#mierle ukeles

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Washing Tracks (1973) - Mierle Ukeles

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"Washing/Tracks/Maintenance Outside” MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES (photo by Agaton Strom for the NYT)

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Jenny Hart, This Work Never Ends, 2002

Sandra Orgel, Ironing (from Womanhouse), 1972

Mierle Ukeles, Hartford Wash, 1973

Carrie Mae Weems, from The Kitchen Table Series, 1990

Kate Bush, “This Woman’s Work” (off The Sensual World, 1989)

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In honor of International Women's Day, we are celebrating artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who has dedicated her life to art in the public realm.

Since 1977, Ukeles has been artist in residence (unsalaried) at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art as public culture into a system which serves and is owned by the entire population. Since she wrote the "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969," virtually all Ukeles's work has been public. In the Manifesto, she proclaims, "I am an artist.  I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother.  (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc.  Also, (up to now separately I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art."

This is Ukeles' 2000 Percent for Art Commission for Engine Company 75 Firehouse in the Bronx titled Honor 2000. Ukeles remarks, "I hope the wall between the inside and the outside of the firehouse becomes transparent, that it is melting a bit because of this artwork."

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art

Last year Ukeles had an exhibition at Arnolfini and there was an interesting film regarding Ukeles and the exhibition on their website.

Director Krist Gruijthuijsen explains in this film, 'the pressures she was experiencing, being an artist, being a wife, being a mother etc. and fundamentally why does time need to be divide between all these areas?' - so she is clearly is seeing a separation between different elements of life, kind of similar to my practice in the sense of  the separation between the home and outside (domestic and streets, different values), and both of us exploring the merging of these separated existing worlds together.

With me using of found objects from the streets and ordering them, into a controlled, easy to mange and comprehends manner.

Unbalanced, 2013 and still from Order (Rubbish I), 2014

'Writing manifesto in 1969 for Maintenance Art, she discussed how private of an artist life is never discussed, doing laundry, changing nappies, cooking. these main elements of life weren't discussed, because its always about the polished, glamour side to the artists practice,' says Gruijthuijsen, with this she is challenging to the oppositions between art and life, nature and culture, and public and private.

'This manifesto originally for an exhibition, basically declaring that everything she does now is art, all the maintenance of her daily life is her practice'

Dusting an Artwork from: Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art, 1970–3.

'So she started taking images of her doing housework, which were published along side the manifesto, then she started to keep log of what she did, a timeline.' - I think there is some similarity here, with her chronological record of her actions and my collection of receipts, in the way they are documents of an action and the way they have been ordered daily as well.

"Trying to explain a drawing to my husband, while children are crying in the background"

A task documented as a part of Ukeles log, 1969

Consumer Performance (Receipts), 2014

She made the progression from daily domestic maintenance to maintenance outside the home, paid maintenance - 'starting to clean inside the museum, clean the museum outside, take care of the museum.

Hartford Wash, 1973

There is a relationship between Ukeles performance of maintaining the museum, especially of her cleaning the steps and my intervention Cleansing. However with Ukeles its more about the perfromance of maintenance, while with me its more about the highlighting waste and rubbish, making the object stand out by painting them white, and also the preventing of the maintenance/street cleaners needed to clear away this rubbish.

I suppose by painting the objects white, it is a cleaning process and challenging what is seen a clean/pure, the ideals of home and cleanliness, the clash between utopia and dystopia, home and streets.

Cleansing, 2014

Throughout the 70's, she was producing more radial performances, which lead to the largest performance of hers Touch Sanitation.

Still from Touch Sanitation, 1977-84

Where she re-enacts the job of a sanitation worker or bin man, another part of Touch Sanitation, as way of bringing awareness to these people, she constructed a performance that took 2 and a half years, involving Ukeles shaking the hands of every worker in the district of NY, more than 8000 people, she thanked them for there work and documented how they saw their work, which I find really interested for not only highlighting this side of rubbish but seeing and hearing that voice from the other side, who experience this everyday.

Touch Sanitation, 1977-84

Reminds me of a street cleaners, particular a man  whom I see every morning picking up rubbish from Trinity Street, and that relationship I have to he, because I know him but I know nothing g at the same time, his name, where he comes from? and how he is in his only bubble, ignored by everyone who walks past.

Kirklees Council street cleaner.

She has dealt from micro/independent up to larger industrial, city scale of maintenance, and similarly with these concerns of everyday routines of life. With me its the part of life before the maintenance, the action that in the end will produce some need for maintenance, such as dropping rubbish on the streets.

'Her work looked into highlighting otherwise overlooked aspects of social production and question the hierarchies of different forms of work, that still very relevant today, especially of housework and low-wage labour. Ukeles was interested in how artists could use the concept of transference to empower people to act as agents of change and stimulate positive community involvement toward ecological sustainability.'

Source

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Mierle Ukeles, The Social Mirror, 1983

Mierle Ukeles works are, arguably, social projects. She wants the viewer, the consumer, to realize the work that is done behind the scenes, or that is meant to be unnoticed. In The Social Mirror Ukele has placed mirrors on the side of garbage truck, so that the public may witness itself as being part of this labor tied to cleaning. Those being reflected are the consumers and inhabitants of New York City, the reason for this truck.