Near the top of the list of inspired manifestos—Futurism, Dada, De Stijl—is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s little-known “Maintenance Art.” As a first-time mother in 1969, she grew frustrated by the schism between her domestic life, with its boredoms and joys, and her identity as a New York artist. (She later said, “I learned that Jackson [Pollock], Marcel [Duchamp] and Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers.”) She channelled her feelings in four typewritten pages, pointing out a double standard; namely, that repetition and systems were considered rigorous in the context of the avant-garde, but dismissed as drudgery when it came to maintenance workers or housewives. One choice excerpt: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
The manifesto is currently framed on a wall at the Queens Museum, where it introduces a revelatory survey of Ukeles’s five-decade career. (Also on view are sculptures, drawings, photographs, installations, studies for unrealized projects, and a deluge of documentation.) For maximum impact, visit the show on a Saturday, when a mirror-covered New York City garbage truck is parked, during museum hours, between the east side of the building and the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park. The vehicle is also an art work—what Duchamp would have called an “assisted readymade”—embellished by Ukeles in 1983, with the help of the New York City Department of Sanitation, where she has been the official (and unpaid) artist-in-residence since 1977.
In 1976, Ukeles invited three hundred custodial workers in one Wall Street building to dedicate an hour of their eight-hour shifts to perform their duties as art, instead of as labor. (The Polaroids she took of the participants fill an impressive wall of the museum in Queens.) New York had just skirted bankruptcy, and an art critic joked in the Village Voice that the sanitation department might secure some fresh funding if it got in on the conceptual act. Ukeles liked the idea and proposed the residency to its commissioner. Against all odds, he agreed. In 1979, Ukeles undertook her most radical project, “Touch Sanitation,” an eleven-month-long ritual during which she shook hands with eighty-five hundred “san men” across the five boroughs, thanking each one for his service. In the most moving section of her retrospective, L.E.D. lights illuminate her route around the museum’s Panorama of the City of New York, like diligent fireflies.
Ukeles isn’t as well known as she deserves to be, but fifty years of her near-devotional efforts to dignify labor that most people see as undignified—if they deign to see it at all—has been influential. When Rachel Harrison photographed the maintenance door to Duchamp’s tableau “Étant Donnés” for her 2012 series “The Help,” or when Nina Katchadourian interviewed an art handler for her new audio tour about dust at MOMA, they became Ukeles’s heirs. ♦
