Anna Moser, NYU 1 Maintenance Art: A Contemporary Feminist Perspective This paper was first presented at the winter symposium “Feminist Philosophy: Rethinking Public Space,” which took place at Oslo University, March 8-10, 2018. Space is not simply an ether, a medium through which other forces, like gravity, produce their effects: it is inscribed by and in its turn inscribes those objects and activities placed within it. - Elizabeth Grosz, “Architectures of Excess” This paper considers the conceptual and participatory social art practice of American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles in relation to the thought of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. Ukeles is best known for her iconic art piece Touch Sanitation (1979–80), in which she shook hands with over 8,500 New York City sanitation workers at different maintenance sites over the course of nine months and told each one: “thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, photos documenting Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-80. Throughout her work, Ukeles has emphasized contiguities between public and private, or civic and domestic, forms of maintenance. Indeed, much of her practice troubles a clear line between the two spheres, challenging any assumption of a bracketed-out space for “only women” that would exclude questions of class, race, and other intersectional concerns. It is in order to shed light on Ukeles’s sociological preoccupations as an experimental artist that I engage with Grosz’s work on space, embodiment, and excess. For Grosz, the key question is: “How can we understand Anna Moser, NYU 2 space differently, in order to organize, inhabit, and structure our living arrangements differently?”1 In her essay “Architectures of Excess,” Grosz proposes: “To produce an architecture in which ‘women can live’ [...] is to produce both a domestic and a civic architecture as envelope, which permits the passage from one space and position to another, rather than the containment of objects and functions in which each thing finds its rightful place.”2 I argue that Ukeles works to realize precisely this kind of domestic-civic “envelope” through her “maintenance art.” UKELES’S “MAINTENANCE ART” Ukeles’s art emerged out of her personal experiences, from the everyday domestic tasks that she performed as a young mother in the late 60s: getting her children dressed, making dinner, doing the dishes, all the while trying to maintain her identity as an artist. These experiences compelled her to reach towards the world, and to challenge gender biases by highlighting similarities between civic and domestic forms of maintenance. As she explained in a 1980 letter to Lucy Lippard: I was damned if I didn’t want to set myself the challenge of finding out if the basic maintenance concept about place in society from service work—feminist in that that confers low status on anyone, regardless of gender, wherever it occurs, and also at the same time confers invisibility . . . provides women as a political class, if we don’t pretend otherwise, a ready-made set of allies across all racial and sex lines for reorganizing the world.3 In other words, hers is an intersectional approach to feminism in that it looks to address the power structures that create and sustain various types of oppression by turning durational labor into art. Most notably, Ukeles has collaborated with the New York City Sanitation Department since 1977, when she became its first ever official, unsalaried artist-in-residence. The DSNY deals on a daily basis with our unwanted, broken-down, leftover, and abject remainders. Lippard calls our attention to similarities between the sanitation workers in the city streets and female workers in the home: “When they stopped to rest in the heat, these ‘garbage men’ were shooed off people porch steps because they were ‘dirty’ with the homeowner’s own dirt. Few women would not recognize the scorn and dismissal they faced for completing tasks that made everything else go Elizabeth Grosz, “Introduction,” in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Boston: MIT Press, 2001), xix. 2 Grosz, “Architectures of Excess,” in Architecture from the Outside, 165. 3 Mierle Laderman Ukeles to Lucy Lippard, December 15, 1980. Qtd. in Larissa Harris, “The Work We Do,” in Patricia C. Phillips, with Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, and Lucy R. Lippard, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (New York: Prestel, 2016), 7. 1 Anna Moser, NYU 3 smoothly.”4 Lippard also underscores the importance of the handshakes during Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation Performance, noting that the “physical aspect of Touch Sanitation linked it to childcare, and to caring in general.”5 In this durational artwork, touch refutes the sense of disgust, of abjection so often associated with maintenance work. It is through touch that a person who performs an often denigrated and mostly imperceptible act, in this case taking away the trash, is acknowledged as human by another human. Rethinking public space can be seen here to begin with rethinking our relations to others not just in the abstract, but on a person-by-person and person-to-person basis. The particular beauty of Touch Sanitation is that it reflects how the Sanitation Department views its own relationship to the city. As DSNY commissioner Brendan Sexton has observed: “Basically, her idea of conceptual art was so right for us. We service every single household. We drive past every address. We honk at every double-parked car.”6 The stress is placed on the particular human, on each and every home. We see a related yet different emphasis on embodiment in Ukeles’s mobile public artwork The Social Mirror. