The next manifesto is Mierle Ukeles ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ (1969).
This text is in the ebook and available on several sites online: https://feldmangallery.com/exhibition/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969
This manifesto is an example of how both a thesis and anti-thesis combine into a new synthesis.
This new synthesis redraws the boundaries between for/against something or negation/affirmation; art/life and art/death; artist/housewife; public/private, creativity/maintenance: and creates a new category for art practice called “maintenance art”.
In this part of the lesson, we still need to consider:-
What does this manifesto negate?
What does this manifesto affirm?
How are these two tendencies – negation and affirmation – resolved into a new kind of synthesis?
There are other ways of considering the content of this manifesto:-
1. As exemplary of the approach of the artist, Mierle Ukeles and her developing idea of “maintenance art”, present in a cycle of works 1969-1979 and as a feminist statement because it challenges and changes expectations for women as artists.
2. As a manifesto which looks at the maintenance work women do both in the family and in public life in a new way as a feminist re-evaluation of domestic work in terms of labour and “care” or as allied to other feminist campaigns to change understanding of what women do socially and economically in society– i.e. “Wages for Housework”, campaigns for rights for women cleaners and domestic workers.
3. In relation to other conceptual artists and their manifestos/artists’ statements of this period in New York in the late 1960s.
4. In relation to psychoanalysis and politics in Herbert Marcuse and Sigmund Freud.
Who is Mierle Ukeles?
Mierle Ukeles is an artist working in New York since the late 1960s until the present day. She is often identified as the unofficial, and then Official, artist-in-residence for the New York City Sanitation Department and has been working with them since the late 1970s. She has an extensive career working on environmental projects, particularly the question of how New York disposes and recycles its waste during and after urban collections and in landfill/recycling stations, with a particular focus on how it regards those who perform this maintenance work across the city. Most recently she has been working on a long-term project on Staten Island where New York’s long-established waste disposal landfill site is being reclaimed and redeveloped as a public park.
If we see this manifesto only as the philosophy of one artist and written only for the purpose of one exhibition, will we miss something about its general importance? Namely the way it marks a shift in the relationship between art/life, between conceptual idea and artistic action by many women artists interested in performance and conceptual art in the late 1960s.
To introduce more ideas about the artist and her practices, here are two overviews of her work, one contemporary, the other historical:-
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a Seeing America video.
See also http://www.arte-util.org/projects/4-actions-of-maintenance-art/
This is one of 3 performances made in 1973 at the same museum: ‘Washing Piece’, ‘Cleaning of the Mummy Case’, ‘Keeping of the Keys’.
This manifesto, written in 1969, was produced at the beginning of her career. This manifesto is often linked to works she produced over ten years in the 1970s, especially those which focused on washing, cleaning and maintenance actions in art museums and offices. In the manifesto she contrasts artistic (male modernist avant-garde) development of art with the routine maintenance of the home/family by women. It was written after she became a mother.
‘The culmination of research and introspection since the birth of her first child, it remains a seminal document that has influenced the content and direction of her work for twenty-five years. In this brief incisive text, Ukeles challenged the modernist myth with its dualistic assumptions privileging linear progress over the repetitive tasks required to maintain people, places, cities, and environments. In art, for Ukeles and many women artists, this dichotomy privileged the disputable notion of pure creation over an organic, co-operative and renewable concept of aesthetic work.’
Patricia C. Phillips ‘Maintenance Activity: Creating a Climate for Change’ in Nina Felshin (ed) But is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995)
‘Development corresponds largely with Modernist notions of progress and individuality, while maintenance, on the other hand, is the realm of human activities that keep things going – cooking, cleaning, shopping, child-rearing and so forth. In this manifesto she proposed living in the museum and performing her maintenance activities. While the gallery might look ‘empty’, she explained, her labour would in fact be the ‘work’.
Helen Molesworth ‘Cleaning up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ in Michael Newman and Jon Bird (eds) Rewriting_Conceptual_Art (1999)
Molesworth in the quote above argues that Ukeles’ ideas defining a new type of art, “maintenance art”, focus our attention on how society supports distinctions between public and private life, but the “maintenance art” she produced attempts to subvert this as what had been considered private work (maintenance in the home) has now become public (art/performance). Work has a double meaning here: actual labour/physical effort and artwork as performance, not artefact.
