{"id":161752,"date":"2025-06-06T02:07:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T02:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/161752\/"},"modified":"2025-06-06T02:07:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T02:07:12","slug":"maintenance-artist-highlights-mierle-laderman-ukeles-radical-caring-approach-to-public-art-colossal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/161752\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Maintenance Artist\u2019 Highlights Mierle Laderman Ukeles\u2019 Radical, Caring Approach to Public Art \u2014 Colossal"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don\u2019t typically associate city government and public works departments with conceptual artwork, let alone lasting collaborations. But for New York City artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles<\/a>, who has been artist-in-residence at the city\u2019s Department of Sanitation since 1977, her core creative inquiry centers around a radical shift in how we perceive art, who gets to experience it, and spotlighting the labor that happens \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d to keep society running.<\/p>\n

The focus of a new documentary, Maintenance Artist, which premieres this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Ukeles\u2019 remarkable approach to art-making centers ideas of upkeep and nurturing. In 1969, she published \u201cMANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969!,<\/a>\u201d a proposal for an exhibition titled CARE, in which she outlined parallels between her experiences as an artist and mother with those of sanitation workers. She asks, \u201c\u2026after the revolution, who\u2019s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, Ukeles performed a number of interventions drawing attention to labor and tasks that often go unnoticed in daily life, like \u201cWashing \/ Tracks \/ Maintenance: Outside\u201d (1973) and \u201cWashing\u201d (1974), the latter of which was staged outside of a former gallery in Soho. From 2 to 5 p.m. one June afternoon, she proclaimed that the area outside the front door was to be maintained as art, \u201cnormalized\u201d again at 5:01 p.m. In a 1986 documentary short titled \u201cNot Just Garbage<\/a>,\u201d she describes this early performance: <\/p>\n

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I started to occupy the area through this sort of repetition of maintenance, of cleaning, and people watched me and were afraid to enter the space. When someone would enter, or go into the gallery and walk across, I would wipe out their tracks immediately. I would follow them on my hands and my knees and wipe out their tracks right up to their heels.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1977, Ukeles was officially named the Department of Sanitation\u2019s artist-in-residence, and her studio has occupied an office space within its building for decades. Maintenance Artist opens with historical footage of Ukeles introducing herself to sanitation workers as she began her more-than-four-decade tenure. The film then cuts to the artist and her studio manager, Catie J. Heitz, sifting through Ukeles\u2019 archives to select work to send to the Smithsonian\u2019s Archives of American Art<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMierle is not a very typical artist,\u201d Heitz says. \u201cShe works within systems, with people. Sometimes you can\u2019t see the work because it was performance\u2014it was an ephemeral thing\u2014but what you can see now is the paperwork that represents it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"the\u201cTouch Sanitation Performance\u201d (1980). Photo by Marcia Bricker, \u00a9 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY<\/p>\n

Ukeles\u2019 work aims to illuminate the labor\u2014and laborers\u2014who play an immanently crucial role in keeping the city functioning on a daily basis, even though work like trash collection or street-cleaning is rarely noticed or lauded. \u201cI desire to create a new kind of utterly public art, not in sealed-off, special places for the few, but art injected right into the city\u2019s bloodstream of daily working life,\u201d she said in an early statement.<\/p>\n

Ukeles \u201chas created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that \u2018keeps the city alive\u2019 \u2014 urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability, and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places,\u201d Ronald Feldman Gallery<\/a> says, which represents the artist. \u201cUkeles asks whether we can design modes of survival\u2014for a thriving planet, not an entropic one\u2014that don\u2019t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual\u2019s voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first piece Ukeles completed in her DSNY residency was a durational performance titled \u201cTouch Sanitation Performance,\u201d in which she shook the hand of every sanitation employee\u2014all 8,500 of them\u2014and said to each one, \u201cThank you for keeping New York City alive.\u201d That gratitude proved profound in some cases, as the interaction had lasting positive effects<\/a> for some of the workers, who expressed how they had been harassed or humiliated while on the job in the past.<\/p>\n

\"a\u201cThe Social Mirror\u201d (1983), New York City 20 cubic yard Department of Sanitation garbage collection truck covered in glass mirror and acrylic mirror, created in collaboration with the New York City Department of Sanitation. Image \u00a9 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

Several of Ukeles\u2019 works transformed the fleet of New York City trucks and equipment into moving artworks. \u201cThe Social Mirror\u201d (1983) covered a garbage truck in a giant reflective glass surface, mirroring denizens of the city back at themselves. \u201cSnow Workers Ballet\u201d (2012) coordinated hulking machinery into a choreographed performance, positioning hard graft in the limelight through the unlikely merging of industrial vehicles and elegance.<\/p>\n

The Queens Museum<\/a> was the first to present a major survey of Ukeles\u2019 work in 2017, spanning five decades of her interrogations of feminism, freedom, crisis, and care. Beyond the conceptual or performative, Ukeles\u2019 practice has always been social and community-oriented, prompting us to genuinely consider how we treat one another, recognize hard work, and, of course, define what art can be.<\/p>\n

Maintenance Artist is directed, written, and produced by Toby Perl Freilich in collaboration with writer Anne Alvergue, premiering on June 8 with additional screenings through June 14 in New York. Learn more on the film\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"a\u201cWashing \/ Tracks \/ Maintenance: Outside\u201d (1973), performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Photo \u00a9 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY<\/p>\n

\"aMierle Laderman Ukeles, \u201cThe Social Mirror\u201d (1983), installed at the Queens Museum in 2016. Photo by Hai Zhang, courtesy of \u2018Maintenance Artist\u2019<\/p>\n

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