The Art of Performing Maintenance

When Ukeles’s first child was born, she experienced a crisis of meaning. Suddenly she sensed that in others’ eyes, she had all but disappeared as an individual and an artist, becoming instead a generic mother figure barely visible behind a stroller. She responded with Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! (Ukeles was well-versed in art history. The Dadaists wrote a manifesto. The Futurists wrote a manifesto. She wrote a manifesto.) She wrote, “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.” The manifesto contained a proposal for an art exhibit. One part would be personal. She used to do the laundry, cooking, housecleaning, and so on and then, as a separate activity, do art. Now, she said, she would do all of her customary maintenance tasks and call it art. She could do all this at a museum. That would be the exhibit. She explained elsewhere that this section of the manifesto was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp’s art of naming and renaming things. If he could hang a urinal on a wall and call it art, she thought, she could mop the floor and call it art. In calling routine maintenance activities art and performing them in publicly visible times and places, she wrote in her manifesto, she could “flush up to consciousness” the usually invisible tasks that daily life depends upon and without which new, creative development is at best fleeting in its results, if it can even be created at all.

Several years later, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Conn., took up this personal part of her proposal. She swept and mopped and scrubbed and got in museum visitors’ way while doing so. It was work. It was art. Her children took part. Some other children visiting the museum thought it looked like play and they joined in, too.

In her manifesto, Ukeles proposed that there could also be a part of a maintenance art exhibition created collaboratively with a broader public. She would ask all sorts of people about their maintenance tasks, how they feel about doing them, and what the relationship is between maintenance and freedom, and she would transcribe the interviews. So, while Terkel was interviewing all kinds of workers for his book, Ukuleles was sitting at a folding table she had set up on a New York City sidewalk and recruiting passersby to sit down for interviews in which she asked those questions. And she was also interested in maintenance as paid work performed outside the workers’ homes. In 1976, she embedded herself in the round-the-clock operations of a Manhattan high-rise office building and sent an invitation—addressed “Dear Friend Worker”—to every employee. The invitation was for them to do what she had done for her housework: keep doing the same, familiar maintenance tasks they had been doing, but now, for one hour out of each day, declare that it was art. Everyone, she says, accepted the invitation. Ukeles roamed the building with a Polaroid camera, so participants could see every image within minutes. She took pictures of people maintaining the building and then labeled them as the workers instructed her: “maintenance work,” or, for one hour a day of their choosing “maintenance art.” She assembled the photos into an enormous grid display. When she learned that none of the workers who participated in the project had visited the resulting museum exhibition, she hosted a gallery reception at a middle-of-the-night shift change time, and then they all came, most still wearing their work uniforms.

Some of Terkel’s interviews focus on maintenance work, too. Craig Carnelia contributed a song called “Just a Housewife” to the musical Working, transmuting a white middle-class housewife’s reflections on her unpaid, family-based domestic work into song. Micki Grant contributed “Cleanin’ Women,” capturing the many-layered social invisibility of being Black and female and employed at low wages to clean up other people’s messes—“cleanin’ women without faces, coming and going on a first name basis.” Listening to them now, both songs evoke the historical moment of their creation and first performances. The housewife struggles to believe in the importance of what she does in the face of traditionalist gender attitudes coming from one side and women’s lib exhortations to escape housewifery coming from the other. The cleaning woman describes herself as the fourth generation to do what she does—that is, we can infer, every generation since the Civil War brought emancipation—but she has some hope that her daughter will have other opportunities, perhaps a place in public life where can be known on a “miss last name basis.” She is cleaning so her daughter won’t have to.

Late in the 1970s, the scale of Ukeles’s work got bigger. New York City’s fiscal crisis in that period was not just an arithmetic problem of numbers in budget columns. It was a systemic crisis of maintenance. The city’s public workforce was slashed. Public buildings and equipment were left to deteriorate as maintenance tasks were deferred.

The sanitation department—which most city residents rarely think about when it is working well—relied on old, poorly maintained trucks that broke down so often the reduced staff could not keep up with the garbage collection schedule. Since no one knew when pick up would actually occur, garbage just sat on the streets. As the visible face of the department, front-line sanitation workers were frequent targets of New Yorkers’ frustration with the mess and the stink. Ukeles got herself named as the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department, an official position with an office space to work from, but no salary. (As the documentary was being filmed, she still held the title and had only recently started packing up her office.)

After a long period of listening to sanitation workers talk about their jobs, she concluded that she, when doing the work of an unpaid housewife, and they, as public employees, were pissed off about the same things: they were doing necessary maintenance work and were rendered invisible or even subjected to active hostility for it. She launched a performance art project called “Touch Sanitation,” in which she shook hands and said thank you to every one of the 8,500 sanitation workers in the city. As she set out on her own quest, she talked to people on the street about what she was doing and encouraged them to wave and say hello and thank you to sanitation workers, too. When she had visited every sanitation department garage and shaken every hand, she organized a culminating event. She had kept a list of all the insults sanitation workers had reported to her in their conversations about their experience on the job, all the derogatory names they had been called. She wrote them all on a glass wall and invited community members to join her in washing them off.

Terkel and Ukeles and everyone they collaborated with all raise never-fully-answerable questions about gender and race and work. The men of the sanitation department experienced social disregard as they did maintenance work, which was very similar to what women doing maintenance work, with or without pay, experienced. Is the character of the work itself the font of the disregard, or is it that the association of that kind of work with women devalues the men who do it? Some of the sanitation men told Ukeles that the public hated them because they saw them as their mother or as a maid. We could ask a similar question about race. One of the insults washed off the wall at the culminating event was “white n*****.”

They also raise never-fully-answerable questions about how changes of consciousness relate with changes of concrete circumstance. Working, as a book and as a theater and film work, and Ukeles’s art do, with great respect, “flush up to consciousness” work and workers often overlooked or insulted. And a number of the workers who spoke with Terkel told him that being respected would be valuable to them in and of itself, even if nothing else changed. But it would be even better to change more than the structure of feeling: to change the structure of time demands and bodily demands and psychic demands on workers, to change the structure of compensation and social authority. Art that changes minds cannot be sufficient. If we feel better about making the right gestures of recognition, there is even a risk of taking momentum away from material changes. Still, making the art and changing minds is necessary. For all the ways Working or the Manifesto or “Touch Sanitation” were of their moment, they pose questions and challenges that still deserve our attention.

Sources: Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, The New Press, 1997. “Maintenance Artist” (maintenanceartist.com); Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!; Queens Museum, “Mierle Laderman Ukeles Maintenance Art,” September 18, 2016–February 19, 2017 (queensmuseum.org); Working, directed by Kirk Browning and Stephen Schwartz, KCET and WNET Channel 13, 1987.