Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance and/as (Art) Work

Preface

It’s one of the funny things about maintenance, it’s almost impossible to see.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 2008

On International Women’s Day (IWD), an aptly despondent image began to circulate on social media. Pictured is a low-wage woman maintenance worker cleaning the “detritus” of (liberal) feminist protest at the behest of Oxford University administrators – or more likely, as is true for most universities (and the greater neoliberal Post-Fordist economy), instructed by managers from an outside company contracted to keep the (often immigrant) waged workers without labor protections and benefits.² The waste in this case: a chalk graffiti slogan of women’s liberation from the historically significant, if already absorbed by liberal institutions, day of organized protest. Posted to Twitter by Dr. Sophie Smith, Oxford professor of political theory, her caption read: “Oxford security makes a woman cleaner scrub out ‘Happy International Women’s Day’ on the Clarendon steps. What an image for #IWD.”³ Oxford was of course quick to apologize and reaffirm its “support” for IWD and those marking the day.⁴

Employing a sparse visual economy, the image depicts some of the many inconsistencies, still subjects of debate, of various feminist programs from the 1970s, including strategies of organizing for the (monetary) valorization of “women’s work” or in addressing the broader notion of “social reproduction.” The latter term has taken on diverse meanings in feminist critiques of gendered (and racialized) capitalism, and will be discussed at greater length below.

Of course, the photo is also indicative of the inconsistencies of certain, dominantly white, heteronormative, second-wave feminist responses to the “international women’s question,” as it was posed in the past. A prominent critique of this conception of “domestic labor” was mounted by contemporaneous radical feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis and Hazel Carby, in the legacy of Claudia Jones’ much earlier work, to show that many critiques of domesticity and the conception of the “housewife” were specific to white working- and middle-class women. Rada Katsarova’s informative essay “Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings,” for example, summarizes Davis’ critique: “Black women’s labor was mobilized in the reproductive realm as well as in the manufacturing and service industries long before discourses of the ‘double burden’ emerged in white feminist thought.”⁵ In much feminist discourse today, it is better acknowledged that a large percentage of care, reproductive, and maintenance labor in the Global North is undertaken by women of color, many of them migrants in highly precarious socio-economic positions.

Turning to this image of the Oxford sanitation worker – disseminated as photographic evidence to make her labor visible – the personal is clearly political, while the private is certainly public. However, the non-intimate documentation is also impersonal, commanding, and even somewhat advantageous given its subsequent media attention.⁶ This wasn’t a “gaffe,” as per The Guardian’s swift recounting of the event; rather, things were working exactly as they have been organized – press and imminent social media criticism of Dr. Smith’s post included. The devalorization of “women’s work” (not necessarily a withholding of wages, but perhaps alienation via the wage contract itself), given its gendered and classed and racialized compartmentalization, is kept as such in order to maintain the illusionistically “free” veneer of neoliberal wage agreements clean, and to render the social reproduction necessary for the continuation of surplus production obscured under layers of waste. The question then: how can an image properly engage this series of problematics?⁷

One potential example is the powerful slogan mounted by protesting students at the opening of the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in September 2018, which illustrates the struggles referenced here with elegant economy: “Who keeps the cube white?” they asked.⁸ The protests were organized outside the inaugural exhibition of work by Mika Rottenberg, as a call to bring the sanitation workers of the art center in-house, rather than subcontracting maintenance labor. The university was quick, unsurprisingly, to lend an air of support to the protestors – citing the history of political activism and agitation by its students, they conceded to “consider” the demands. More interesting than this recuperation of protest, however, is how the action was discussed in reviews of the exhibition itself – demonstrating mainstream art criticism’s generalized inability to engage with political action undertaken through visual culture. In the Guardian’s take, for example, the topic is only broached in the last paragraph of their review of Rottenberg’s exhibition, to quickly mention that she had written a statement (left unquoted) of support.⁹ The reviewer employs a pre-eminent art-historical methodology, formulating a juxtaposition between the exhibition on one side, and the staged performativity of the protest on the other. This, quite directly, turns the politics of the action (“the vuvuzelas and loud music” included) into the choreography of a politicized art performance – a breakdown of political aesthetics for the sake of the aestheticization of politics, we might say, echoing Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction. While this is nothing new, of course, a pertinent question here, of protest, the university, an art center, and an artist, would be: why not question waged work itself? How might we make labor visible in visual culture, without propping up the way labor value is itself extracted, promulgated, mythologized, and reproduced at the behest of neoliberalism? In the words of Kathi Weeks: “How might we expose the fundamental structures and dominant values of work – including its temporalities, socialities, hierarchies, and subjectivities – as pressing political phenomena? […] How might we conceive the content and parameters of our obligations to one another outside the currency of work?”¹⁰