Can we see Ukeles manifesto as linked to other ideas in the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s, especially a feminist understanding of how the ‘personal is political’?
You might want to read a famous essay from 1969 by Carol Hanisch on ‘The Personal is Political’. Available from her http:// website (Some security programs may block this as it is http: and not https: protocol)
How is ‘Maintenance Art’ related to other feminist initiatives to rethink women’s domestic / waged labour from the 1970s?
‘Feminist maintenance and duration performances were a strategy to make women’s labor visible, and to foreground issues of working conditions, the gender division of labor, unpaid labor, and agency in women’s domestic work and lives’
Faith Wilding ‘Durational Performance: The Economy of Maintenance Art‘ (c.1998) in Marion Von Osten (ed) Norm Der Abweichung (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003).
In this essay, Faith Wilding links the idea of maintenance art to the work shown in Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s project in 1972, Womanhouse, where a group of women students, studying with Chicago and Schapiro, built installations about women’s lives and experiences in an empty house and used it as a site for performances and discussions. For an overview, read this magazine article in Wide Walls
If you want to see documentation of this work, please follow the link to Womanhouse where you can read the catalogue essay. Images of the work appear in Judy Chicago’s book Through the Flower (1975) and Norma Broude and Mary Garrard’s The Power of Feminist Art (1994).
‘The performances created for Womanhouse also centered around domestic gender roles and women’s maintenance labor, such as scrubbing, ironing, dishwashing, applying make-up. These performances introduced the duration maintenance performance–the actual performance of a domestic task such as ironing a sheet, scrubbing a floor, etc. that lasts as long as the real-life task–thus compelling the audience to experience the real-time tedium of women’s maintenance work. The psychological experience of women’s domestic service was addressed in Faith Wilding’s “Waiting” performance, which condensed a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive monologue; her maintenance task is one of endlessly providing female reproduction and family service that erases all traces of her own agency.’
Faith Wilding ‘Durational Performance: The Economy of Maintenance Art‘ (c.1998) in Marion Von Osten (ed) Norm Der Abweichung (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003).
Another point of comparison can be found in the fictional character, Edda, in Helke Sander’s film, Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (1978)/ The All-Around Reduced Personality: Outtakes. Edda is a mother, photographer and active feminist trying to live and work through the contradictions of transforming her everyday life and situation as an autonomous independent artist in numerous free-lance roles. This film is discussed by Marion von Osten, where she focuses on how women’s labour in care and reproduction is socially marked by being considered a “REDUced PERson” when it comes to productive labour:-
The reflective, connection-forming, and knowledge-producing form of work sketched out here also points to a change in society through which new claims to activity, collectivity, and property can be negotiated.
The protagonist is not only photographer, feminist activist, and theorist, that is, cultural producer, but also a product of emancipatory demands and capitalist impositions, a subject who has pulled away from wage labor and its regulatory apparatus in the factory or in the office, as the Autonomia Operaia called for. At the same time, she is a Reduper (an all-around REDUced PERson)—a figure who cannot be located biographically, and instead requires a new form of subjectivity to be realized in the contradictions of capitalist socialization. In this way, Redupers marks the post-Fordist convergence of work relationships, subjectivity, desires, and political demands that has consequently brought about a multitude of all-around reduced personalities.
Marion von Osten ‘Irene ist Viele! Or What We Call “Productive” Forces’ e-flux Journal #08 September 2009
In this 2 minute extract from a 98 minute film, you will get some sense of the plot.
‘Edda Chiemnyjewski, a freelance press photographer and single mother living in 1970s West Berlin, is confronted with the fact that “a cook has no time for affairs of state”. She also fails to find a market for the project she has been working on with her women′s photography group that seeks to document the city. While from today′s perspective the city, which becomes one of the film′s protagonists, looks like post-war Berlin, little has actually changed as regards the precarious existence of free-lancers. With a heavy dose of self-irony Helke Sander, who also plays the leading role, tells of a divided life in a divided city.’
THE ALL-AROUND REDUCED PERSONALITY (Helke Sander, 1979) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.
How do you see the relationship between Mierle Ukele’s projects of the time, Womanhouse and Helke Sander’s film? Add your comments to the forum.
