Art I Like - Mierle Laderman Ukeles

I like the sound of what she's doing, so I tried to fit her into the "land artist" category -- some of her concerns with human systems as they relate to "the earth" just about get there -- but really she's probably better in the "public art" category. (Sometimes we like to have categories.)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an artist addressing the problems that progress creates. Her speciality is garbage. Waste needs maintenance, and she's been doing garbage-related works for decades. Since 1977 she's been (unpaid) resident artist for the New York sanitation department. Touch Sanitation was her first project. According to this article, "She drew attention to the maintenance of urban ecological systems in general and the use of pejorative language to represent "garbage men" in particular. Ukeles traveled sections of New York City to shake the hands of over 8500 sanitation employees or "sanmen" during a year-long performance. She documented her activities on a map, meticulously recording her conversations with the workers. Ukeles documented the workers' private stories, fears, castigations, and public humiliations in an attempt to change some of the negative vernacular words used in the public sphere of society. In this way, Ukeles used her art as an agent of change to challenge conventional language stereotypes."

In 1983 she put mirrors on the garbage trucks that follow along and clean up after parades -"Reclaiming waste materials and waste environments in an effort to create a new relationship with our material world" according to one of the books I was reading this morning.

In 1969 she sat down and wrote a manifesto: Maintenance Art. "If I am the artist, and if I am the boss of my art, then I name Maintenance Art," she said in this interview, 40 years on.

I like the sound of this project too: I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976) was a performance/project exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ukeles collaborated with 300 hundred maintenance staff at a bank in Manhattan. She took Polaroid photographs of men and women doing routine jobs and asked them to discuss their labor as either art or work. Jobs were often discussed by the same person, at different times, in different ways. Later, she exhibited the workers' narrative statements alongside pictures of their daily chores. She asked viewers to challenge the social constructions of aesthetic and cultural values that define what work and art mean.

See more photos of her work here - and this one shows use of recycled "glasphalt" in a park/reclamation project -