Introduction. Wages for (and Against) Housework

What I am talking about is a new revolution in the labor movement […] questioning the meaning of “work” altogether.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, letter to Lucy Lippard, 1981

This text engages two wide theoretical conceptions of social reproduction and their use in a specific historical moment, in order to engage with the early work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles from the perspective of visual culture. In doing so, I intend to demonstrate that her practice isolates a model of art working that can account for both a feminist and post-work critique of the production of gendered and invisible subjectivities in the very site of work itself. To summarize a foundational assumption in the cogent arguments in (autonomist and Foucauldian) feminist discourse of the last few decades, which this essay will center around: while “domestic labor” is performed inside and outside the home, it is nonetheless rendered invisible and must be reified, potentially through, or against, an abstraction such as the wage. Though “social reproduction” is a crucial component of productive forces and labor power, and for the accumulation of capital (if we allow for the time being a classical Marxian distinction between productive and reproductive forces), its “devaluation” is written into the fine print of most social contracts. The assumed labor/sex agreement of the marriage contract is one especially clear and ubiquitous example of the not-so-invisible ink of subjugation in domesticity.¹¹ Of the many different definitions of “social reproduction” employed, we can consider the breakthrough work by a specific contingent of 1970s Euro-American feminists, particularly the International Wages for Housework Campaign, who, in Katsarova’s well-worded summary:

identified social reproduction as a field of productive, generative activity […] showing how patriarchal social organization was a structural element in capitalist exploitation, and further, how the history of working class struggle had effectively mirrored and reproduced patriarchal relations and gender norms under capitalism.¹²

As briefly mentioned, branches of feminist theory concerned with “domestic labor” that reinforced the separation of productive and reproductive forces were not without their limitations. Katsarova is right to point out much of the literature’s tendency to consider an essentialized, heteronormative, and static body while also overlooking struggles waged by women of color and in anti-colonial contexts.¹³ However, as Marina Vishmidt remarks: “‘Society’ or ‘the social’ is a projected imaginary […] and what actually counts as its reproduction is potentially open-ended and ambiguous.”¹⁴ Vishmidt has recently proposed that we consider two distinct conceptions of “social reproduction” that emerged in certain feminist writing of the last five decades: a materialist understanding of gendered, racialized, and often unwaged work on the one hand, and, on the other, the literal reproduction of capital and productive relations, following Louis Althusser’s critiques of classical (and later Stalinist) Marxism developed in the years after May 1968. Ukeles’ well-known work, when read in the dialectic of social reproduction as sketched by Vishmidt, demonstrates a practice capable of engaging both critiques.

During the years 1965–1977, before entering the Department of Sanitation as an (unsalaried) “artist-in-residence,” Ukeles worked in plastics factories, penned her seminal Maintenance Art Manifesto, produced plastic sculptures and proposals for major art collaborations with scientists (in the era of projects such as Experiments in Art and Technology, and so on), became aware of feminist artist networks such as WEB (West-East Bag), and began to contemplate the meanings implicit in “development” and “maintenance” – or more precisely: administered economic development and its mitigation (typically via austerity). Importantly, in the late 60s and 70s, she had given birth to three children, and though she had met with other cultural workers active in feminist organizations (most consequently with Lucy Lippard), Ukeles’ first “maintenance” works were staged in the home (parallel to claims outside art production that the “home is a factory”). She then shifted the environment of maintenance to the corporate workplace and the museum (equated as such), and by the end of the decade to the municipal structure of public sanitation, a larger civic institution of “maintenance.”

I contend that this series of operations – taken from the home to the museum to the municipal – point to a strategy of cultural activism that invites collective participation via a form of feminism as politics, rather than an essentialization or individualization of women on the one hand, or a proposition for a psychoanalytic analysis of gender and maternity as labor on the other; the examples chosen here to remind us of the now-tired debates of the period.¹⁵ Ukeles instead approached the worker, phenomenologically and physically (“in real life”), while becoming one herself.¹⁶ Her practice demonstrates a mode of collectivist, socialist, feminist, and materially productive practice, notwithstanding its own partial inscription in the capitalist relations of production and patriarchal considerations of power constituting the culture industry. Rather than invoking immaterial labor to produce information or a generalization of affective labor (in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s conceptions, for example), or dematerializing the work and site of exhibition (following Lippard, Seth Siegelaub, and so on), Ukeles instead reifies domestic labor by proposing to equate all “affective work” with artistic work, and subsequently enters herself and her labor power into low-wage service and municipal systems.¹⁷

