“The Maintenance Artist” emphasizes Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ radical, caring approach to public art – huge
We don’t usually associate the city and public works departments with concept art, let alone lasting collaboration. But for New York City artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has been an artist-in-residence for the city’s Department of Health since 1977, her core creative inquiries focus on the fundamental shift in the way we perceive art, experience and focus on “labor” that keeps society functioning “behind the scenes.”
The focus of the new documentary Maintain the artistPremiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, Ukeles’ extraordinary approach to the Art Production Center is to maintain and cultivate ideas. In 1969, she published the “Declaration on the Maintenance of Art”, in 1969! carein which the similarities between the artist’s experience and those of sanitary workers are outlined. She asked, “…Who will pick up the trash on Monday morning after the revolution?”
In the early 1970s, Ukeles conducted many interventions that attracted attention to labor and tasks that were often not noticed in daily life, such as “washing/track/track/maintenance: exterior” (1973) and “Washing” (1974) (1974), which was conducted outside the former gallery of Soho. From 2pm to 5pm in June, she declared that the area outside the front door would be considered art again, again “normalized” in the 1986 documentary “Not Just Trash” documentary “Not Just Trash”, which she described this early performance:
I started to occupy the area with this maintenance, cleaning repetition, and people looked at me, fearing to enter the space. I wipe their tracks immediately when someone enters or enters the gallery and walks by. I’ll follow their hands and knees and wipe them in their steps.
In 1977, Ukeles was officially appointed as the resident artist of the Ministry of Health, and her studio occupied decades of office space within its buildings. Maintain the artist The beginning is a historical footage of Ukeles, who began her tenure for more than four decades. The film was then cut from the artist and her studio manager Catie J. Heitz, and screened Ukeles’ archives to select jobs to send to Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
“Mierle is not a very typical artist,” Heitz said. “She works with people. Sometimes you don’t see the work because it’s acting – it’s a brief thing – but what you can see now is the paperwork that represents it.”
Ukrais’s work aims to shed light on the workforce and workers who play an important role in keeping the city working every day, without attention or praise even when it is rarely received by work that is garbage collection or street cleaning. “I want to create a new type of public art, not in seals, special places for a few, but inject art into the blood of everyday work and life in the city,” she said in an early statement.
Ukeles “creates art, involving endless maintenance and service work that ‘keeps the city alive’ – urban waste flow, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability, and the power we transform degraded land and water into public places for healthy living,” said Ronald Feldman Gallery, representing the artist. “Ukrais asked if we could design a survival model (for a prosperous planet rather than an entropy planet) so as not to crush our personal and civil liberties and silence our personal voice.”
The first purple weapon completed during her DSNY residence was a continuous performance titled “Touch Sanitation Performance” in which she held the hand of each health worker (with 8,500 employees) and said to everyone, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” In some cases, this gratitude proved profound because the interaction had a lasting positive impact on certain workers who expressed how they had been harassed or humiliated in their work in the past.
Several Ukeles’ works transformed a fleet of trucks and equipment in New York City into a mobile work of art. The “Social Mirror” (1983) covered a garbage truck on the huge reflective glass surface, reflecting the city’s residents themselves. “Snow Workers Ballet” (2012) coordinates clumsy machinery into a well-planned performance, positioning hard grafts in the spotlight through an unlikely fusion of industrial vehicles and grace.
The Queen Museum is the first to conduct a major investigation into Ukrais’s work in 2017, covering her five years of interrogation of feminism, freedom, crisis and care. Besides conceptual or performative, Uginres’ practice is always social and community, prompting us to really consider how we treat each other, recognize the hard work, and of course, what art is defined.
Maintain the artist A special screening by Toby Perl Freilich in New York on June 14, in collaboration with writer Anne Alvergue. Learn more on the movie website.