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part I: The Social Mirror, 1983. Created in collaboration with DSNY. For this work, the DSNY lent Ukeles a garbage truck, which she covered in mirrored glass with the help of Brooklyn Glass & Mirror Corporation. The truck was subsequently driven in the finale of The First New York City Art Parade, “which took place on the evening of September 27, 1983 Lucy Lippard, “Never Done: Women’s Work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 15. Ibid, 17. 6 “Interviews with New York City Department of Sanitation Commissioners,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 201. 4 5 Anna Moser, NYU 4 and featured more than one hundred individual art projects along thirty-two-blocks of Madison Avenue.”7 In a different but related way to Touch Sanitation, The Social Mirror visually confronted people what they had previously sought to distance themselves from, as excess or other. The sanitation department especially liked The Social Mirror because of the directness of its message. A subsequent DSNY commissioner, John Doherty, explains: “One the things we always admired was the mirror truck she had [...]. It was a reflection of what you see in society as well. The garbage – it’s New York, you know? The good and the bad.”8 So how did Ukeles come to work on such a large, public scale with the DSNY? I want to discuss the development of her initially private, domestic-oriented art practice towards a civicminded, worldly feminist engagement, because I believe that there are lessons to be drawn today from her prescient “envelopment” of these two supposedly distinct spheres of existence. In 1962, Ukeles began her art practice in earnest at Pratt University, where she worked on a series of sculptures that she called Bindings. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Second Binding, 1964. These sexually evocative organic forms were crafted from rags, newspaper, and aluminum foil, which were stuffed into cheesecloth and then knotted and stiffened with glue. As the curator Patricia Phillips observes, it was with the Bindings series that “Ukeles’s art [first] implied a sense Patricia Phillip C. Phillips, “Making Necessity Art: Collisions of Maintenance and Freedom” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 122. 8 “Interviews with New York City Department of Sanitation Commissioners,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 206. 7 Anna Moser, NYU 5 of time and temporality, possessing a quality of imminence and instability, as if the form were inhabited by a vital force that animated the surrounding space.”9 Ukeles herself has admitted in interviews that the forms often exploded into a mess and were difficult to conserve; in her own words, “I was plagued by the maintenance requirements of them!” 10 We see here Ukeles’s recognition of a link that often goes unacknowledged in art, between the mundane labor of making and the conceptual “product” that supposedly transcends these concerns. Between 1966 and 1969, Ukeles then developed a related series of inflatable, plastic-based sculptures that she called Air Art. These works, which she envisioned as malleable and responsive materialities, indicate a keen awareness of “emergent issues of hybridity [and] adaptability.”11 Her vision is also increasingly ambitious and public-minded, even as the scale that she is working on remains relatively small. This is evidenced by a drawing she made during the time for an unrealized proposal that she titled Air Art: Bloom—Seagram’s Building. [Left.] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Air Art: Bloom—Seagram’s Building, 1967-68. Ink and marker on tracing paper mounted on board. [Right.] The Seagram Building, NYC, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, completed 1958. Phillips, “Making Necessity Art,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 31-2. Phillips was the head curator of the Ukeles retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2016. 10 Ibid, 32. Philips in conversation with Ukeles. 11 Ibid, 33. 9 Anna Moser, NYU 6 In this playful critique of high modernist space, Ukeles reimagines the Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and located on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, as an adhesive surface for soft, barnacle-like appendages that undermine the smooth, vertical logic of corporate architecture. If you look closely at the drawing, you can just make out the words “off” and “on,” which have been penned inside various appendages. According to a key in the lower left-hand corner, these words refer to both “air” and “electromagnetism.” It seems that Ukeles was envisaging modules capable of both inflating and deflating, with electromagnetic skins that could be activated so that the inflated forms might attract and repel each other. Ukeles’s utopian vision imagines a new architecture or architectural surface, which is also a connective membrane or skin. This surface, which is at once thick and soft, mediates between outside and inside – and across difference – by responding to the contingences, temporalities, and excesses of specific forms of relational embodiment. Yet we are only dealing with a piece of paper here. The proposal was never conceived as an endeavor to be realized in space. And, increasingly in the late 60s, Ukeles