In the Part I of this text, I map out some of the Euro-American art-historical landscape within which Ukeles’ practice emerged, and propose a re-reading of the Maintenance Art Manifesto alongside Silvia Federici’s manifesto Wages Against Housework, as a way of re-introducing key early works by Ukeles that she performed in the home. Part II discusses Ukeles’ explicit critique of value production and class, and the implicit critique that unsettles the reproduction of (gendered) productive relations in the site of (exhibiting art) work, as it shifts from domestic space to the museum. Lastly, in Part III, I apply this argument to her engagement with a corporate managerial structure and her initial entry into the DSNY (the City of New York Department of Sanitation), demonstrating how her model operates on the level of the municipal (in some ways a corollary to the “multitude”). Such a model of art working is shown to be an attempt at answering the problem, in the words of Federici, of a missing political formation or “political perspective” in the broad socialist feminist position of the late 60s. This is the truly radical and imperative motion that Ukeles activated. In fact, if we turn again to Kathi Weeks’ book The Problem with Work – and consider that Ukeles’ position at the DSNY is unsalaried – we might read her practice as a formidable answer to one of Weeks’ introductory questions: “How might feminism contest the marginalization and underestimation of unwaged forms of reproductive labor, without trading on the work ethic’s mythologies of work?”¹⁸

Manifesto in and Against the Home, the Languages of Social Reproduction

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Manifesto, 1969

In the contexts of visual culture and feminist writing of the late 60s and early 70s on “maintenance,” Ukeles is undoubtedly a central figure to consider – both for her legendary, and still entirely relevant Maintenance Art Manifesto: Proposal for an Exhibition, “CARE,” and her later maintenance art performances, before and after becoming artist-in-residence at the DSNY in 1979.¹⁹ Her five-decade career continues to provide a productive critical model for analyzing certain drawbacks of political agitation and organization towards women’s economic and sexual liberation via identitarian representation or with the idealistic potentials in collective bargaining. Both strategies were of course prominently employed at various points by different feminist contingents after May 1968.²⁰ Ukeles’ work has received much more attention (most prominently in the constructed art-historical canons of “institutional critique,” “feminist art,” and “social practice”),²¹ though more importantly it has become a much-needed source of reference for scholarship on social reproduction and “housework” in recent years.²² To my knowledge, however, there has been little art-historical scholarship to endeavor a more pronounced reading of her work through the lens of Federici’s critique, a key figure whose writing and activism broke with then-dominant Euro-American feminisms (liberal, radical, and socialist, essentialized into the broadest of categories) to articulate a pointedly post-autonomist feminism as a political project. I refer specifically here to Federici’s legendary manifesto Wages Against Housework (1975) and the work of International Wages for Housework (WfH) Campaign. Vishmidt takes up this line of thinking in her work, and keenly remarks: “Ukeles may have spoofed the transcendent universality of the (male) artistic subject by proposing housework as art, but her targets were more extensive and, like the Italian feminists, these targets included revolutionary politics.”²³ She refers here to an important line in Ukeles’ manifesto, which asks: “The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” This is a key point to Ukeles’ self-reflexive critique of (socialist) feminist projects, running parallel to the critiques levied by WfH. Vishmidt continues:

Thus, like Wages for Housework, Ukeles sought to valorise the excluded – here the excluded of the institution of art in its broadest sense, there of wage labour and the labour movement. In both cases, this valorisation is also a de-valuing, that is, a strategy which also challenged the institutions that orders visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion, as well as the larger system that it represents.²⁴

If Ukeles’ and Federici’s manifestos are positioned as parallel texts across the divide between cultural and political activism (if we choose to accept this distinction), one will notice that the agitation, refusal, and linguistic recoding in both texts are of startlingly similarity, and that in their juxtaposition this distinction seems to evaporate.²⁵

Federici’s activist work and writing has also gained a much wider audience in recent years, as WfH is being re-examined by new generations of feminists – particularly in radical queer and trans feminisms – since the publication of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998). Speaking recently with Jill Richards, Federici described the autonomist preconditions of WfH: “The women’s movement as a whole was autonomous because it was clear that our concerns were not important to the male-dominated left. […] By the time our collective formed in 1973, the need for feminist autonomy was well established.”²⁶ As described by Weeks, the focus on the wage by feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Federici “as that which sutures the household to waged labor economy” follows an autonomist re-reading of Marx, so that “the wage is understood as the dominant mechanism by which individuals are incorporated in the capitalist mode of cooperation.”²⁷ The key expansion of Marx’s explanation of the wage – that it obscures, in its abstraction, the production of surplus value – by Federici and others associated with WfH is that it also hides the necessity of unwaged labor for this same value production.²⁸ Weeks summarizes further: “[Nicole Cox and Federici] offer a more expansive account of not only who is involved in the wage relation and thus who might contest its terms but also what counts as a wage struggle, in this case going beyond the focus on wage rates to include efforts to secure the provision of social services and reductions of work time.”²⁹ In short, wage labor relations thread themselves through the lives of all who work, including those not paid a wage. It’s worthwhile to point out once more that Ukeles’ own position with the DSNY is unsalaried.

