Blazing Epiphany: Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969!: An Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Following are excerpts from an interview by filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich with artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Ukeles is the official unsalaried artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977. Her artwork, crashing boundaries between labor and performance, system and spirit, unveils connections between feminism, workers, the city, and environment. Key works include Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, Touch Sanitation, The Social Mirror, Ceremonial Arch Honoring Service Workers, Snow Workers’ Ballet, Unburning Freedom Hall, Cleansing the Bad Names, and LANDING at Freshkills Park (in process). In 2016–17, Ukeles had a museum-wide, career-survey exhibition at the Queens Museum. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney, Guggenheim, and Jewish museums in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago (promised gift); Migros Museum, Zurich; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, Connecticut; and Smith College Museum, Northampton, Massachusetts. Represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery, NYC, she exhibits and lectures internationally. Ukeles’s work is the subject of an upcoming film.

Figure 1.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, The Social Mirror, 1983. Mirror-covered New York City Department of Sanitation truck.

© Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York.

Toby Perl Freilich:

It’s been fifty years since you wrote Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “CARE,” launching your career as a self-described maintenance artist. What life events and emotions led you to write it?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles:

I had struggled for many years to be an artist. It was a long journey to know that that’s what I am. Art is freedom.

My heroes in the avant-garde were my “uncle” Jackson Pollack, who gave the gift of free bodily movement in the work, my “grandfather” Marcel Duchamp, who gave me the gift of renaming or moving a simple object from one context to another and reinventing the whole meaning of it, and my “uncle” Mark Rothko, who gave me a gift in his art of the ability to move from one dimension to another.

Now, you might notice that my heroes happened to all have been men. And how they were supported in the world was something you didn’t talk about; you focused on their genius. I wanted to be an artist to be free. And I felt that they fed me these gifts of great freedom out of their creation.

And then, in 1968, Jack and I, out of blessing and great desire, had a baby, and I ended up falling out of the picture of the avant-garde. I didn’t know about babies. My heroes didn’t change diapers. I just had a great crisis as did many women in the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies. So, I literally divided my life in half. Fifty percent of the time I would be the mother with the baby. Fifty percent, I hired somebody to take care of the baby and I would go to another place and be that artist.

But when I was with the baby being the mother, I was thinking to myself, I’m going to lose it. I’m not going to be able to be an artist. I have to be an artist. When I was the artist, what am I thinking? Is the caregiver really paying attention to the baby? Is she crying? So, my wires were getting all crossed. I felt like I was two separate people in one body. I didn’t like that feeling at all.

Before I had a baby, I did as little maintenance as a person could do. If anything got in the way of me making my art, I just wouldn’t stick around. But now I wanted to take care of the baby. And actually, when you pay attention to a baby, you go through thousands of discoveries. Like, the baby doesn’t arrive with a little manual on how...