Touch Sanitation: Mierle Laderman Ukeles

When New York-based art critic Robert C. Morgan wrote this article, Mierle Laderman Ukeles had already been exercising the feminist art/life principal for more than a dozen years. Her own pregnancy sparked her long-term examination of woman's traditional caretaker role, extrapolating to larger questions about art, work and survival. Here Morgan gets to the bottom of the work's form, content and context. —Eds.

Take out the papers and the trash
Or you don't get no spending cash
If you don't scrub the kitchen floor
You ain't gonna rock and roll no more

from "Yakety Yak," words and music
by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
© 1958 by Tiger Music, Inc.

In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto entitled "Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition," which challenged the delegation of housework to women. In this seminal document of feminist art, Ukeles was attempting to demystify the image of the "housewife" as someone locked into an irretrievable system of dependency. Being pregnant at the time with her first child, she was feeling biological and psychological changes within her body, as well as confronting social and political changes within the society, which were in turn affecting her attitudes about art. In deciding to become a "maintenance artist"—and by announcing her intentions through the manifesto—Ukeles wanted to reinterpret the conventional housewife stereotypes, not in imagistic terms, but through a systemic style of creative action.

The chores that accompanied the raising of children became meaningful as she refused to define her domestic role as being anything more than a neutral work-system. Thus, by rejecting the standard "housewife" ideal, Ukeles hoped to revive the idea of housework as a functional endeavor—a ritualistic series of activities that maintain the hygiene of the family unit. Thus, she intended to confront the apprehension and anxiety of falling into a role and of being handed a social image she abhorred. Rather than disavowing her existential dilemma, Ukeles chose to "perform" housework as a maintenance system—a literal art of work existing in real time.

Having read the Freudian historian Norman 0. Brown some years earlier, the artist was able to identify her struggle between housewife and artist as resembling the familiar life-against-death conflict used in psychoanalysis. By accepting the reality of her situation as a necessary role in maintaining the household, she discovered the reality of maintenance as a means to the survival of personal freedom, art and all other social institutions. In other words, maintenance art was a necessary part of the human condition. Through this approach to the problem, Ukeles began to extend the references in her work outside of a purely feminist content in order to reveal the conditions of work, and the stereotypes handed to maintenance workers on all levels, whether in public, private, or corporate enterprises. Her mode of "doing" art became a series of actions that acknowledged the basic human operations that supported various institutions and perpetuated the idea of culture. In the course of redefining her own domestic role, she caught the meaning of art as action, art as gesture, art as circumstance within an appointed system or any designated structure.

Initially, Ukeles acknowledged the tasks of maintenance as a liberating idea, a context for her art that she identified as a feminist position. As this position extended from the household system to that of public sanitation, the artist performed in museums and office buildings and eventually in the streets of New York City. In I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), Ukeles shifted her emphasis from the personal or individual scale to that of a large-scale system. For two months, she worked as part of a sanitation bureaucracy, cleaning floors and elevators in a lower-Manhattan office building along with 300 janitors and "cleaning women" during regular shifts. Her recent large-scale performance, Touch Sanitation, completed June 1980, involved more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation. The performance itself lasted for a duration of eleven months. Her intention was "to face and shake hands" with each one of the 8,500 sanitation works while saying the words: "Thank you for keeping New York City alive."

While not oblivious to the biases that various news media held against the Department, Ukeles believed that most of these negative feelings were the result of irrational fears people had about garbage. As a performance artist, she wanted to emphasize the basically human side of the operation, that the activity of picking up trash was essentially no different than the disposing of it; the process was, in fact, one cycle. By shaking hands with a sanitation worker, or "san-man," she was demystifying another stereotype. There is a necessary task to be done and a necessary separation to be made between the task and those who perform it. Maintenance is a shared concern; there is both a private and public aspect to the work cycle. Waste products are not created by "garbage men," but by individuals who designate leftovers as trash. "Are we to assume," Ukeles has stated, "that those who dispose of trash—being all of us—are the 'garbage people'?"

In Touch Sanitation, the artist has shifted the focus of her actions outside the gallery space as an implicit ideology, a container for her work. This is a more radical shift from her previous 1976 performance in which the exhibition space of the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum was used in conjunction with the performance in the building. The museum, in this case, was simply part of the larger system, the social network of maintaining the premises, regardless of where the art happened to be shown. In Touch Sanitation, however, the gesture of the handshake evolved as an action independent of any immediate spectatorship among art-world clientele. Not only was such an action independent of the gallery or museum space, it was also independent of the theater. Its lack of domination by any traditional aesthetic category puts it on the fringes of a support system with which it could easily identify itself as art.