The artwork most commonly referenced to demonstrate a literal valorization (or reification) of specifically domestic affective work, and thus implicitly a critique of its unremunerated condition as seen in the sites of artistic value production, is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1979). The piece interweaves the bureaucracy of managerial labor with the privacy of domestic/maternal work in its organized presentation; it interrogates distinctions between public and private space and (social) reproduction in those spaces by bringing the “refuse” (i.e. the materials of maternity such as diapers) into the white cube; and it engages in a psychoanalytic feminist reading of the relationship between a mother and her infant son.³⁰ Much less mentioned in this context is Alison Knowles, who began to score intimate domestic tasks as aesthetic/textual operations in the early 1960s. Though associated under the banner cast by the Fluxus “commander in chief” George Maciunas, Knowles isolated her own distinct models of scoring (in her words “proposing”) compositions. She composed Proposition 1 (October 1962), which instructs the reader/performer to make a salad. Variation #1 on Proposition (October 1964) instructs: “make a soup.” Speaking on her participation in the first group of Fluxus artists assembled by Maciunas to tour in Europe in 1962, she recently remarked: “I was the only woman in a group of all men, and I was making salads and changing diapers on the stage.”³¹ This is to say that the interweaving of the intimate and the public, the domestic and the political, the home and the museum, were already being experimented with in Euro-American avant-garde visual culture of the early 60s. Clearly, the labor of the home was an aesthetic container to be mobilized in collapsing distinctions between the private and public realms, to critique – or at least address – the capitalist production of gender via the site of work, as famously demonstrated and satirized in Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1969). Ukeles has also often noted the influence of the dancers of the Judson Dance Theater, such as Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, which in fact suggests an influence on the shift to quotidian movement and objects in her work.³² In arranging a seemingly unconnected group of artists in this way, it is nonetheless helpful in introducing Ukeles’ coalescing of many of these ideas in her manifesto, to mobilize these gestures politically on her own body in her home, before she engaged on the level of the commons or the municipal.³³

Ukeles recounts that, while a student at the Pratt Institute in New York, her male professor instructed her to quit art after she became pregnant. She later remarked: “I was split into two people: artist and mother. I had fallen out of the picture. I was in a fury.”³⁴ After leaving Pratt, she continued to study art in Denver and then spent a vital period in Philadelphia, where she worked in a plastics factory. All of the above contributed to her Maintenance Art Manifesto (October 1969), which she wrote in one sitting, comprised of two parts: Manifesto! Maintenance Art and a proposal for an exhibition titled CARE. It is worthwhile looking again at some oft-referenced and brilliant sections of the manifesto here:

C. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time, literally; the mind boggles and chafes at the boredom; the culture confers lousy status and minimum wages on maintenance jobs; housewives = no pay.
D. Art:
Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. I am an artist.

And later in section II (the exhibition proposal):

I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.³⁵

Just as Ukeles understands her gendered role as a domestic laborer to be entrenched in structures of subjugation within a patriarchal system, she also understands that the potential for emancipatory agency can reside in the same site of working, or more appropriately in an autonomous approach to valorizing the productivity of the work itself while eliminating the necessity for selling one’s labor power via a hierarchical contract or lack thereof. For example, notice how minimum wages for “lousy” jobs in culture are positioned next to the unpaid labor of the home. Furthermore, she incorporates the “two people,” artist and mother, back into one via the shared axis of maintenance work.

Ukeles performs two key linguistic shifts in the Manifesto. By changing “domestic work” to “maintenance work,” and thereafter “maintenance work” to “maintenance art,” she engages a shift of capitalist hierarchies to counter the stratification that her labor value is inscribed into and subsequently sold or exchanged within. As Pierre Bourdieu remarked on such changes in vocabulary, they can be “both the condition and the result of breaking away from the ordinary representation associated with the idea of ruling class” – in this case, the patriarchy of the “male earner” and the male manager.³⁶ The Manifesto ushered in a radically powerful model for incorporating not just art and life, or artwork and labor – quintessential concerns of the modernist avant-gardes – but also for intertwining practice and agitation, private labor and public space, art working and domestic duties.

