The Cambridge Dictionary gives two definitions for maintenance but the one relevant here is, “the action of keeping something in the same state or in good condition” (Waite, 2012). This idea of maintenance is first interrogated from an artistic perspective by Mierle Ledermann Ukeles in her 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art!”. In this manifesto Ukeles defines two ideas, ‘The Death Instinct’, which she aligns with development, and ‘The Life Instinct’, which she aligns with maintenance (Ledermann Ukeles, 1969). The piece is born of an explicitly feminist critique of the role of maintenance work in society at the time: “The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs=minimum wages, housewives=no pay” and as a solution to the low status of maintenance work Ukeles proposes elevating maintenance to an art form, going as far as including a proposal for an exhibition “CARE” in the manifesto (ibid.). In the proposal for this exhibition she outlines three parts or sections of maintenance “personal, general and Earth Maintenance” (Ledermann Ukeles, 1969). In her discussion of “Earth Maintenance” she addresses the ideas of environmental pollution and care head on, suggesting polluted water, air, soil and the contents of a sanitation truck be delivered to the museum every day to be rehabilitated by herself or scientists (ibid.). It is of note that from the very beginning the ideas of maintenance art and the environment have been intrinsically linked, and that Ukeles expands her feminist critique to address the politics of both class and the environment, issues that cannot be untangled from each other.
In more recent times, as the climate crisis worsens, the calls for “earth maintenance” have come ever stronger from academics, environmental scientists and activists. Among them is Shannon Mattern who at the beginning of her article for Places discusses our cultural obsession with the new and the innovative in way that bares strong similarities with Ukeles’ ‘Death Instinct’. Throughout the article she discusses the necessity for maintenance to be given greater priority in an era where infrastructure seems to be crumbling more rapidly than ever, and there is ever increasing pressure from certain Silicon Valley-minded quarters to simply replace the old and uncared for with newer, shiner, more expensive versions of what essentially amounts to the same thing (or in some cases, an even worse version of what came before) : “Some people will even tell you that it’s okay if the Carnegie- and Roosevelt-era foundations of America crumble. Rather than fix the systems we have, we can stand by for the imminent rollout of autonomous vehicles and blockchain-based services” (Mattern, 2018). Mattern discusses not just the act of repairing itself but the communal and societal bonds that form around these actions and how that in and of itself can result in the repair of community and societal bonds (ibid.), something that is just as important to forging a more sustainable future as the physical act of repairing the environment.
The parallels between how governments have treated societal maintenance and how they have treated the climate crisis are evident to any who would look. From arguments about which arm of government is responsible for the maintenance of the New York City Subway System in the US (Mattern, 2018), to the almost laughable amount of time spent by various Irish political and governmental bodies discussing and deliberating Dublin’s proposed Metrolink, the consultation period for which has been extended into 2023 despite being included in Government planning strategy in 2000 (Kelly, 2022), the maintaining and caring for physical, social and to a perhaps lesser extent, digital infrastructure is something that sits at the bottom of most governments’ lists of priorities. These tactics of delay and deferral can also be seen in government responses, particularly governments in the global north, when faced with the heavy task of restructuring economies and infrastructure to deal with the climate crisis. The website climateactiontracker.org, which rates countries on a spectrum of government targets and actions, currently recognises no country as in keeping with the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement and recognises only six as being in the nest best category of “almost sufficient” (Climate Analytics, 2022) and in a report by Systems Change Lab published this year none of the 40 indicators of progress that were analysed were on track to meet that same 1.5°C target (Boehm, et al., 2022). This report is at pains to underline that there is a path forward to achieving these targets but is one that is ever narrowing and that has made much more difficult by the delay in implementing solutions and the cascading effects of climate change (ibid.). When state agencies and governments lack any desire to care for and maintain crumbling systems and infrastructures it should come as no surprise that they are similarly ineffectual in acting to maintain the health of the planet.
The other strong parallel between our crisis of maintenance and our crisis of the environment is between those who perform maintenance (and those who are worst affected by the lack of it) and those who stand to be worst affected by climate change and our varied other environmental issues (and are therefore most invested in solving them). The youth climate group Fridays for Future have adopted the term ‘MAPA’, standing for Most Affected People and Areas, to describe the groups who have historically and will likely continue to face the worst of the climate crisis; people of colour, low-income people, people who live in the global south (Fortgang, 2021). The identification of some people being worse affected by environmental issues is not unique to Fridays for Future, the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on their website “The most vulnerable groups, including children, the elderly, people with preexisting health conditions, outdoor workers, people of color, and people with low income, are at an even higher risk because of the compounding factors from climate change.” (Anon., 2021), while the charity Concern lists the top ten countries most affected by climate change as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan (Anon., 2022). It is no coincidence that these same groups of people both perform more than their proportional share of maintenance work and are worse affected when those systems of maintenance break down or falter. Mattern and Ukeles both reference these demographic breakdowns of who performs care: “We can learn from feminist critiques of the politics of care (particularly the reliance on poorly paid immigrants and people of color) and look to maintenance practices outside the Western world” (Mattern, 2018), the undervaluing of the people who perform care and maintenance (think housekeepers, sanitation workers, farm labourers, nurses, carers, cleaners…) is intrinsically linked to how we view the work of maintenance. Maintenance is so often an afterthought, something unappreciated or a distasteful necessity where newer, innovative versions are not in reach to serve as a replacement. It should come as no surprise then, that we have reserved the labour of maintenance primarily for the people who society undervalues, those who we have also volunteered to be the first to face the damage of climate change, pollution and catastrophic weather events.
