In the 1970s, Mierle Ukeles became the artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY), a position she has held (unsalaried) through to today.
She was already interested in making art out of the unseen work of daily life that is often overlooked. In 1973 she created “Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside”. Documented in an iconic set of black-and-white photographs, we see Ukeles washing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum: guiding her mop (painbrush-esque), pouring water, scrubbing the pavement with a rag. In 1976 she scaled up her project, with “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,” at the Whitney Museum, where she spent five weeks in the building, speaking to maintenance workers. She would take their photo with a polaroid camera and ask, is what you’re doing right now work or art?
A sarky review of that show noted that if the Department of Sanitation could turn its regular work into a conceptual performance the city might qualify for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ukeles mailed the review to the DSNY Commissioner and asked if he was interested in having an artist in residence. He mailed her back, “How would you like to make art with 10,000 people?”
At the heart of Ukeles’ work is the idea that the quiet work of maintenance deserves to be as visible and praised as the bold work of creation. In “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” Ukeles lays out the distinction between what she calls “two basic systems: Development and Maintenance.” The former, associated with the avant-garde and implicitly male, is concerned with “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing.” The latter includes tasks generally associated — at least in the private sphere — with women and domestic work: “keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.”
Maintenance “takes all the fucking time,” but is largely ignored by our culture. She was making, in art, the same critique that feminist theorists make today when they argue for a Universal Basic Income or for systems that would materially value the unpaid labour so often done by women in heterosexual partnerships. As we have seen with the pandemic, gender inequality has skyrocketed. PWC predicts that the impact to women in the UK will be so great it will reverse a decade of progress in gender equality. By one measure the US lost 140,000 jobs in December. 156,000 of them were lost by women. If those numbers don’t make sense to you, that’s because men gained 16,000 jobs in that time. The entire net loss accrued to women.
Ukeles’ work is supposed to make visible the unlauded work of upholding the world and making it liveable. As she says in the manifesto, “the sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
I thought about this work as the inauguration of Joe Biden happened this week. It is important to hold onto the hope of the moment. The first WoC Vice President, the potential for green development–one of Biden’s first acts in office was to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. There will be a lot said in the coming days about building back better. There will be stimulus spending and grand projects.
But lost in this conversation will be a recognition of the quiet work of repair. The prosaic, small acts of cleaning up the mess at hand. Who will recognise the people that, even in four years of chaos, managed to keep their patches alive enough for the growth that is said to come. In the wreckage of the Trump years, it’s easy to forget how hard people some people fought to sustain the good.
It is hard to recognise this work, because it is about stasis. We live in cultures defined by productivity and growth. To acknowledge maintenance is to reorient your value system to something more cyclical.
A friend sent me the poem ‘Atlas’ by UA Fanthorpe. One part reads:
maintenance is the sensible side of love // Which knows what time and weather are doing // To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; // Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers // My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps // My suspect edifice upright in air, // As Atlas did the sky.
We overlook maintenance because it isn’t sexy. Sensible never wins in the contest for attention. It also defies narrative, as Anne Boyer says in the undying:
Doing the dishes is not like freedom. Freedom is whatever we notice because it isn’t like doing the dishes. The ordinary is ordinary because it ordinarily repeats: taking care lacks freedom’s entertainments and its exceptions.
For any author of doing the dishes, the best part of the story would be the story of missing out on everything else while the dishes are being done. Or a person could be a modernist of the dishes and make a stream of consciousness account of an attempt to flee dish-sink reality. But it would be easy for any of those accounts of doing the dishes to miss what is important about doing the dishes, which is that it is not interesting or remarkable work in itself. but that it is the work on which everything else depends.
An ongoing necessity like dirty dishes needing to be done doesn’t produce narrative. It produces quantities, like how many dishes were washed. It produces temporal measurements, like how much time was spent washing them and when. Narratives end. Quantities, hours, and dishes don’t.
Maybe dishes produce categories and distinctions. Maybe one kind of dish is washed but not the other, one kind of technique used and not another. To study the dishes could result in an account of spaces, of technologies, of tools and instruments, or infrastructures, economics. A work like that could demonstrate the crisis that occurs in its absence: the dishes have piled up, the smells and cockroaches have come. Or it could result in an account of class, race, and gender––who, in the current arrangement of the world, does the dishes and who does not.
Doing the dishes falls inside a larger set of relations made up of necessity. We have physical bodies. These exist inside and among the larger bodies of the world. All of these bodies––ours and everything else’s––are adhered to decay, are always ruining or on the verge of it and never evade entropy or collapse. The ordinary ongoingness of our existence, like every time we do the dishes, is every time we try to block ruin’s path.
There is the work of making the world, which is the world that’s good to look at, and there is the quieter work of keeping the world ok once it is here. Making the world is a concrete pleasure, but the nature of the rest of it has yet to be determined. It’s hard to make a judgment of the senses regarding the sometimes invisible and necessary efforts we exchange between us. It is hard to read, for beauty, the everywhere space we are always making around the always manifesting world of the world. p 109