In her Wages Against Housework manifesto Federici writes: “The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already doing as work, what capital is doing to us, and our power to struggle against it.”³⁷ The paramount point about valorizing paid housework in the way Federici does is not the reification of that wage itself, but rather of the work, using the wage abstraction. The performative demand in the call “for” wages is a political position that designates the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, and so on, as sites of value production. Federici’s manifesto engages in a similar type of linguistic shifting as Ukeles’ does. Wages Against Housework begins, for example, with an epigraph in which she equates love with unwaged work, frigidity with absenteeism, and miscarriage with a work accident. “Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions … but homosexuality is workers’ control of production,” she writes. Furthermore: “More Smiles? More Money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.”³⁸ Federici once more, beautifully resonant with Ukeles’ text: “The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already doing as work, what capital is doing to us, and our power to struggle against it.”

Maintaining the Museum

Ukeles rejected the then-prominent models in “critical art” of “being conceptual” as she refers to them – e.g. engaging in purely textual exercises in semiotics, shallow Wittgensteinian play (in the way of Joseph Kosuth perhaps, or its more elegant and critical rejection in poetics by strategies such as those of Marcel Broodthaers), and the linguistic scoring of emancipation. Rather, in her manifesto, the textual is intrinsically accompanied by the (re)productive: an exhibition proposal, further discussed below, which seeks to bring maternal and collective civic maintenance labor into the museum’s galleries. It is here that we might acknowledge, and problematize, the Duchampian influence in her work. Ukeles often refers to Duchamp as her “grandfather,” a formulation simultaneously correlative and distancing.³⁹ Heavily affected by a short meeting in 1963, Ukeles recounts that she was struck by his apparent “exit” from art production – now clearly understood as a myth, or even a mode of performing.⁴⁰ A young art student taken aback by this feigned “exit,” she remarked to him: “Now that you have heirs, you can go back to work.” Duchamp’s response, the kind that is illuminating but takes some time to appreciate: “Did you mean ‘heirs’ or ‘airs’?”⁴¹

I imagine that this interaction, and the stated influence from post-war New York Duchampians (Jasper Johns in particular), in addition to her frequent references to the focus on the everyday in the performances at the Judson Dance Theater, likely compelled her to inevitably think of production in materialist terms. It is no coincidence then that, in between publishing the manifesto and first entering the DSNY, she staged the work Now that you have Heirs/Airs Marcel Duchamp: Maintain the Ties that Bind (1973), a ceremonial “killing” of the (grand)father. While exhibiting work at the Moore College of Art & Design, Ukeles tied a ball of string to the glass doors near Duchamp’s The Large Glass at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and walked to her own show while unspooling the string, thereby connecting the two institutions and the two artists’ work.⁴² After arriving at Moore College, she cut the string, severing the material (and umbilical) tie while also slyly alluding to Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913) as the string fell to the ground.⁴³ While her analysis of labor, artistic or otherwise, remains a pointedly materialist one, Ukeles would not limit the readymade to physical objects, moving to employ scripts, managerial etiquette and behavior, and different forms of waged or unwaged labor as readymade apparatuses.⁴⁴

The second part of Ukeles’ manifesto was written as an exhibition proposal, and was turned down. Sent to the Whitney, Ukeles proposed to live in the museum with her child for a period, wherein her mothering would be the work. (Of course Lea Lublin’s Mon fils [1968] comes to mind here as well). Among other elements, Ukeles also offered to turn part of the exhibition space into a recycling facility in which she would work with scientists (skilled labor) to process trash in the site of exhibition, equating two forms of reproduction. The argument here is that we are all maintenance laborers – some paid, some not, some specialized labor (scientists), some low-wage service labor (cleaning staff) – but remunerated inequitably.

Although the proposal was rejected, in 1971 Ukeles sent it, along with the manifesto, to Jack Burnham, who published large excerpts in Artforum, together with four photographs merging a small amount of absurdism with symbolic and literal representations of Ukeles at work in intimate spaces.⁴⁵ In Maintenance Art: Dusting a Baffle (1970), for example, she is pictured cleaning a semi-transparent plastic artwork that partially distorts her face. Here, in a gesture of self-reflexive critique, she literally maintains her earlier work so that it can continue to exist.⁴⁶ Her laboring presence in the black-and-white photograph recreates a form reminiscent of the early twentieth-century photography that aimed to document large typologies of industrial workers. Ukeles, however, shows herself toiling, otherwise invisibly, at home, rather than workers exiting the factory, so to speak. Ukeles’ critique is also directed towards other strategies of institutional critique, enacting, in part, what Andrea Fraser later termed “a methodology of critically reflexive site-specificity,” particularly evident when the site of the “event of photography” is the home, and the site of its dissemination is the art magazine, here equated as two sites of (re)production.⁴⁷ Once Ukeles shifts this critique from the home to the museum, or later from her own body to the bodies of the multitude at work and the city as site of maintenance, Vishmidt’s argument elsewhere for an “infrastructural critique” applies keenly: “‘Institutional critique’ is retrospectively identified with a circular or, at best, enervatingly mimetic relation with the phantom antagonist/enabler (or enabling constraint) of the institution that is also ‘in you,’ whereas infrastructure sounds more like reality – its critique unfolds in a productive register, maybe even as production.”⁴⁸

