Everything I do is Art is Art
Lecture notes from my visit to St. Mary’s domestic art class, plus a syllabus on labor memoirs & a prompt for writing about work
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At the height of the pandemic, the feminist performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles had a revival. One of the central texts people reference when exploring Ukeles’ legacy is her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, written in 1969 as a proposal for an exhibition that was never picked up. The manifesto speaks to the ethos of her long career, but the complexity of her work often goes under-explored. In one frequently quoted spot of the manifesto, she writes that "maintenance”— the work we do perpetuate ourselves and “the species”—”is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.”
This quote is often called upon to highlight the drudgery of domestic labor and caregiving— the kinds of work Ukeles wrote about in that manifesto, such as: “clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper…” her list goes on, even mixing public-facing emotional labor (“keep the customer happy”) with private financial labor (“pay your bills”) and what we now call self-care (“wash your hair” and “stay young”).
Ukeles career, however, has been a conceptual one—she is not, as some would have it, in favor of or against maintenance work. Though she felt her artistic and maternal life divided her in two, her performances and exhibitions were nuanced, not didactic. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made objects and an exploration of what counts as Art, Ukeles’ career is not simply a critique of the work we don’t often see as work. Her work borders on activism (not activist enough for some), but she remains first and foremost an artist who is interested in documenting the details of different forms of hidden labor, rather than advocating any clear moral position.
In another section of her manifesto, she writes: “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art.” She then quotes a Balinese saying: “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.”
A few weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture at St. Mary’s College of California, to a class of undergraduate students studying domestic art. The students were engaged and responsive, and when I asked them to introduce themselves, they jumped at the chance to share their own artistic interests— in sculpture, writing, illustration. The class, run by Patti Maciesz and Suzanne Schmidt, met in a restored Firehouse in downtown Oakland, off campus, which gave the class an anti-establishment air that felt necessary for what we were discussing.
I had been invited to speak about Ukeles and Mary Kelly, two artists I’ve been researching, writing on, and teaching about for years. As I took the students through these two artists’ perspectives on work and aesthetics, we spent a little time discussing how their work brings “invisible labor” into art spaces, once the domain of men and men’s work. We talked about Kelly’s famous six-year exhibition Postpartum Document—she brought poopy diapers into the gallery space, explored how language is passed from mother to child, positioned the child as an art object, and the mother as artist. In all this, she also documented what art critic Lucy Lippard called the “cultural kidnapping” of our children by a male-dominated social world.
In the class, we also debated extensively the sincerity of Ukeles 2020 update to the work she’s done for years with the New York Sanitation department (including her famous Touch Sanitation performance). The 2020 update, exhibited at Queens Museum and in Times Square, “thanks” service workers for their service.
I wanted the students to see something more plain though: about how discussing these artists opens up possibilities for seeing the Art in the everyday, and for bringing the everyday into their own artistic practices.
One of the exercises I gave in the class, as a method for inviting the students into the kind of work Ukeles and Kelly do, was to go through the physical motions of some everyday task or chore, basically pretend they are working at home, then write about what they notice coming up in their thoughts, physical sensations, and feelings while they “do“ this work.
I’ve done this exercise quite a few times, but because it’s one I started doing with students during the pandemic, I’ve never witnessed people actually engaging with the activity. Usually, I invite students to turn off their Zoom cameras and find a spot in their home where they can do some distinct care or domestic task. They perform the work and write a little, then they come back to share how their bodies felt while they washed and dried dishes, while they patted their baby to sleep, or while they swept the kitchen.
This time, though, I got to watch everyone pretending to work in person, and it was thrilling. The Firehouse was filled with young people pretending to do mundane tasks: one young man picked up a giant push broom and meditatively pushed it all around the space; a young woman chatted with me about her care responsibilities while she cradled an invisible baby; a group of students congregated in the little kitchen pretending to load a dishwasher that wasn’t there.