Marina Vishmidt links Mierle Ukeles’ manifesto directly with another well-known campaign for a change in women’s dominant position in low-paid or non-waged work in most economies around the world: the Wages for housework movement. It is this contradiction in the “double burden” of women’s work in their family and in the waged labour market that Ukeles’ manifesto highlights, but Ukeles finds an imaginative way to relink, contradict and challenge this through a focus on her life as art in the concept of ‘maintenance art’.
Ukeles may have spoofed the transcendent universality of the (male) artistic subject by proposing housework as art, but her targets were more extensive and, like the Italian feminists, these targets included revolutionary politics….
Can the labour that socially exists as the unacknowledged maintainance activity that goes on beneath and after work stoppages and revolutionary rupture (‘the sourball of every revolution, who will clean up?’) also be suspended? And how would we envision the intensity and complexity of the challenge to established social relations introduced by a break in the continuity of care that precisely makes both alienated labour and its refusal possible?Marina Vishmidt ‘The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s’ Third Text 2017 vol 31, no 1. pp.49-66
Feminism has been engaged for a long time in rejecting ideas of a fixed identity for either men or women based in biology, while insisting that all conceptions of identity (binary or not) and all forms of identity are social, historical and subject to change. The separation of male artist and female housewife (from Ukeles, Lesson 1) is just one example of how social roles have been naturalised as biological ones in a polarised sex/gender distinction about art and work. The abolition of this kind of distinction, recognised as a form of discrimination (and a form of repression/oppression for women and men) remains a key feminist demand.
More on thinking about public and private spheres and domestic labour
The 19th century romanticised the home (for all classes) as a place of respite away from the public sphere of work, a place where “leisure” or “conspicuous consumption” predominated in middle and upper-class homes, and the labour of (working class) men and women as servants in the maintenance or support for this remained hidden. The home was technically a place of rest for working class people, but it was often a workplace as well, over-crowded or without basic amenities.
The domestic, as a word for a term/concept, refers to many things: it may be the downgraded idea of unpaid or unwaged work performed in the home (most often by wives or mothers, known as housewives) but it is also a synonym for those people employed as domestic workers on low wages or as “live-in” help. Domestic, in this sense, has been widely used throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to refer to both women’s unpaid work for their family at home and the waged workers who work for middle-and upper-class households – usually the single maid, cleaner, cook or housekeeper (all typically female roles). Domestic also refers to how things are organised at home as an arrangement or state of affairs and in this sense is expanded to mean in one’s country – as in the term ‘domestic politics’. It does not refer exclusively to women in these meanings.
The interaction between the public and the private spheres of contemporary life is no longer that of the 19th century where the public sphere of art, commerce and politics was regarded as separate from the private sphere of home and family. The idea of two separate spheres was gendered and class-based and offered distinct roles for men and women. The distinction was drawn between these two spheres (as a middle-class separation) in terms of waged and unwaged economies, where the home is no longer seen as “productive” to the economy.
Art was regarded as part of the public sphere, even though it was often produced “at home”, because this was the setting of many studios. The artist, especially bohemian ones, was not seen as “working”, like a waged/salaried worker. Artists in this sense were equivalent in the labour market to many other independent manufacturers, artisans and craft-producers, where they were not employed in a trade. They were self-employed and self-made, and it is worth remembering that many were supported by private income or patronage (in the 19th century). This separation of spheres and assumptions about “place” in a social system points to why working-class artists were few and far between, since to be an artist meant entering or interacting with the middle-classes as an “artist”, an independent manufacturer of goods. While there were associations, societies, Academies or unions, and independent exhibitions started to take place, artists started to question their place in this social system. Increasingly they presented themselves as outsiders to society, drawn to their vocation by their own skills and desire, and “unconventional” or “non-conformist” by comparison with working-class trades or middle-class professions.
The modern economy continues many aspects of this capitalist system developed during and after the industrial revolution and remains dependent on the support of the domestic sphere for the care and reproduction of its workers. In a labour market where men still predominate in the most highly-paid professions and there is still segregation of the labour market in terms of male-dominated and female-dominated occupations or segments of professions/trades/types of work, the relative position of women still has to be considered as a gendered question. The situation of women, when it was considered, used to be called “the women question” and many gendered analyses of the labour market today still regard women as a “surplus” labour force, not a central part of the economy, and so discuss women’s proper or major role purely in terms of responsibility for family/ home or in caring and maintenance work.
This discussion of the reserve army of women’s labour for a waged economic sphere also arises in Donna Haraway’s writing:-
To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that makes a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.