struggled to overcome her “divided” status as artist and mother.12 In December 1966, she married her husband Jack and, in 1968, gave birth to their first child. Faced with the increased complications of daily life, her art suffered, and she felt trapped in a cycle of cleaning, cooking, and caring for others. It was in 1969 that Ukeles decided she had had enough and typed out her now-famous “Maintenance Art Manifesto.” In this manifesto, Ukeles critiqued the drudgery of everyday labor performed by women by enumerating acts of household “maintenance,” including: “wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, [...] call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”13 Yet her crucial intervention was to highlight systemic inequalities that plagued both domestic and civic maintenance workers. In it, she declares: “The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.” 14 Later in the manifesto, she writes: “My working will be the work.”15 Ukeles explains in a 2009 interview in Artforum: “[...] this is early feminism, very rigid, I literally was divided in two. Half of my week I was the mother, and the other half the artist. But, I thought to myself, “this is ridiculous, I am the one.” Bartholomew Ryan, “Manifesto for Maintenance: A Conversation With Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” Art in America (Mar 18, 2009), http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/draft-mierle-interview/ 13 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Artist’s Writings,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 210. Ukeles first became known in the art world in 1971, when Jack Burnham, one of the mid-twentieth century’s leading proponents of art and systems theory, published an extended excerpt of her “Maintenance Art Manifesto” in an article that he wrote for Artforum in January of that year. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid, 211. 12 Anna Moser, NYU 7 Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “Care,” 1969. Four typewritten pages. This manifesto rejects an idea of art as inspired encounter in favor of a conception of artistic labor oriented towards solidarity. As Laura Raicovich notes, “Whether working with city agencies, sanitation workers, laborers, [...] or art workers, Ukeles has hewn a path that is a model for artmaking in a social sphere.”16 In ensuing projects, Ukeles further subverted the expectations of male-dominated conceptual art in order to redress social injustices. Many of her durational, labor-intensive performances of the 1970s prior to her collaboration with the Sanitation Department involved cleaning and scrubbing the interiors and exteriors of museums and galleries, including The Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum in Hartford, CT, and A.I.R. gallery in downtown Manhattan. 16 Laura Raicovich, “The Work We Do,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 8. Anna Moser, NYU 8 [Left] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, July 23, 1973. [Right.] Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Inside, July 22, 1973. Most recently, Ukeles has been working on her largest physical scale yet to design a series of outlooks for the Staten Island landfill Fresh Kills, which closed in 2001 and is now being turned into a park. Yet Lippard urges us not to overlook the intimate, domestic origins of Maintenance Art: “The origins of Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Works [...] were conceptual private performance pieces in which Ukeles documented through photographs everyday actions of dressing, feeding, diapering, and walking her children.”17 GROSZ’S “ARCHITECTURES OF EXCESS” In my remaining time, I’d like to say a few words on the thought of the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz in order to elaborate some of the ideas latent in Ukeles’s practice. For Grosz, like Ukeles, space is always dynamic rather than static. In her 2001 book Architecture form the Outside, she states: “Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation.”18 Rethinking space in feminist terms is then predicated on recognizing and challenging a history of theorists of the body and of action, ranging from Aristotle and Plotinus through Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and others, for whom the “treatment 17 18 Lippard, “Never Done,” in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 15. Grosz, “Introduction,” in Architecture from the Outside, 9. Anna Moser, NYU 9 of the maternal-feminine” has been the “the condition for and template of the ways in which space is conceptualized and contained.”19 In her essay “Architectures of Excess,” Grosz does this by pushing back against a conception of space as “a passive receptacle requiring filling, containment, and measure,” in order to suggest that space “needs to be reconsidered in terms of multiplicity, heterogeneity, activity, and force.”20 Grosz is especially concerned to articulate how space and habitation contain within themselves an “excess” that “takes them [...] into the realm of the future where they may function differently.”21 We can understand “excess” as that which exceeds pure functionality. This gives us the ornament, it gives us luxury, it gives us jouissance. Yet we can also think of “excess” as “abundance” or “potential for proliferation”: a future possibility. There is also a third sense of excess that relates to this second sense, the verso side of proliferation, which has to do with “that which is left out of social collectives, which glues