The magazine exposure caught the attention of Lippard, who subsequently included Ukeles in her traveling exhibition c.7,500 – one of the curator’s “numbers” exhibitions.⁴⁹ Ukeles submitted photographs documenting maintenance work as part of Maintenance Art Tasks 1973 (1973), including titles such as Changing the Baby’s Diaper, Doing the Laundry, Dressing to Go Out/Undressing to Go In, and so on, accompanied by a dust rag to be used by visitors to “maintain” the photographs. She also exhibited a maintenance art questionnaire, which Ukeles asked both artists and museumgoers to complete and send to her.⁵⁰

When the exhibition travelled to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Ukeles proposed to perform her maintenance art, and the museum agreed. She famously scrubbed the floors outside and inside the museum (Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside and Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside – the former a now-iconic image), washed the glass cases of a mummy (Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object), and locked and unlocked gallery/office doors (The Keeping of the Keys) – all components of the Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973). This was the first time that she performed maintenance art in the museum, rather than exhibiting photographic documentation of maintenance done in the home: a form of subversion that is made explicit when Ukeles clarifies that she considered her performances a “critique of the institution.”⁵¹ As Vishmidt elegantly summarizes: “If the daily uncompensated labour performed by mainly women in the household could migrate to the museum and seek legitimacy as art, then it was no longer self-evident that this labour was any less ‘creative’ than the kind of activity otherwise enshrined as art, and no less public than socially necessary wage-labour.”⁵²

A key component of the work is its unsettling of the valorization of labor power, particularly evident in Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object (1973). In this part of the durational work, Ukeles suggests – in a detailed chart – the arbitrariness in distinctions of use and exchange value in work performed by a “maintenance person,” a “maintenance artist,” and a museum conservator. She chose to “maintain” a glass case that housed a female mummy, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.⁵³ Since she cleaned the case as a “maintenance artist,” as opposed to a maintenance worker (museum cleaning staff or the like), the “dust painting” she created became a work of art – a playful invocation of the Duchampian adage: it is art if the artist “says it is,” or if it enters the institutional site of display. Her intervention was then codified as an artwork via her maintenance art stamp – a different form of the artist’s contract developing at the time, which redistributed authorial autonomy back to the auratic signature – strengthening the totipotentiality between the work and the artist’s hand.⁵⁴ After her intervention, the case would have to be cleaned by the conservator, literally assigning non-professionalized maintenance work to a professional. Ukeles describes the work in the following way, which accounts for her strategy of subverting structuralized labor hierarchies:

I asked the maintenance worker to clean the vitrine, to do his regular work – which they actually did with a diaper […] Copying him, because he was the expert, I did exactly [w]hat he did, but it was an artwork, because I said so. When I finished, I stamped the vitrine with my “Maintenance Art” stamp. Once I stamped that vitrine, the maintenance worker […] could no longer put his hands on this art object. Then the conservator did a condition report of this artwork, the vitrine and said, “This artwork, the vitrine, needs to be cleaned.” At that moment I handed him my tools. He, copying the maintenance worker, cleaned the vitrine. We were photographed at the beginning, and we were photographed at the end. The same people, lined up the same way. But the notion of value had floated through me from the worker to the conservator.⁵⁵

Vishmidt again: “In proposing a world in which ‘maintenance’ activities were just as legitimately a part of the art as the objects or even the more ephemeral propositions or documentations that announced conceptual art, she was suspending the division of symbolic and physical labour that ensured work and art remained matter and anti-matter, autonomy without a taint of heteronomy.”⁵⁶ Quite emphatically, Ukeles empowers and increases the value of the museum’s cleaning staff, which, if the supposed logics of capital were to hold, would also increase their wage; she also distorts value distinctions and market-determined hierarchies between domestic work, museum work, and art work, as all three results from the maintenance of the glass case are, in fact, exactly the same. In analyzing this piece, Molesworth contends that the three different roles elucidate managerial concerns with the divisions of labor, which is true; however, she goes on to suggest that it legitimates the fact that “anyone can do maintenance work.” It seems, however, that the more relevant point is that everyone must do maintenance (to varying levels of necessity and privilege), “all the fucking time,” but that some are paid more, others less, and others still nothing at all, based on the logics of value and the productive relations reproduced in the very site of work.