Donna Haraway A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985)
Where is art in today’s economies? Artists are still seen as self-employed entrepreneurs and small studio owners or micro-businesses, even when they work on a commission or produce piece-work for a known market (in either arts or crafts). Rarely are artists seen as waged labourers, even when they work as studio assistants (under the direction of an artist or in their studio for a weekly wage or salary). Much social care, domestic labour, and maintenance work performed by people (largely women, globally) continues to support the world of work, although there are many forms of unpaid (or underpaid labour) in waged/non-waged affective labour: assistants, interns, technicians, outsourced labour and part-time paid employees who support the cultural industries.
Non-waged (or low-waged) caring labour is not just confined to questions of housewives, mothers and carers. In today’s networked economy, working from home or at home, in micro-businesses or on casual/(zero-hours) contracts is not a rarity, but someone still has to feed the kids, take care of the elderly, pay the bills, clean the clothes and wash the dishes.
The question of class has not gone away: people on different incomes organise these caring/domestic/social activities differently, as do men and women between themselves.
Can artists really claim to be workers in a market?
Are women artists, the reserve army of labour, in the art market?
Is it useful, necessary or productive to only associate women artists with the domestic sphere?
Or continue to present women artists, only as housewives?
Is the work of women artists, socially differentiated, because it is neither exclusively “affective labour”, nor “economically-driven waged work”?
How are the manifestos of Selma James linked to Mierle Ukeles?
One important text on the Wages for Housework campaign, its principles and approach can be found in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James ‘The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community‘ (1972) or here http://www.bolshevik.org/history/women/Dalla_Costa_James.pdf.
In these texts, it is the working-class housewife whose position is central to their analysis of class and capital. They define “housewife” as a “caste”, whether or not a woman works outside the home, and as central to the “woman question”, i.e. the problem of women seen only as a reserve army of labour in capitalism, to be employed in times of boom and laid off in times of recession.
‘The role of the working class housewife, which we believe has been indispensable to capitalist production, is the determinant for the position of all other women. Every analysis of women as a caste, then, must proceed from the analysis of the position of working class house-wives.’
Selma James early text (1973) Sex-Race-Class is one of the foundational anti-racist statements for the International Wages for Housework campaign. The labour of working-class women is a reserve army of labour for capitalism but they are also central to the social reproduction of labour itself, as housewives and rearing children to be the next generation of workers. Racism, sexism and class are intertwined in this system of exploitation of women’s labour and this is why there is a joint interest between Black liberation and women’s liberation in her writing.
‘Our identity, our social roles, the way we are seen, appears to be disconnected from our capitalist functions. To be liberated from them (or through them) appears to be independent from our liberation from capitalist wage slavery. In my view, identity-caste is the very substance of class.’
Selma James’ work campaigning over many years continues today. Her later text ‘Women and Work’ (2012) reinforces the argument in global terms: where women need to transform themselves from victims of the situation in which they find themselves and learn to re-appropriate that system by exercising their rights: http://www.reimaginerpe.org/files/19-2.james_.pdf
How do you see the connection between Ukeles manifesto on maintenance art and the role of women as housewives in today’s global economies?
How do you see the reversal that her manifesto performs in relation to the artist’s role as “free labour” and her decision to turn the everyday tasks of maintenance labour into art?
How is this manifesto related to other conceptual artist’s manifestos / artists’ statements ?
Mierle Ukeles’ manifesto and her artworks are linked to conceptual art. In this part, let us consider how they are linked.
‘Conceptual art as “ideas in the air” – is also “the spontaneous appearance of similar work totally unknown to the artists that can be explained only as energy generated by [well-known, common] sources and by the wholly unrelated art against which all the potentially “conceptual” artists were commonly reacting’
Lucy Lippard in introduction to Six Years: The Dematerialization of Art (2nd edition)
In 1967, John Chandler and Lucy Lippard in their essay ‘The Dematerialisation of Art’ (Art International, Feb 1968) signalled two directions for ultra-conceptual art: 1) art as idea and 2) art as action. Mierle Ukeles’ art is both action and idea. It is both Conceptual art with a capital c – in which ‘ideal is paramount’ and it is also a form of art where its ‘material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or “dematerialized”. (Lucy Lippard).