If the lack of impetus by governments to act to fund and make the necessary repairs to our crumbling infrastructures and ecologies is driven by both the societal undervaluing of maintenance as opposed to innovation, an undervaluing of the benefits this maintenance provides and a lack of appreciation for the damage the breakdown of this systems does then perhaps the solution is to fundamentally alter the role and value we place on maintenance in our society. This is essentially what maintenance art proposes “Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Ledermann Ukeles, 1969). Ukeles’ first works after writing her manifesto focused on the maintenance she herself performed, but one that perhaps better illustrates how the concept outlined here can feed into an environmentalist outlook is “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,” in which she spent five weeks approaching one maintenance worker every day, photographing them and asking them to classify what they were doing as either art or work (Steinhauer, 2017), this ability to claim labour as art is a powerful one, especially when that claim is platformed by a venerated institution such as a museum or gallery. Ukeles clearly recognises her power as an artist (and one recognised by mainstream institutions at that) , and she uses that power to uplift these maintenance workers (and the maintenance they perform: “she used herself as a conduit, giving the maintenance workers access to an artistic authority that she had outlined in her manifesto: the act of naming.” (Steinhauer, 2017). This power to turn the undervalued labour of maintenance into art is something that Ukeles continues to explore, particularly in her role as the artist in residence of New York City’s Sanitation Department (DSNY), this role and in particular “Touch Sanitation Performance”, the first project she undertakes in the role, only expand on the ideas expressed in “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,”. The piece in which she shakes the hand of every single one of New York’s 8,500 ‘sanmen’, is remarkable both in scale and for the boundaries between gender, class and race that Ukeles manages to cross (Steinhauer, 2017).
The piece stops short of overt political commentary (despite having an undeniably political message, as does all the work discussed throughout this essay) and this is where the flaws in some of Ukeles’ work lies; she does not push the critiques expressed in “Manifesto for Maintenance Art!” far enough in the actual work produced, despite the radical nature of her manifesto. Mostafa Heddaya critiques Ukeles’ lack of engagement with the idea that as artist in residence for DSNY she herself is a participant in the same institutions that devalue the labour that she wishes to elevate (Heddaya, 2016), though that makes it is a particular irony that the position of artist in residence for DSNY that she held was an entirely unpaid one. This is an important critique to acknowledge and it underscores some of the complexities of maintenance art as a practice; there is a careful balancing act to be struck between using ones position in the art world and within the powerful institutions that position allows access to and not allowing those same institutions to corrupt, censor or infiltrate ones practice. Heddaya cites one particular instance in his article that illustrates the complications that come with working with hegemonic institutions while also trying to critique their practices,
“The strictures that Ukeles functioned under emerge forcefully in a gallery devoted to the 1984 “Touch Sanitation Project” show, where a list of “defamatory names and phrases” that sanmen submitted to Ukeles is displayed, its redactions by municipal administrators prior to the exhibition—particularly of racial epithets—demonstrating that DSNY was invested in managing the way that their artist-in-residence aired the grievances of their employees. The retroactive disclosure of this censorship in the space of the museum is at odds with the notion that, at least at the time of the “Touch Sanitation Project” show, the relationship between the work’s production and reception could be reciprocal rather than instrumental (Heddaya, 2016).”
This incident, while indicative the problems faced when working with powerful public institutions (and the problems of the institutional critique as a whole) may also expose why work such as Ukeles’ is necessary. That DSNY administrators felt the need to censor the exhibition clearly illustrates the poor relationship between the ‘sanmen’ and DSNY management, and more broadly between those who carry out maintenance and those who are in charge of funding and managing it. Another striking parallel to our contemporary climate crisis.
I will conclude by discussing what I believe is the piece of Ukeles’ work that best illustrates how maintenance art can be used to address contemporary issues around the environment directly, her work on the landfill site Fresh Kills in Staten Island. This project, which is still ongoing, is part of the regeneration of the Fresh Kills site into a public park. Ukeles was appointed the artist for the site in 1992 when it was still an active landfill to help develop a plan for the closure and repair of the site with help from a design team, after some bureaucratic back-and-forth, the landfill was scheduled to close in 2001 without the design team ever being formed (Lederman Ukeles, 2002). Seemingly undeterred, Ukeles continues research and attempt to understand the complexities of the site, even when this is complicated by its temporary reopening to sort debris from the 9/11 attacks, an issue that Ukeles openly wrestles with in her article for Cabinet Magazine (ibid.). Nonetheless, by the time of Ukeles’ 2017 retrospective exhibit she has created approved drawings and sculptural models for ‘Landing’, the sculptural earthwork piece she has developed for the site. Steinhauer cites this piece as a fulfilment of the “Earth Maintenance” part of Ukeles’ manifesto, using maintenance art to radically transform and repair that which has been allowed to fall into decay (Steinhauer, 2017). ‘Landing’, which is still in production today, is designed not only to help maintain the land it was built on but to help people to experience that land in various ways, and is very deliberately designed to be as accessible to the public as possible (Duncan & Hatton, 2022). In this work Ukeles captures what maintenance can do for society, what maintenance art can do for the earth and how elevating these fields of caring for and repairing what we already have can be transformative to how the land and systems around us.
In closing, if we accept that a fundamental part of solving our ongoing environmental catastrophes is a sharp reorientation of the way we, as a society, view the importance of maintenance and those who carry it out, as I have outlined above, then maintenance art offers a tool to help with that very reorientation. If we accept that the dominance of innovation as the main way of thinking about our future is both damaging in an environmental sense and in a human, social sense then we must call for the equal status of maintenance and of maintainers. This is what Ukeles calls for in her manifesto, and while she might not yet have achieved it, the works I have examined here show the beginnings of a way forward, a future where maintaining the world around is prioritised over the shiny newness and promised wealth of innovation and where maintenance “The Life Instinct” whether it is private or public is an art, whether or not it exists in a gallery.
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