From the Worker’s Club to the Landfill

Returning to Weeks’ question posed at the end of the introduction (on how feminism can contest the marginalization of unwaged reproductive labor without propping up the mythologies of the work ethic), a similar question is foundational to Ukeles’ decision to move from the rarefied site of the art institution in order to work with sanitation workers. An intermediate step in this move was the durational and participatory performance work I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), staged at the Whitney Museum’s then-downtown location in the lobby of a corporate skyscraper at 55 Water Street. The work begins with a simple invitation to 300 maintenance workers: to choose one hour of the work they do every day as art. To create documentation of the building-wide “performance,” Ukeles approached the workers with a Polaroid camera – working in eight-hour shifts alongside them – and snapped a photograph. After the photo was printed, she would ask whether the image showed them working or making art, so that she could document it as one or the other. This was not the first piece she organized that unsettled the divisions of labor dictating maintenance and art, nor her first use of photographs to document maintenance (art) working as evidence of performed labor. Interestingly, however, this was the first moment when she shifted the scale of analysis to the whole structure of workers, maintenance, and finance: a huge corporate building kept running by an army of workers, typically rendered invisible to the other people present in the building in order to work, exhibit art, and so on. Before carrying out I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day she declared: “I have been waiting for years to get my hands on a skyscraper. Why? Because a skyscraper needs tremendous maintenance.” The readymade here is both work and site. The photographs act to uncover the obscured reproduction, operating behind the scenes, which shifts the scope of “social reproduction” from the work identified by a materialist analysis of an individual toiling body, to the reproduction of larger, post-Fordist systems themselves.

Eschewing a single-body framework for her maintenance works, which runs the risk of essentializing a specific type of laboring body, this shift to larger structures in fact echoes WfH’s critique of earlier conceptions of affective labor, which did not take race and class into a wider account alongside gender. Rejecting a Western white-centered feminist program, Federici describes that “the women who launched WfH came from a history of militancy in Marxist-identified organizations, filtered through the experiences of the anticolonial movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, and the ‘Operaist’ movement.”⁵⁷ Its foundations came from a vast array of socio-economic and cultural contexts, with women from the US, Peru, Trinidad, India, Uganda, and so on.⁵⁸

As a precursor, Autonomia (alternatively operaismo [workerism]) had developed in Italy during the late 1960s through a resurgence of factory workers’ struggles, which led to radical re-readings of Marxist orthodoxy, particularly a rejection of the Stalinist Marxism still prominent in the Italian Communist Party. They adjusted Marxian frameworks to allow for the critique of all institutions – from the party to the state, from the union to the political movement itself – most prominently in the writings of Negri, Mario Tronti, and Paolo Virno. However, at the beginning, this group was often antagonistic to feminism and to women members themselves. An infamous event occurred in Rome in 1977 when “the male stewards of Lotta Continua and of the Comitato Autonomo di Centrocelle attacked a feminist demonstration and its vindication of a woman’s right to separate from a man.”⁵⁹ Such inconsistencies clearly prompted writers and activists to develop more-inclusive frameworks; writers as diverse as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Federici in the Italian context (though Federici left Italy early in her life), among many others, would come to be loosely grouped as post-autonomists.

Federici, however, is justifiably critical of a central post-operaist formulation regarding “affective labor,” a term used in this context to reconcile the aforementioned duality between “productive” and “reproductive” work. The term gained prominence in part due to Negri and Hardt’s writings, particularly in their trilogy that begins with the landmark Empire.⁶⁰ Federici criticizes the breadth of their use of the term “affective labor” to mean “the creation and manipulation of affects.” Her criticism is that they remain unaware of the massive contributions to the worker’s struggle that women have made against the blackmail of “affectivity,” or that the majority of this materialist merging of productive and reproductive work has been on the backs of women, often precarious migrants and women of color.⁶¹ On the series of divisions evident in the multiple struggles against sexism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism, take for example the famous 1968 sanitation strike in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic speech bridging civil rights and class struggle. In a photo, a group of black men stand holding picket signs proclaiming “I AM A MAN.” This radical protest and movement thus employed a gendered call for liberation and an end to racialized violence in line with Weeks’ argument that gender is produced in the site of work.

Speaking about the need for a larger feminist movement that leaves the home, Federici remarks: “Women have always found ways of fighting back, or getting back at them, but always in an isolated and privatized way. The problem, then, becomes how to bring this struggle out of the kitchen and the bedroom and into the streets.” Ukeles, after she brought the maintenance of the home into her art, and that maintenance art into the corporate space and museum, continued with taking her art to the “streets,” or more appropriately to the municipal system, with its garbage trucks, landfills, and depots.

