Robyn Walton

On the Useful Object - and its Objection to Being Used 

“Once the commodity had freed objects of use from the slavery of being useful, the borderline that separated them from works of art … became extremely tenuous” (Agamben 42).

This essay explores the useful object’s confusion within the art world. It considers whether ordinary household objects that begin a new life as an art object could offer an exemplar for a possible new life for the mundane domestic labourer themselves. Can the life – and midlife crisis – of the domestic utensil be employed as a lens to examine the lives of those engaged in reproductive labour, thereby solidifying social relations?

The treasuring of the everyday is a political act. A valuing of the devalued raises the status of ‘feminised’ roles and tasks, “… domestic, reproductive activities that are connoted as female and thus excluded from the paradigm of work” (Sigler 20). Rather than focusing upon pure function, if we re-engage with the physical form and materiality of quotidian utensils – by considering them as objects – we can imbue them with a thingness that allows them to speak of other concerns.

“The sort of objectification that takes place during those operations that produce use value, sign value, cultural capital will never produce a thing. Producing a thing – effecting thingness – depends, instead, on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it typically is” (Brown Other Things 51).

Kathrin Meyer has written, in relation to the work of artist Alicja Kwade, that “when a thing does not act in accordance with the prevailing rules, when it is neither handy nor intelligible in the way it behaves, then its material, its being-made, its qualities come to the fore with greater distinction.” Kwade’s work frequently questions the inherent nature or purpose of the known world. In her hands, materials do not behave according to our shared experience with the universal laws of physics. According to Kirsty Bell, Kwade “sets about to undermine the object’s objectness or the material’s materiality through a tweaking of its fundamental attributes…”

With Kwade’s installation Andere Bedingung, seemingly rigid mirrors, pipes, channels and rods slump and slip between wall and floor. Elsewhere a decorative silver serving tray lies shattered upon the floor as if it were made of glass (Unter anderer Bedingung). The titles of these 2009 works say it all – the objects have apparently been subjected to ‘other conditions’ which differ from the norm. Solid metal rears up, shatters or flops, its supposedly tensile nature rendered fragile or fluid. Referring to a similarly unsettling work, Kooperatives Phänomen (2010), Meyer wrote, “The installation creates the impression of a strange animation of these objects … frozen in a movement they could not perform under ordinary conditions.”

“I do not wish to invest the material with new meanings, but rather to clarify the symbolism in its existing readings and use this as a language, or question it or give it a new twist by placing it in an unusual context. Things should be what they are and remain so, while the viewer’s expectations about the materials in our environment are to be used and amplified or questioned” (Kwade 129).

The instability of object-ness becomes readily apparent when something is utilised in an ‘unauthorised’ way, prompting a different kind of attention. Dysfunction brings into view the strangeness that was always latent within everyday objects, highlighting their double nature as equipment and thing (Schwenger 65-70). Critical theorist Bill Brown refers to this trait as misuse value – a dislocation of the object from habitualised objectification allows for a more sensuous, tactile appreciation of the object-being (Other Things 51). Once abstracted from utility we have the opportunity to somehow inadvertently see the object anew.

One such example is Norwegian artist Yngve Holen, who incorporates mass produced goods in unconventional ways in his work. Many of his sculptures are dissected vehicles and consumer appliances, in which careful slicing exposes generally unseen innards. Another work, Sensitive to Detergent, Drive the Change (2012), consists of a stainless steel washing machine drum, mounted upon an adjustable drum stand from a musician’s kit. Playing on similarities in both name and form, the resulting device takes doing one’s laundry to new heights.

While in general use, a utensil is so taken for granted as to become invisible in its very ordinariness. As Martin Heidegger wrote in The Origin of the Work of Art, “the handier a piece of equipment, the more inconspicuous…” (39). The utensil is concrete, mundane, worldly. It is an extension of our physical self. Once removed from its context or its purpose however, once obsolete, broken or distorted, it rears up as a new thing. It is present, both to our perception and our imagination.[1] The most quotidian object when caught unawares can present itself as strange and lovely.