Ukeles was included in the fourth exhibition in Lucy Lippard’s number’s series “c.7,500’, a touring exhibition (seven venues) which began at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, 1973. Her work was shown amongst that of Renate Altenrath, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Jacki Apple, Alice Aycock, Jennifer Bartlett, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Doree Dunlap, Nany Holt, Polly Johnson, Nancy Kitchel, Christine Kozlov, Suzanne Kuffler, Pat Lasch, Bernadette Mayer, Christian Mobus, Rita Myers, Renee Nahim, N.E. Thing co., Ulrike Nolden, Adrian Piper, Judith Stein, Athena Tacha and Martha Wilson. You can find images of this show online at:
https://walkerart.org/magazine/lucy-lippard-six-years-7500-walker-art-center
or listen to Leslie Dick present her encounter with “c. 7,500”, an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard, when it travelled to London. This talk was part of the Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Symposium, a student-organized project at CalArts on March 10, 2007.
This list of names is a reminder that there were many women artists in conceptual art, in spite of its largely masculine presentation in most text books on conceptual art. Lee Lozano, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Suzanne Lacy, Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Lorna Simpson may be more familiar to you, but what about Linda Montano or Lynn Hershman Leeson? Conceptual art was also international: quickly establishing a presence in many other countries: UK, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, Argentina, and former Yugoslavia.
Lippard’s definition of women artists’ subjects and approaches is important: ‘narrative, role-playing, guise and disguise, body and beauty issues; a focus on fragmentation, interrelationships, autobiography, performance, daily life, and of course, on feminist politics.’
Her work on the questions of feminist activism and how politics is present in art is extensive and can be found in several anthologies of her writing e.g. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art and Get the Message.
You can find several manifestos related to conceptual art, including Ukeles, in A. Alberro’s et al Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT, 1999), http://lignesdiagonales.fr/conceptual.pdf
Joseph Kosuth, concluded his manifesto “Art After Philosophy” (Studio International, October 1969) with his statement:
“Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art.”
or, for example,
‘9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the components. Ideas implement the concept.’
Sol Lewitt’s ‘Sentences on conceptual art’
‘1. By meta-art I mean the activity of making explicit the thought processes, procedures, and presuppositions of making whatever kind of art we make…..2. Meta-art is generically related to art, art activity, and being an artist. The impulse to meta-art is unfathomable in the way the impulse to art is; meta-art is unique in just the way art-making activity is, and form the same reasons; its subject matter is, like both of these, immediately accessible to artists.’
Adrian Piper ‘In support of Meta-Art’
How do you see Ukeles work as conceptual art?
It would be helpful here to consider her maintenance actions and the presentation of these performances in image/text formats as documentation in exhibitions.
Do you see a link between the ideas in Ukeles’ manifesto and those of Piper, Kosuth or Lewitt?
How do her ideas relate to the writings of Freud and Marcuse?
The opening lines of this manifesto indicate Ukeles’ awareness of both Freud and Marcuse’s writing and the circulation of their ideas as a means to explore human instincts (towards both death/life, destruction/creation). This would be another way to consider or analyse this manifesto, especially its ideas of repression/liberation in psychoanalytic/psycho-social-cultural terms.
Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) is a response to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1961]). Both books explore how humanity is characterised by the struggle between instincts towards life (Eros) or towards death (Thanatos).
The struggle between death and life instincts forms the first paragraph of Mierle Ukeles manifesto and this is a central part of Freud and Marcuse’s work on how civilisations function. Unlike Freud and Marcuse, however, she aligns death with the emptiness of the male avantgarde’s production and life with maintenance work and the labour of social reproduction, which has fallen largely to women. So, underlying Ukeles’ arguments is a feminist interpretation of Marcuse’s ideas about liberation and the pleasure principle.
Ukeles points to the divorce between artistic production and maintenance work – indicating how they are regarded as separate in society. In order to liberate herself from these conventions, she argues, she will now combine them, bring life to art, and art in a new relationship to life. The idea of liberation from the status quo is what matters here.
Marcuse argues that society is structured according to two principles: pleasure and performance. The manifesto shows her awareness of Freud and Marcuse’s ideas of repression in/by/through the performance principle and their understandings of the meaning of liberation which is secured by escaping all unquestioned conformity to them.
Marcuse argued that repression / conformity to social norms and expectations took two forms: basic and surplus. Conformity to social norms was central to the performance principle, the willing submission of people to social expectations and norms, and it required repression of the pleasure principle because in this repression, gratification of desires was controlled or deferred.
