not only make the public notice maintenance labour, but to really acknowledge and value it and see the people behind the work.
I think the ideas behind Mierle’s work relate to my work and I’m especially inspired by the ideas in her manifesto. I want to find ways to make people to look around and take notice of maintenance labour, developing a sense of care in thinking about and appreciating these kinds of labour in our communities.
https://www.wikiart.org/en/mierle-laderman-ukeles/touch-sanitation-1980
https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/