A case in point is Six Levels, a work by the Brazilian artist Jac Leirner. Six Levels consists of just that – six standard tradesmen’s levels mounted on a wall in a style reminiscent of a Donald Judd stack. “Leirner’s new works evoke not so much the inconspicuous dignity of the Heideggerian ready-to-hand hammer as the quintessentially North American subculture of do-it-yourself… Wrested away from their mundane task of determining whether other objects are horizontally aligned, the levels draw attention only to themselves, but also by the same token, to our own act of looking at them” (Martins 227-8). The levels come out from the shadow of ‘painting’ and emerge into focus – their air bubbles shift from practical device to become the punctum of the work.[2]

There are those who argue that to be useful and to be beautiful are two mutually exclusive states of being. In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Immanuel Kant claims that any notion of pure aesthetic judgement expressly excludes utility. With regards to an object’s utility (or extrinsic objective purposiveness) our interest in the intended purpose of the object is the basis for any liking. We are aware of its causal concept and are appreciative if, in use, it meets those requirements well.

Intrinsic objective purposiveness, or inner purpose, is instead derived from an object’s perfection. We perceive it as the product of some will, or concept (what sort of thing is it meant to be), and our judgement of its perfection is based on “the harmony of the thing’s manifold with this concept” (74). For Kant this notion of the perfect, or good, is closer to the ideal of beauty, although beauty must be a liking for the thing itself without reference to any concept: “The beautiful, which we judge on the basis of a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without a purpose, is quite independent of the concept of the good. For the good presupposes an objective purposiveness” (73).

Kant allows a certain ambiguity into his system in the form of exemptions for obscurity or lack of knowledge (78). A pure judgement of taste may yet be made, if a useful object is abstracted from its purpose, or if the person judging it has no concept of its purpose. His classic example of beauty (formal purposiveness without reference to purpose) is the flower. This is problematic however, as the flower obviously has a very defined purpose (to enable reproduction) which determines its form. However, Kant claims that when “we are judging the flower, we do not refer to any purpose whatever” (84 emphasis added). It goes both ways: there are some beautiful things which turn out to have purpose (flower) and “…there are things in which we see a purposive form without recognizing a purpose in them (but which we nevertheless do not consider beautiful)” (84).

The most interesting aspects of Kant’s Critique are these grey areas. He raises a set of possible questions for analysing the success or failure of objects with ambiguous or frustrated purpose. How do viewers respond to these objects? Can the sense that there is some unknown purpose or perverted utility provoke some sense of unease? How is objective purposiveness judged if it is unclear what that intended purpose is? Is it possible to intentionally muddy the waters of purpose to mine the discomfort of the ‘wrong’?

According to the philosopher Jean Baudrillard every object has two functions; to be put to use or to be possessed. “A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject...” (Marginal System 86). Every object oscillates between the two categories, as Baudrillard makes clear: “Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous: functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity, and possession is continually getting entangled with utility, as part of the ever-disappointed effort to achieve a total integration” (Marginal System 86-7).

Utility and possession, Baudrillard’s two categories of object function, are rooted in Karl Marx’s theory of use value and exchange value. The Marxian commodity is either produced to satisfy a need (subsistence), or to exchange for money (capitalism) – in which case the required labour power (and potential use value) can be obscured. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben states that, “since the commodity presents itself under this double form of useful object and bearer of value, it is an essentially immaterial and abstract piece of goods, whose concrete enjoyment is impossible except through accumulation and exchange” (37). He goes on to argue that it is precisely this double face of the product of work (which is never simultaneously apparent) that constitutes the Marxian commodity’s fetishistic nature (37). With the commodity fetish a symbolic value of desire is overlaid onto an object’s normal use.

