D’Souza, Aruna. “The Art of Citizenship: Mierle Laderman
Ukeles at the Queens Museum.” ArtPractical, November 10
2016. http://www.artpractical.com/feature/the-art-ofcitizenship-mierle-laderman-ukeles-at-the-queensmuseum/
8.1 / Art + Citizenship
The Art of Citizenship: Mierle
Laderman Ukeles at the Queens
Museum
By Aruna D’Souza November 10, 2016
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, at the Queens Museum (on view through February
2017), is the first museum survey devoted to the artist. Over the course of her five-decade-long
career, most of which was spent as artist-in-residence with the City of New York Department of
Sanitation, Ukeles mapped out a practice that seems to place her somewhere between the late20th-century strategy of institutional critique and the current vogue for social-practice art. The
former is one in which the artist carves out, no matter how provisionally, an outsider position from
which to shine light on the biases and inequities institutions enact and reproduce. The latter
involves a participatory, collaborative, socially engaged immersion into a field, usually undertaken
with an activist intent. If neither of these labels seems quite the right fit for Ukeles, it is because
she neither considered herself an outsider to the systems she was operating in nor an activist.
Instead, her work, and the role of the artist that her work inscribed, makes a powerful argument
for the artistic possibilities of citizenship—and the responsibilities, obligations, and collective
pleasures that go along with it.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Inside, July 23, 1973; twelve black-andwhite photographs, two text panels; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Ukeles’ practice, since the birth of her first child in 1969, has focused on the idea of maintenance—
a category of labor rarely recognized as such. This designation refers to the effort not of giving
birth but of changing diapers, not of curating the exhibition but of dusting the display cases, not of
erecting the building but of clearing its trash. In Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!: Proposal
for an Exhibition “CARE”—a sculpture, she terms it, in the form of a text mapping out the
trajectory of her work for the next almost half-century—she calls maintenance “the sourball of
every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
Posing it as the opposite of “development” and its related concepts of individual creation, progress,
and change (the values, as it happens, of the avant-garde), Ukeles imagines maintenance as an
equally revolutionary act—it “preserve[s] the new; sustain[s] the change; protect[s] progress”—
even if it is rarely recognized as such.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, September 16–October 20,
1976; performance with 300 maintenance employees, day and night shifts over the course of six
weeks at 55 Water Street, New York; installation at Whitney Museum Downtown at 55 Water Street:
720 Polaroid photographs mounted on paper, printed labels, color-coded stickers, seven handwritten
and typewritten texts, clipboard, and custom-made buttons; overall: 12 x 15 ft. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts.
Ukeles’ shift from more traditional object-making to maintenance at first involved declaring the
day-to-day drudgeries that consumed her postpartum life as a form of art, a position not dissimilar
to a number of feminist interventions of the era aligning domestic labor and artwork, such as
Martha Rosler’s hysterical Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Mary Kelly’s Postpartum
Document (1973–79), and even Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1979).
She then stepped into the sphere of art institutions with works such as Transfer: The Maintenance
of the Art Object (1973), which drew attention to the perverse fact that museums assign vastly
different values to the exact same work. While a maintenance person could dust a mummy case
on a day-to-day basis with no fanfare, the moment that Ukeles dusted the same mummy case and
stamped it with the notation “Original Maintenance Art,” it became an artwork—meaning that
now, the case could only be dusted by a museum conservator after writing a condition report.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Untitled drawing for Flow City, 1983–2001. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts.
Her shift to working with the New York City sanitation department in 1976 was a natural
continuation of this progression—from the private realm outward, first to art institutions and then
to the city’s service-based infrastructure. But in this move from the “personal is political” to forms
of communal life, Ukeles’ feminism became, necessarily, intersectional. Because the invisibility
(and consequent devaluation) of maintenance work in America cuts through gender as well as race,
immigration status, and class, her art was no longer necessarily focused on women—though it was
no less feminist for the fact.