This approach is made clear in Ukeles’ first and most famous project with the DSNY: Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–1980), including Handshake Ritual, in which she shook the hands of 8,500 sanitation workers and thanked them for their work. She repeated the phrase “Thank you for keeping New York City alive,” which clearly carries connotations of care work. In the second part of the durational performance, Follow in Your Footsteps, she “became” a (sanitation) worker too, “replicating the sanitation workers’ actions as they collected trash,” and kept an eight-hour workday for months, “punching in and out,” as it were, to become a (sanitation) laborer herself.⁶²

When Ukeles first reached out to the DSNY, she met with Edward T. Ostrowski, the president of the sanitation workers’ union. After their meeting, he wrote to her: “The union has no objection to your work; in fact we welcome such a project which promotes the sanitation man and gives the public a true insight into their lives and working conditions.”⁶³ Perhaps this praises anticipated press more than it does Ukeles’ project, but nonetheless the message she promoted clearly came across to a group of severely underpaid, under-protected, precarious laborers.⁶⁴ Also evident is an initial wish, on Ukeles’ part, to foster this “true insight” into working conditions – the productivist and documentary impulse par excellence. In her letter to the sanitation workers introducing Touch Sanitation and herself, she writes: “Nobody understands enough about what you do, how tough it is to work day after day on a job like this, about how hard it can be in lousy weather […] What kind of artist am I, you might wonder? I handle regular art ‘material,’ as you do. [Sanitation workers refer to trash as ‘material’].”⁶⁵ Crucially, she then announces: “I am an independent ‘maintenance’ artist. I don’t work for the city, the unions, the newspapers or networks,” which may clearly be read as Ukeles staking a quasi-autonomist position, though it also anticipates the precarious conditions of independently contracted freelance labor that would soon dominate art practices such as hers.⁶⁶

In the same 1979 letter to the “sanmen,” with her tongue firmly in cheek, she writes: “YOU ARE THE BALANCING AGENTS. You do the hard, heavy, physical work, traditional ‘men’s’ work. (No woman has passed the sanman’s or officer’s entrance exam. Yet.) At the same time, you nurture, you ‘husband’ the City. It’s time for us all to learn to honor this balancing kind of work you do.”⁶⁷ Of course, if one misses the irony and sarcasm at play here, a major premise of the work would be foregone: the bringing together of this “traditional ‘men’s’ work” with traditionally “women’s work.” As Ukeles has described on multiple occasions in the decades since, the sanitation workers were similarly invisible – hidden in plain sight – as women are in the home and in the workplace. Predictably, Ukeles faced heavy criticism from second-wave feminists for choosing to work with a municipal department staffed completely by men. She also faced frequent harassment from the sanitation workers themselves at the beginning, when she was taken for a “non-productive” intruder (given the precondition that art is “useless” in terms of materialist function), before they inevitably welcomed her as a colleague. As Weeks writes of her own project: “It is difficult to mount a critique of work that is not received as something wholly different: a criticism of workers.”⁶⁸ In Ukeles’ projects with the sanitation workers, we might rephrase this concern to say that it is difficult to mount a critique of the maintenance labor intrinsic to capitalist reproduction without it being received as something wholly different: in this case, a foregoing of attention for the gendered affective and domestic labor of the home, and the struggles of diverse feminisms operating in concert to liberate women from unremunerated work (but not from work altogether).

Conclusion

At the end of her celebrated “House Work and Art Work” (2000), Helen Molesworth proposes: “That 1970s art work informed by feminism is currently a site of intellectual energy is perhaps due to the problems of labour that shape our current public sphere: from the ‘end’ of the welfare mother to home officing; from the new threats to privacy made possible by the ever-expanding role of the Internet in the lives of people in developed nations to the multinational corporate reorganization of public space.”⁶⁹ It seems that in less than two decades of continued neoliberal domination, working to dismantle the mitigated victories of the late 60s, Molesworth’s 2000s-era prognosis has already become nostalgic. A less-than-comprehensive update to her list might read: the re-entrenchment of hetero-patriarchal frameworks in socio-political programs constructed by global right-wing reactionary politics; reproductive rights on the verge of erasure all over the world due to a rejuvenated neo-conservatism continuing to limit crumbling welfare services while enshrining the heteronormative family model; violence against women ever-present and mediatized; global civil war; and the fact that successes (of the bourgeois or liberal feminist variety) for certain women in the workplace feed the need for low-wage domestic and immigrant labor, and underwrite the increasing inequality of neoliberalism. The question today in the context of visual culture should be how cultural producers can respond aesthetically to such a series of attacks in an array of immaterial and mediatized culture wars without being instantly recuperated and absorbed into those very frameworks, which are then mobilized against workers; with oppressive reforms masquerading under terms such as “right-to-work” laws and reactionary neo-conservatism employing the languages of twentieth-century left-wing protest, the linguistic and visual terrain is surely treacherous. Ukeles’ work with the DSNY provides a historical template for bridging “social practice” with a materialist feminist political perspective, one that reifies invisible labor without celebrating the wage itself.