Maintenance Art Works at the Arnolfini - Who is it really for?




Touch Sanitation

 



  "I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother, (random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separatly) I 'do' Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art."

These are the opening words to Mierle Laderman Ukeles Maintenance Art Works exhibition at the Arnolfini, Bristol.

In 1969 Ukeles fell out of the art world when she became a mother. In order to combat the oppositions between art and life she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art. It was her re-positioning into art, highlighting the everyday and questioning what is defined as 'work' or a 'role', culminating in a body of performances works.

The exhibition contains documents and photographs that archive the Maintenence performances in a layout that can be described as 'dry', or as though the original intention was for these works to be presented within a book. The experience would be exactly the same, except you could be sitting down instead.     

Presenting an archive in the context of an exhibition needs more effort in preventing a stagnant environment. Two video's of Ukeles most well known performance, Touch Sanitation are presented in an individual manner. Television, headphones, chair, viewer, and in this the impact of the piece as public art is lost. Yes these are videos of a moment in time, a 'one time performance' but this is what remains, therefore the viewing of these videos could have been presented in a more centralised, shared atmosphere.

The aim of touch sanitation was to break down social boundaries and to empower people in the act of change, appreciating those who worked for New York city, doing the jobs people prefer to ignore and leave to others. Although it seems the resulting empowerment lies within Ukeles and her career. What did shaking hands with this woman mean to the workers of the Department of Sanitation? When looking back upon the project she writes:

          "I meet a sanitation worker. I see deep in his eyes what I have come to call the Gates of Acceptance. I see him looking at me, and then I see his gates opening up....We are exploding the old upstairs-downstairs cultural frame together." (Feb 2007) 

She saw meeting new people as a scary, dangerous prospect, as though these people are a different species, staring at her, but then everything turns out okay. She is fine and well treated. Sanitiation workers are people too, who would have thought. It seems that Ukeles entered the project with stereotypical views, placing herself as the 'upstairs' to their 'downstairs' it begs the question who was this really for?   

Memory, Trace and the Archive: Part 1

 

Spellings by my former self

Why do we hold on to objects of our past? Arranging them, documenting them and preserving them as a kind of added memory that serves no real use?

  Many of us store mementos in a dusty box, under the bed, in the loft, squeezing untouched junk into a spare cupboard, then shutting the door, unable to see the light of day for perhaps years. There is an interesting contradiction here between not letting go and shutting away the past, but I will come back to this later.

  The past exists within us and becomes embedded within an associated object or souvenir (and usually have no monetary value). These 'memory objects' are different to other possessions, the have no function, yet they are precious to us. From old school books, cards,tickets and clothes.
  They are evidence to an experience, grounding our existence in today, commemorating the memory of a person or moment that is triggered by the, touch, sight or smell of the object. This fuels the obsessive collating of objects, as we produce our own archives and study them on occasion to seek out what we no longer are, and affirm our presence in our own current consciousness.

    'Time has to split at the same time as it sets out or unrolls itself: it spits in two dissymmetrical jets, one which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past.' 
(Gilles Deluze, 1985:p81) 
                                                                                                             
  We live between several tracks or temporality of awareness, that of retention, perceptual memory and the recollective memory. This split between past and present is fundamental to our understanding of making/recalling memories ' as time flows and each present fades, but it doesn't disappear.'
(Daniel Birnbaum, 2005:p84)

    'Only in brief moments does transformation seem possible, and the change does not concern the past itself but rather our relationship to alterity in all its forms: the past, our own and that of others, and the otherness that exists within ourselves. What is the act of consciousness in question - reminiscence, self analysis, a process of grieving or a paradoxical celebration of that which has been?' 
(Daniel Birnbaum, 2005: p84)

  With commemoration follows mourning, the two go hand in hand, yet simultaneously contradict each other. Within the celebration of the object comes a moment of grief. To commemorate is to serve as a memorial, triggering a reminder of a time, person or a part of ourselves that is no longer is - a presentation of our own mortality, which at times is difficult to face.

  It seems like the elements of memory hold within them continual doubling, mirroring and reflections that forms an intertwined, multidimensional structure in my mind, but how is it held together? how can it be mapped? I am only just beginning to understand all of this. Through beginning this blog I aim to unravel the artistic jargon and explore memory and the archive in contemporary art, along with keeping up to date with artistic practice today. 'I am always in the present and still in the past, and already in the future. I'm always here and elsewhere. I as ego come in between these two modes. I am only in this doubling, and I emerge in this displacement.' (Husserl Ausgabe)