(tranquil piano music)
- (Beth) We're in the Wadsworth Atheneum,
looking at a series of photographs
by Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
And this is her work,
Washing/Tracks/Maintenance. Outside.
From 1973.
What we're looking at
is the artist scrubbing
the outside staircase of this museum.
- (Patricia) Mierle came
here in the summer of 1973
and performed four different
performance art pieces,
each of them associated
with the authority and power
within the art museum, and also
about domestic maintenance.
- (Beth) In these
photographs, we see the artist
going outside of the museum.
- (Patricia) This is where
people enter the museum,
so she's front and center
at this institution
where everyone who visits
the museum has to pass,
so she's cleaning the front steps by hand.
It's quite a grand staircase,
and pours the water down,
moves it around in front of the museum
in very dramatic strokes.
In a way, it's like
being an action painter
like Jackson Pollack,
but her palette is water
and her surface is the concrete sidewalk
and the stairs in front of the museum.
- (Beth) And I read that this took hours.
I mean, this is backbreaking work.
- (Patricia) I believe it
was a four-hour performance,
so that's no small undertaking.
- (Beth) And we also see her
laying out cloth diapers.
- (Patricia) Our conservation
department uses diapers
to clean the surfaces
of glazing on artworks,
and it also has a parallel with a mother
who is changing diapers,
so it does fill a role
in both the museum world
and the domestic world.
- (Beth) She coined this
term, "maintenance art."
She had been a practicing artist,
she got married, she had
children, and found herself
spending her day maintaining
the life of a child
and thought, I can do
art or I can be a mother,
and in fact, that's how people
approached her about it.
They said, "oh, now you're a mom,
you're not an artist anymore."
- (Patricia) Mierle had
a crisis of identity
as an artist at that time
and became very angry about
her position as a mother
having to be completely
responsible for the
care and maintenance of
children who were completely
dependent on her.
- (Beth) And she said when
she was in her studio,
she thought about whether the
child was being taken care of,
and when she was with her children,
she thought about her art.
And so, was there a way to
make caring for something,
maintaining something, art.
- (Patricia) She created a
manifesto and a whole new
area of art-making, which
she called "maintenance art."
- (Beth) And if you think
about this in the context
of twentieth century art,
going back to Duchamp
and the idea of the
readymade, of taking something
that's already out in the
world and naming it art,
and by naming it art, transforming it,
changing how we look at something,
and Ukeles calls our
attention to maintenance.
- (Patricia) She approached
a number of different museums
about performing these
tasks as performance art,
and was turned down by
virtually every museum,
except for the Wadsworth Atheneum,
so the Wadsworth took a
chance on something that they
didn't know how successful it would be,
or how visible it would
be, or what kind of
institutional critique might be
wrapped up in this whole project.
- (Beth) You use the term
"institutional critique."
This is a way we think about some art
which criticized the
very institutions of art.
The museum was opening
itself up, potentially,
to some criticism.
- (Patricia) She's shedding
light on the invisible workers
at an art museum that, perhaps,
we all take for granted,
and are the workers who
are not paid as well,
they are not on the front
line like a director
or a curator would be,
but people who are
maintenance staff invisibly
keep the museum in perfect working order.
What she's doing as a performance piece
during the hours that the museum is open
is to expose a worker like
this in a way that would
highlight their actions.
- (Beth) As a mother,
there's a maintenance system
that's within the family,
and then here we have
the maintenance system
of a public institution,
like the Wadsworth Atheneum, a museum,
but then later on in her
work, she also looks at
the maintenance system of a city.
- (Patricia) We can relate to this
on so many different levels,
because in our personal lives,
we have to maintain our
own homes and laundry,
and then there are people
who are the workers
who get paid for such
things, and then there are
city operations where there's
a whole sanitation crew,
and she became the artist in residence
for the Department of
Sanitation in New York.
- (Beth) We often think
about the work of artists
as creation.
We don't think about it as maintenance.
- (Patricia) We're so
involved in thinking about art
as an object, and so to think
of art as something that's
more associated with everyday life,
where there's a maintenance aspect to it,
is a very different way
of thinking about art.
- (Beth) She talks about how
she saw the incredible freedom
in the work of the
abstract expressionists,
in Jackson Pollack, for example,
and the way that he made art into gesture,
into movement through space.
And wanted to have that kind of freedom
in the way that she
thought about art-making.
But found herself very
constrained, and yet found this way
to turn what she was doing into a new way
of thinking about art and
thinking about motherhood.
She says, "Jackson Pollack
never changed diapers."
And so this bringing
together of these worlds
that are otherwise so far
apart, and this making visible
of labor clearly has a
political aspect to it.
- (Patricia) To really bring
this forward as real work
and possibly even real art
was a brand new thing in 1973.
(tranquil piano music)
