Meet the artist who called out a museum by scrubbing the floor for hours
Mierle Laderman Ukeles showed maintenance staff are just as important as curators
On July 22nd, 1973, visitors to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Connecticut, encountered an unusual sight: the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, armed with buckets of water and cleaning supplies, washing the staircase at the museum’s entrance. Later that afternoon, she moved inside, using diapers in lieu of rags to scrub the marble floors on her hands and knees, buffing away visitors’ footprints as they walked by.
Carried out over the course of eight hours, corresponding to the typical span of a work day, Ukeles’s performances, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance — Outside and Inside, respectively, made the invisible labor of maintaining the museum — typically performed by low-paid custodial workers away from the public eye — unavoidably present.
By simply scrubbing — dramatizing the difficult but unheralded work of keeping the museum clean — Ukeles brought debates around feminism, labor, and value directly into the institution.
Ukeles’s Hartford Wash performances belonged to a cycle of four “Maintenance Art Performances” highlighting activities that were essential to the museum’s operations, but rarely acknowledged as such, let alone celebrated. The work of cleaning the museum’s floors belonged to the category of labor Ukeles called “maintenance” — the behind-the-scenes work associated with upkeep and care — as opposed to “development,” the category of work that was publicly recognized as productive and worthy of praise, such as the individual creative efforts of an artist.
The performances were presented as part of “c. 7500,” an exhibition of conceptual art by women artists, organized by the pioneering feminist curator Lucy Lippard. While “c. 7500” was the fourth of Lippard’s “numbers shows” — travelling exhibitions of conceptual art staged at various institutions between 1969 and 1974 — it was the first to focus entirely on female artists; as Lippard noted in her catalogue essay, the exhibition was conceived as a response to claims that “there were no women conceptual artists.” Fittingly, Ukeles’ contributions touched on the connections between the struggle to have women’s work recognized and the undervaluation of “maintenance” in general.
In her 1969 “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” Ukeles identified a blind spot in the history of avant-garde art and culture: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” Prompted by the birth of her first child the previous year, the manifesto considered the relationship between Ukeles’ role as an artist and as a mother, questioning why one form of work — art-making — was considered culturally significant and the other virtually without value. As Ukeles later described, the manifesto was written in “a quiet rage,” a response to the frustration she felt as she attempted to resolve what seemed like irreconcilable positions: upon learning of Ukeles’ pregnancy while she was an MFA student at Pratt, a male sculpture professor announced to the class that she would no longer be able to pursue a career as an artist. “I learned that [Jackson] Pollock, Marcel [Duchamp], and Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers…I fell into a crisis. I didn’t want to be two separate people — the maintenance worker and the free artist — living in one body.”
In the manifesto, Ukeles proclaimed that she would no longer separate the two, challenging the subordinate position assigned to “maintenance.” “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order),” Ukeles wrote. “I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.”
From that point on, Ukeles devoted herself to what she called “Maintenance Art,” creating performances and art projects that highlighted the unseen labor required to keep society functioning. Ukeles’ series Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art (1970–73) involved meticulously documenting the household tasks and routines that consumed the majority of her time — such as folding laundry and bundling up her children to go outside in the winter — and exhibiting the resulting photographs and texts as artworks. Though Marcel Duchamp had never changed diapers, Ukeles drew on the example of his readymades — everyday found objects that he declared to be sculptures, shifting the definition of the modern artwork away from an object made by the artist’s hand to something that the artist decided was art — to recast the domestic work of caring for her family and maintaining their home as an artistic act.
Though strongly informed by the women’s movement, Ukeles’s work not only addressed housework and the domestic sphere, but the broader place of maintenance work within society, with a particular attention to issues involving class and the environment. In her two other “Maintenance Art Performances” at the Wadsworth for “c. 7500,” Ukeles emphasized the hierarchies of labor within museums themselves, not only making the work of lower-status employees like security guards and janitors visible, but asking why their contributions to the museum were considered menial in relation to the work of curators, conservators, and artists. (Along similar lines, Ukeles has regularly collaborated with the New York City Sanitation Department, where she has served as artist-in-residence since 1977; for her performance Touch Sanitation (1979–80), she shook hands with each of the department’s 8,500 workers, personally thanking the for “keeping the city alive.”)
For Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object, Ukeles cleaned the glass display case holding an ancient Egyptian mummy, a task previously assigned to the museum’s custodial staff; by contrast, the mummy, as part of the museum’s collection, was cleaned by trained conservators. However, in claiming the case itself as part of her artwork, Ukeles transformed the status of the object and, by extension, responsibility for its care: though nothing about the case had changed, nor the procedure involved in maintaining it, cleaning the glass would subsequently be the job of the more specialized conservators.
In Keeping of the Keys: Maintenance as Security, Ukeles borrowed a set of keys from the security staff and went through the museum during public hours, locking the doors to each room in the galleries and administrative offices at particular intervals, temporarily trapping the people inside and disrupting the routine flow of movement throughout the building.
With her performances, Ukeles established a crucial link between the concerns of the feminist art movement and those of artists exploring institutional critique, who challenged the idea that the museum was simply a neutral container for universally-recognized masterpieces, instead emphasizing their ideological character. She transformed the activities of the Wadsworth’s custodial and security staff into an artwork, pushing back against the perception that the work of artmaking was inherently more interesting or valuable than the work involved in maintaining it.
The image of the artist on her hands and knees, exhausted from hours of physical labor, reminded viewers that the invisible foundation of every institution — from the private sphere of the family to the public museum — was a maintenance worker cleaning up the mess.