Ukeles’ work with the sanitation department was catalyzed by a David Bourdon review in
the Village Voice of her contribution to a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, Art< —
>World, which took place at its satellite space at 55 Water Street, a fifty-three-story office building
in the financial district. I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976) involved Ukeles
asking the building’s hundreds of workers to declare one hour of each of their shifts as a work of
art; as with her own act of declaring her quotidian childcare routine as artwork, or her interventions
in museums, the activities themselves didn’t change, only their conceptual value.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Meeting with Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello in his office at DSNY
headquarters, December 23, 1976. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Mierle Laderman
Ukeles. Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979–1980; citywide performance with 8,500 sanitation
workers across all fifty-nine New York City sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts. Photo: Robin Holland.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979–1980; citywide performance with
8,500 sanitation workers across all fifty-nine New York City Sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts. Photo: Marcia Bricker.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979–1980; citywide performance with
8,500 sanitation workers across all fifty-nine New York City sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts. Photo: Marcia Bricker.
In response to this piece, the Voice critic waggishly suggested that the sanitation department,
which was being devastated by the city’s financial crisis in 1975–6, declare its own activities art
and apply for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ukeles wrote to the
commissioner, enclosing a copy of the review—and after some time she became the department’s
first official, unsalaried artist-in-residence. (Among the most charming inclusions in the show at
the Queens Museum is the correspondence of Norman Steisel, Sanitation Commissioner from 1978
to 1986 and an enthusiastic supporter of Ukeles to his colleagues—the guy clearly had a sense of
humor and played the role of straight man with aplomb.)
The fruits of this association are rich: Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), in which Ukeles
shook the hand of each one of the 8,500 workers in the city’s fifty-nine sanitation districts, saying
to each of them, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”; Sanitation Celebrations (1983), a
parade highlighting the ace skills of sanitation truck drivers and barge captains in choreographed
“work ballets”; and Touch Sanitation Show (1984), a documentation of Ukeles’ sanitation
collaborations that was installed in two sites, the 59th Street Marine Transfer Station (where
garbage was loaded onto barges) and Ronald Feldman Gallery, driven by the sanitation workers’
desire to make something beautiful in their lives.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part
I: The Social Mirror, 1983; garbage collection truck, tempered glass mirror, and acrylic mirror; 28 x
8 x 10 1⁄2 ft. Created in collaboration with DSNY. Courtesy of the Artist.
Of her position, Ukeles has written (somewhat cryptically): “I came into Sanitation not as a social
worker to [sic] ‘do-gooder,’ nor as a social scientist to study, nor even as some thought as an
empathetic or fed-up relative—for I am none of these.” And indeed, the effect of Ukeles’
interventions is not that of a benevolent artist shining a light on the invisible worker, but of her
shining a light on her own—and our—act of relegating this work to invisibility. Ukeles’ role is
that of citizen surrogate: She acts on behalf of all of us city dwellers whose livelihood depends on
such systems functioning smoothly (as anyone who has lived through a garbage strike will attest),
taking on our responsibility to preserve, sustain, and protect a system that has been put in place to
make possible a public sphere. This act of maintaining the commons was especially poignant (and
urgent) in this era of privatization: the bankruptcy of New York City, the Reagan years, the Clinton
administration—the beginning of its (perpetual and ongoing) demise.
To put it another way, there is no inside or outside to the positions that Ukeles maps in works
like Touch Sanitation Performance—a distinction that institutional critique largely relies upon—
because Ukeles refuses to see maintenance as an Other. For her, making visible the work of
maintenance isn’t shining light on something separate—it is, on the contrary, a “flushing up into
consciousness” as she puts it, an act of desublimation within the collective psyche. In this light,
the forms of visibility that her performances construct are purposely doubled. Social
Mirror (1983), consisting of mirror-clad garbage trucks, and made in conjunction with Sanitation
Celebrations, may have rendered the vehicles (and consequently, the labor of maintenance) hypervisible on the street, but it did so by reflecting the city, throwing back an image of us, forcing us,
quite literally, to see ourselves in this work.