The branded commodity transforms this symbolic value into real exchange value, servicing a kind of lifestyle totemism – “commodities as carriers of social values” (Simon 33). Aspiration can dictate an exchange value out of all proportion to either the true production cost of an object or its use value. This immaterial value of the commodity fetish emerges from seemingly nothing. In actuality we are all responsible for creating the value of commodities that we aspire to. We have power. As the symbolic capital of conspicuous consumption, these products have no natural divine desirability, they are valued precisely because we desire them, and we are manipulated into desiring them. Some power may be reclaimed by looking beyond the commodity fetish to see use value, to see the productive labour which has been concealed behind image and desire.

For Baudrillard, once stripped of utility, “the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection… An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject” (Marginal System 86). In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin defines a collector as one who detaches the object from its original context or function, in order to bring it into a close relationship with others of similar typology (204). The act of organisation endows the collected objects with an abstractness, by which Baudrillard suggests “the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry” (Marginal System 87).

Jac Leirner’s Hardware Silk is such a case in point. A “plethora of holed or hollow pieces of hardware” have been collectively penetrated by a taut steel cable, suspended just below eye level (Martins 227). The paraphernalia of art installation, normally tidied away before the exhibition opens, is instead laid out for our close inspection. “The ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’, strangely inscribed in the commodity-object, rises to the surface only when contemplation strips it of its proper contexts” (Müller 88). Leirner’s work highlights the rich variety of colour, texture and form present in the group of objects, linked (literally) by the fact that they share the common attribute of a round hole.

Local artist Chris Braddock collects certain kitchen ephemera (among other things). Whisks and sink strainers gathered in their respective large groupings emphasise small differences rather than similarities. That they are similar seemingly goes without saying. Braddock does not claim these as artworks, but they are more than utensils – they have traversed into the grey area. The fungible object has fallen into a new life as possessed object, which takes part in a direct relationship with the subject-viewer. The objects have been denied their function, or rather they have been assigned a new purpose as a thing.

“The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (Brown Thing Theory 4).

According to Heidegger, “the mere thing is a kind of equipment that has been denuded of its equipmental being” (11), it has lost the qualities of serviceability and of being made. Heidegger’s equipment is an object in the world that we make use of in order to achieve some ends – a tool if you will. But, as soon as the object no longer serves, it reverts to being a thing. For Heidegger therefore, equipment occupies a strange no-man’s land between thing and work of art, with something of the nature of each. It is like the artwork in that it is man-made, it is unlike the artwork in that it does not have the quality of self-sufficiency, of having perhaps taken shape of its own volition.

“A piece of equipment, for example, the shoe-equipment, when finished, rests in itself like the mere thing. Unlike the granite block, however, it lacks the character of having taken shape by itself. On the other hand, it displays an affinity with the artwork in that it is something brought forth by the human hand. The artwork, however, through its self-sufficient presence, resembles, rather, the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is never forced into being. Nonetheless, we do not count such works as mere things. The nearest and authentic things are always the things of use that are all around us. So the piece of equipment is half thing since it is characterized by thingliness. Yet it is more, since, at the same time, it is half artwork. On the other hand, it is less, since it lacks the self-sufficiency of the artwork. Equipment occupies a curious position intermediate between thing and work- if we may be permitted such a calculated ordering” (Heidegger 10).

Elsewhere Heidegger argues the artistic nature of artwork lies in its allegorical role: its ability to manifest something other than its own thingness (3). In this it anticipates the branded commodity as a carrier of sign value. The immaterial labour of the avant-garde readymade did not merely mime and mock “the degraded world of capitalist modernity” as Foster would have it (15-16). Rather the surrealists prefigured the impending explosion of assigned value of the branded commodity-fetish-worship of the contemporary world of neoliberalism.

“Breton quoted Hegel to the effect that the art object lies ‘between the sensible and the rational. It is something spiritual that appears as material.’ Thus Breton anticipated the rhetoric of contemporary capitalism, according to which commodities are almost accidental materializations of a transcendent brand identity” (Lütticken 111).

