New Mierle Laderman Ukeles Documentary Looks at Art of Unseen Labor

A new documentary about an artist’s decades-long dialogue with New York City government agencies premiered, at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month, at the perfect time. For the past several months, supposed cost-saving measures, courtesy of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, shrunk federal agencies under the guise that workers who process new vaccines, coordinate air traffic, or protect consumers from business fraud waste money. Debates about the childcare costs, building affordable housing, and free buses dominate New York’s current mayoral race. The moment is ripe to reflect on the practice of an artist like Mierle Laderman Ukeles who encouraged city residents to “hear what New York City is like for the people who keep it alive every single day.”

Maintenance Artist, written and directed by Toby Perl Freilich, follows Ukeles as she develops “Maintenance Art,” a term she coined in a 1969 manifesto to describe her new approach to art, or as she put it, “doing everyday things, flushing them up to consciousness, and exhibiting them as art.” As she was raising two children, Ukeles seemed frustrated with daily house tasks (child-rearing, cleaning, cooking) that got in the way of her art-making. Likewise, she wanted to make her presence known in an art world that rendered mothers invisible. The manifesto brought those worlds together. In a contemporary art landscape focused on innovation, genius, and individualism, she asked, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

Telling her story chronologically, Maintenance Artist weaves in key points from Ukeles’s career—dropping out of Pratt, the manifesto, working with conservators and museum staff, interviewing janitorial staff—into moments for succinct analyses of the context that shaped them (second-wave feminist art, the city’s economic crisis, and the rise of conceptual art). The film deftly unpacks themes without letting their weight distract from the film’s main thrust, as it does when it shows her discussing plans for Landing: Cantilevered Overlook (2008), an ongoing installation at the landfill–turned–city park Freshkills in Staten Island. Difficulties securing institutional funding for the Percent for Art commission coupled with red tape from city bureaucracy have kept the work from being realized. As the artist sorts through documentation for Landing to determine what to send to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, which holds her papers, the exhaustion and frustration show clearly on her face. But central to it all is Ukeles at work, from cleaning the sidewalk, to talking to or shaking hands with maintenance workers, to worrying about funding.

Freilich keeps the editorializing to a minimum while still managing to expose the unconscious bias that operates within the systems that Ukeles works. The film zooms in, for example, on Ukeles’s time as an artist in residence with the NYC Department of Sanitation workers in the late ’70s and early ’80s. For her seminal Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), the artist documented her interactions with some 8,500 DSNY employees, or “sanmen,” across the five boroughs, as she shook their hands, interviewed them, and simply observed them. The groundbreaking partnership between an artist and a city agency helped to raise public sentiment and budgets for DSNY. But Ukeles’s footage from that era reveals the crux of her feminist concerns with the project. A veteran, explaining why DSNY staff feel undervalued, says that city residents don’t respect their work because “they think that we’re here to clean up their messes.” Debriefing that moment for the documentary, Ukeles points out the tension. She says, “If they were women would it be okay to hate them?”

But Maintenance Artist features mostly footage from Ukeles’s own archive and the artist’s narration. Freilich wanted to highlight the overlooked artist making ecofeminist, public art decades before it was popular after seeing Ukeles’s Queens Museum career retrospective in 2016. Staying so close to the artist’s point of voice means there are only a few moments that describe the impact of her work. Her collaborators at DSNY, the gallery representing her, and her family share their experiences with the artist at the time, but few interviews interrogate the work beyond its immediate impact.

The omission becomes evident at the end, where you would expect to see comments from contemporary artists or art administrators whom Ukeles inspired, either directly or indirectly. There would be no shortage of artists or administrators to pull. Ukeles’s unpaid work has grown into funded city programs such as NYC’s Public Artist in Residence program, established in 2015 during interviewee Tom Finkelpearl’s time as commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, or Los Angeles’s Creative Catalyst programs, which now intentionally pair artists with city agencies. The documentary also seems to ignore the abundance of social practice artists whose works Ukeles would have been in conversation with.

Similarly, other than a short description of Ukeles attending Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) with her children, there is little information about her relationship with her children as her practice developed. After that experience, Ukeles left her children at home, working 16-hour sanitation shifts. Her children seem understanding of that decision but they don’t elaborate. The film never resolves if Ukeles’s Maintenance Art was the best solution for the two people who inspired her career. Instead, the, at times, myopic documentary seems so overwhelmed by the mere fact that the 86-year-old artist is still alive that it forgets to step back and look around. “We are all a maintenance worker,” Ukeles reminds us.