In keeping with the ecological concerns pronounced in the earlier "Maintenance Art" manifesto, Touch Sanitation raises several important questions: What occurs at the other end of the production line? What happens after the utility of the material has been exhausted? What happens to the scrap? The refuse? The dangerous gases and toxicants? The chronically harmful effects of radioactive wastes? More specifically, who takes care of the 22,000 tons of waste produced each day by the factories, businesses and residents of New York City? And what is the current social attitude that surrounds the sanitation worker who is hired to clean the sidewalks and maintain the mobility of the streets?

The fact that Ukeles has operated within a bureaucracy from the standpoint of "real time" places her work within the scope of conceptualism; yet, it might also be acknowledged as a kind of sociological street-theater. Although the artist is questioning the rational aesthetics of modernism, as well as the groundless decorativeness of postmodernism, the art-historical concerns are rather diminutive in contrast to the larger cultural issues being addressed in Touch Sanitation. Given the perspective of a simple action, Ukeles has performed a subtle transformation upon the psychology of doing an otherwise humdrum routine. Although such an action might not be interpreted as dramatic in a theatrical sense, the handshake carries a powerful feeling of mutual interest and support among workers. It comes to signify a sense of trust, an instillment of a feeling about the social nature of work. In joining forces with the san-men, Ukeles was able to unite her feminist concerns with the general nature of the work which they perform. Furthermore, san-men tend to believe—and rightly so—that a certain disparity exists between the reality of their work and the public image that is presented negatively through the news media. The gesture, presented by Ukeles, offered an alternative to some of the bad publicity. Consequently, the repeated series of handshakes literally became a chain reaction, a human support structure.

The definition of "nontheatrical performance"—stated earlier by Allan Kaprow (Artforum, April, 1976)—characterized certain types of work as "performing" a task well. Such performances given by garage mechanics, telephone operators or surgeons do not require an audience or a persona in the sense of constantly reinforcing what these performers do. They exist in their own right without audience support. Often such performances are related to maintenance and therefore seem appropriate to the underlying intentions in Touch Sanitation. In performing a collection maneuver, for example, a sanitation worker may have a personal style of choreography in the way he operates off the truck. In Touch Sanitation, this operation is further emphasized as having artistic merit while, at the same time, it is reinforced by a handshake—"pressing flesh," as the jargon goes. During this exchange, the worker is invited to step outside the normal routine for a moment, to lose his anonymity as a worker on the streets, and to become a person. This may account for a minor transformation of demeanor and attitude in the worker's mind. Yet the action cannot be forced; the sense of ritual is understood for the moment. No further motive is necessary. Although union ideology is an ever-present issue, to impose a specific ideological connotation upon Ukeles' action would give it an unnecessarily romantic edge. It is not an expectation of the job; yet by choosing to participate in the exchange, the san-man reaffirms something of the individual that he is. The decision to be one's own authority, given the anesthetization of the routine, persists while upholding one's end of the truck team, and while taking orders from the foreman. The sanitation worker is a basic support unit that keeps the system going, and the authority to do so is ultimately his own. The handshake further acknowledges that human hands do the work, and without them the work would not get done.

To comprehend the scale of maintaining a city as complex as New York is difficult. For Ukeles, it was necessary to have some insight into the reality of the system before she inaugurated her performance on June 24, 1979. The proposition of shaking hands with 8,500 workers throughout each of the five boroughs was one thing as an idea, and something else as an actual experience. The challenge, in addition to "walking out" the various sanitation districts and shaking hands with san-men, was to maintain oneself. Her performance also consisted of beating fatigue and depression, fighting off illness, nausea, discomfort, toxic odors and body aches. At one point, bronchitis landed her in bed for two weeks.

It is within this social/work context, outside of the conventional art/gallery syndrome, that the handshake and the spoken phrase assume another important connotation. When photographed by the news media, the image of a handshake serves to remind the public sector that sanitation is a team effort, that each worker and each citizen is valuable to the entire system. The affirmative message given by such an image is generalized as a public model. Pragmatically, however, not everything about the job or within the job deserves recognition or even positive reinforcement. It is inevitable, for example, that some workers will take advantage of certain situations and ignore parts of their job. The power of the commercial news media to blow such incidents out of proportion was one of the serious contentions that Ukeles sought to address. In performing a gesture of support, she hoped to reveal the more favorable, though often ignored, attributes of the majority of workers employed by the Department.

Ukeles' performance of Touch Sanitation was primarily an attempt to exorcise the stereotypes affiliated with employees in the New York City Department of Sanitation. The notion that one who handles garbage works at the lower echelon of society was the stereotype Ukeles saw revealed time and again. Such a notion is possibly in evidence when a culture has not yet vanquished its puritanical work-ethic as a criterion for godliness. Garbage could be considered a metaphor as much as illness is. Thus, in advocating "the human part of the system," Mierle Laderman Ukeles has further extended the notion that feminism and maintenance are intertwined; to overcome the stereotype remains a challenge. She has further advocated that maintenance is the "underbelly system" of urban life and culture—a work-a-day system that keeps people alive and things functioning, whether on a public or domestic level.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1982.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002