collectives together while finding its existence only outside, as marginalized.”22 Here we might reflect on the historical role of women in society, as well as the mostly invisible role that sanitation workers play even today, taking out the trash in the early hours of the morning so that a city can run in the way that it is supposed to. What would it mean for both feminism and public space to embrace an idea of community that opens itself to these alternative senses of excess? To consider this question, Grosz draws on Luce Irigaray, who posits excess as the “maternal-feminine” and argues that the place of “femininity” is that which the “architectural cannot contain within its own drives to orderliness and systematicity.”23 Inspired by the work of Irigaray, Grosz is especially critical of planned cities like Brasília, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lucio Costa. Brasília was founded in 1960 to serve as the new national capital of Brazil. The idea was that it “would be without the colonial legacy, without baroque and classical architecture, without slums,” and it has been lauded for its innovative modernist architecture.24 The British architect Norman Foster has Grosz, “Architectures of Excess,” in Architecture from the Outside, 162. Ibid, 164. 21 Ibid, 151. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 156. Here, Grosz is especially drawing on Irigaray’s 1993 book An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Grosz also notes Bataille’s theorization of “excess” as the “order of the excremental,” which recalls us to the sanitation workers. 24 Robin Banerji, “Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?” BBC World Service. 7 December 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20632277 19 20 Anna Moser, NYU 10 described Niemeyer’s buildings as “hauntingly beautiful” and “absolutely magical.” 25 Yet many diplomats and residents agree that Brasília doesn’t work as a city. It doesn’t feel like it’s scaled for human beings, zoning rules undermine a lively street life, and most of the poor have been shunted out to “satellite cities.”26 Brasília’s Esplanade of Ministries. Credit Eraldo Peres/Associated Press It is in order to combat visions like Brasília, and account for that which exceeds systematicity, that Grosz sets out to reconsider space as a “mode of accommodation” that “provide[s] the possibility of exchange between and across difference.” 27 Crucially, this “mode of accommodation” does not entail seeking out a space for only women, for this would be a negative freedom. As Susan Stewart explains, “negative freedoms” can be understood as “freedoms from,” as “concrete and reactive,” because they “rely on prior causes and involve independence from existing powers, whether such powers stem from the divine, the state, or elsewhere.” 28 In contrast, “positive freedoms involve acts of affirmation—they are experienced not as away but as toward,” and their prevailing theme is “our decision to live.”29 In “Architectures of Excess,” it seems to me that Grosz is concerned with positive freedoms. She is working to imagine what we might call “figures of the newly thinkable,” a concept that Linda Qtd. in Banerji, “Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?” Ibid. 27 It is a “mode of accommodation,” she argues, that “may provide the possibility of exchange between and across difference,” rather than an established “commonness that communities divide and share” in “Architectures of Excess,” 157-158. She aligns her thought with Alphonso Lingis’s concept of a community of strangers. This community is not, or not only, defined by “common bonds, goals, language or descent, but that which opens itself to the stranger, [...] to the one with whom one has nothing in common, the one who is not like oneself” (151). 28 Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2011), 5-6. 29 Ibid, 6. 25 26 Anna Moser, NYU 11 Zerilli theorizes in her book Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.30 It is for this reason that Grosz advocates for producing “both a domestic and a civic architecture as envelope, which permits the passage from one space and position to another, rather than the containment of objects and functions in which each thing finds its rightful place.” 31 CONCLUSION Grosz and Ukeles suggest that, in our feminist reckoning with public space, we cannot content ourselves with “creat[ing] more social islands within a sea of the same.”32 We must also make it a priority to explore space in ways that exceed a notion of it as defined “primarily by its modes of occupation.” I’d like to finish by revisiting Ukeles’s drawing of the Seagram Building that she made the year before writing her Maintenance Art Manifesto. There is something about this provisional image that we might reflect further on – I am thinking particularly about how it refigures the skyscraper’s surface as a soft membrane or skin capable of affective response. This drawing reveals a haptic, relational understanding of surface that anticipates Ukeles’s most ambitious public projects, and also contemporary feminist theory and art practice, in its privileging of what we might call, following the work of Giuliana Bruno, a form of “public intimacy.”33 Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 59. Zerilli develops out of Cornelius Castoriadis’s work on the “first [or radical] imagination.” 31 Grosz, “Architectures of Excess,” in Architecture from the Outside, 165. 32 Ibid, 163. 33 See Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007). 30