I recently read about Mierle Laderman Ukeles' 'Maintenance Works' in Miwon Kwon's 'One Place After Another'. Kwon's interest was more in Ukeles' use of the gallery space and how cleaning revealed the white cube as an institution with mundane maintenance tasks, where as I was more intrigued by the idea of cleaning as a creative process. As I have been looking at materials that are overlooked, why not processes too? Reading the essays in 'Dirt' also gave me more context and awareness about how deeply rooted our social stigmas are to do with dirt, and how cleaning is ritualised in many ways.
A few things caught my imagination in Ukeles' Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969. Firstly her insistence that maintenance is continuous, ongoing, never ending... I interpret this as a futility, which I have a great interest in. I have never really thought about cleaning as a 'poetic' process, but recent research has made me consider the significance of removing dirt, restoring order and fighting natural processes. Ukeles is right - there is always something to be done because order can never be upheld for long in life. I am reminded of Long and Goldsworthy, indeed the ephemeral nature of there work matches Ukeles' despite the contrast in setting.
"Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art." reminded me of Martin Creed's way of working, although I think Creed is less prescriptive about it. To Creed, every act is a creative act whether he says it is or not, but the way Ukeles phrases it here makes it sound like a choice. The (almost aggressive) tone to her manifesto seems telling of how contemporary and potentially challenging this work was in 1969, but it now feels a little outdated; Creed takes the attitude of her manifesto as assumption and makes work with Ukeles' notion already established. Nevertheless I am drawn to this way of perceiving everyday processes as it reveals a significance and meaning in the mundane. There are elements of her cleaning as 'performance art' that reminds me strongly of ritual, especially as it is fronted by a manifesto that reads in places like a doctrine.
I decided to clean a floorboard as a way of thinking through my ideas about this process as a creative act. I thought about the similarities (of which there were many) and differences (of which there were very few) between cleaning this floorboard and any other process that I use in my art. I often view making as a kind of meditative ritual anyway, as performing a lengthy or repetitive action puts me in a calm and thoughtful mind-set, and there is often a sense of endurance, patience and diligence in these moments. In spite of this there is something about the ritual element to what I was doing, and indeed Ukeles and some performance art in general, that makes me a little ill at ease. I think it might be in the documentation or viewing of the performances - I find something quite odd and perverse about ritual being observed or presented as something to be observed. Although I decided to film myself cleaning, the work would be less uncomfortable for me if there was no viewer at all.
The activity of cleaning one floorboard was not only about the action, but I wanted to explore how cleaning reveals the dirt. One would not realise or pay attention to how dirty the floor is without knowing what it is like when it is clean. I'm not particularly enthused by the results of this experiment. If I were to develop it into a work I would make it more delicate, instead of the minimalist approach of cleaning one whole board. I would clean into the pattern of the wood grain, which would also highlight the pattern of the wood and possibly make people think about the history of the material too.
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