Both writers are exploring how these instincts are controlled, and what happens when they are given free reign or repressed in order to “construct” civilisation or “Western capitalist society”. This quote, from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summarises the arguments explored:
Freud’s book paints a bleak picture of the evolution of civilization as the evolution of greater and greater repression from which there seems to be no escape. The death and life instincts are engaged in a battle for dominance with no clear winner in sight. According to Marcuse, Freud fails to develop the emancipatory possibility of his own theory. Marcuse’s task is two-fold. First, he must show that human instincts or drives are not merely biological and fixed, but rather, are social, historical, and malleable. Secondly, he must show that the repressive society also produces the possibility of the abolition of repression
(Marcuse Eros and Civilisation 1955: 5).
A key part of Marcuse’s work was to explain how and why people in society are willing to accept their own domination and repression, choosing to live as “one-dimensional” beings in conformity to social expectations and roles. As a result, he focuses on how the possibilities for liberation within capitalist societies exist simultaneously within what are generally regarded as the mechanisms of domination (the activities organised by the state, the army, the police, prisons, schools, social, health and welfare policy around the family).
‘The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposes a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social labor now reproduces society on a large scale and under improving conditions. For a long way, the interests of domination and the interests of the whole coincide: the profitable utilization of the productive apparatus fulfills the needs and faculties of individuals. For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfil their own needs and faculties but work in alienation.’ (Marcuse Eros and Civilization 1955: 45)
Mierle Ukeles’ work is about overcoming many different aspects of alienation:
the alienation of manual maintenance work as “non-productive”;
the alienation of cleaning and routine tasks which underline “civilisation”;
the ways in which refuse and recycling function within cities are hidden but essential part of the maintenance work we all rely upon;
the alienation of women artists from notions of a male heroic avantgarde;
the idea that art serves art and not life, and that we need new relations between life/art to overcome the alienation of art.
Marcuse was significantly the only member of the Frankfurt School of Philosophers to write positively about feminism in his ideas of liberation, e.g. his paper “Marxism and Feminism”, Stanford University, March 7, 1974. (Feminism, as well as Marxist feminism, was present in the 1920s and 1930s when the majority of the group was working, but it was not discussed in many of the key works of critical theory). Angela Davis was one of his former students in the US in the 1960s. Davis defined Marcuse’s legacy as:
‘encouraging intellectuals to speak out against racism, against the Vietnam War, for student rights. He emphasised the important role of intellectuals within oppositional movements, which, I believe, led more intellectuals to frame their work in relation to these movements than would otherwise have done so. And Marcuse’s thought revealed how deeply he himself was influenced by the movements of his time and how his engagement with those movements revitalised his thought.’ (Stuart Jeffries ‘The Effect of the Whip: the Frankfurt School and the Oppression of Women‘ (2017)).
Marcuse’s study of a one-dimensional society fuelled Nina Power’s feminist tract, One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books, 2009) into the rhetoric of consumerism as liberation/liberating (even around feminisms) in representations of women in contemporary society, which you might like to read.
‘The ‘one-dimensional man’ of Marcuse’s title is fully immersed in the promissory world of liberal democracy and consumerism and yet ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls’ (Marcuse). I contend that much of the rhetoric of both consumerism and contemporary feminism is a barrier to any genuine thinking of work, sex and politics that would break with the ‘efficacy of the controls’ that Marcuse identified. What looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles.’ (Nina Power, p.2)
How do you think Ukeles’ manifesto speaks about the liberation of women?
Does she see women’s work in her concept of “maintenance art” as artistic freedom or as a liberation from the performance principle?
Go to Lesson 2
This first lesson considers the following manifestos:-
Yvonne Rainer
‘No Manifesto’ (1965) and A Manifesto Reconsidered (2008)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Yes Manifesto (2004)
_____________________________________________________
100 anti-theses on cyberfeminism (1997)
_____________________________________________________
‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969:
Proposal for an exhibition “CARE”’
Who wrote these manifestos?
Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, author in the USA.
Mette Ingvartsen is a choreographer and performance artist in Sweden.
Old Boys Network began in 1997 with artists Susanne Ackers, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Vali Djordjevic, Julianne Pierce.
Mierle Ladermann Ukeles is an artist in the USA.