Much earlier, in 1855, Charles Baudelaire experienced the great concentration of commodity objects that was the Paris Universal Exposition. The spectacle attracted crowds who marvelled over novel products as if they were artworks. This enabled Baudelaire to ascertain that the aura surrounding the work of art is “the equivalent of the fetishistic character that the exchange value impresses on the commodity” (Agamben 42). Fetishization is taken to its extreme where it becomes the entire use value of the (art) object. For Baudelaire, art is the new absolute commodity:

“…a commodity in which the form of value would be totally identified with the use-value: an absolute commodity, so to speak, in which the process of fetishization would be pushed to the point of annihilating the reality of the commodity itself as such. A commodity in which use-value and exchange value reciprocally cancel out each other, whose value therefore consists in its uselessness and whose use in its intangibility, is no longer a commodity: the absolute commodification of the work of art is also the most radical abolition of the commodity” (Agamben 42).

Curator Joshua Simon argues that the art exhibition allows us to see commodities clearly for what they are: “More than in any other context, commodities are most true to themselves as art” (38). In his book Neomaterialism, Simon suggests that the base material for all art practice is now the commodity itself. Everything around us “in our prefabricated world” is the commodity – we merely refashion it into art which references that world (38). The objects are used as collaborators: “…the attempt to apply any authority over things, to own them, is a failed task” (15).

Simon has coined the term unreadymade in reference to such assemblages, which aim to undo “the process of authorship through appropriation” (45). “While the readymade uses display to make things from the world become art, the unreadymade uses display to make what is shown as art testify to its existence in the world as a commodity” (41). For Simon the exhibition is an opportunity for contemplation of the new post-appropriation assemblage as the commodities re-emerge into the material world.

Which raises the question of what happens to the objects post-art? If the component parts of the artist’s assemblage have been created by the material labour of others, and merely selected and positioned by the artist, what happens after the show? Does it all return to being regular stuff, or, like some kind of ‘as seen on TV’ prop, does it have proximity value? Does it have the added desire value, or mystique, of the artist’s immaterial labour? In short, does creating a new thought for an object create a new value?[3]

Artist Luke Willis Thompson has explored this territory with in this hole on this island where I am, 2012. His readymade, although remaining in-situ, was displayed within an art context by virtue of being accessed via the dealer gallery Hopkinson Cundy. The entire family home – complete with contents – was available as an artwork, price on application (Thompson). During exhibition hours the occupants were unable to use the house-as-house, which became house-as-art-object.

Thompson juggles art object with sentimental, use and property-market exchange value in a ‘mare’s nest’ of identity. The very definition of Simon’s unreadymade, Thompson’s house makes what is shown as art testify to its existence in the world as a commodity. All the mundane stuff of life is laid bare for the viewer in a strange parody of the staged open home. Everything is personal – sentimental value is readily apparent but inaccessible. We see everything but we know nothing – resembling Oscar Wilde’s cynic who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” (38).

House-as-art-object was entirely dependent upon a choreographed taxi-ride from the gallery: “The house can be an artwork, or a house, depending on how it is approached” (Thompson) Which implies that it can exist as both house and artwork simultaneously. After the show, the house reverted to being an ordinary house, only to re-emerge as an artwork for the Walters Prize Exhibition in 2014. Things can be art, and then they can be “turned back on” to be ordinary things (Thompson).

In Attending to Abstract Things, art critic Sven Lütticken calls for utilising the “political aesthetics of things” as a site of challenge to contemporary capitalism, by developing a new kind of art: “Inverted ready-mades that are no longer content to create artistic surplus-value, but rather investigate the conditions for a different type of thing… If the surplus-value production of ready-made and surrealist objects anticipated branded capitalism, the question is what anticipations of a different economy might look like” (120). How can contemporary artists prefigure a future alternative to the current neoliberal environment? Lütticken suggests a reengagement with the material, by which he expressly does not mean some form of nostalgia for the primitive gift economy, but rather a kind of making real of the abstract. His proposal appears to have certain parallels with Simon’s unreadymade concept.

So, with the unreadymade, is the object taking some time out from its mundane commodity culture existence to experience life as pure form or art object? Or, alternatively, does functionality and utility instead represent time out for the fetishized commodity object – is it the art status which truly represents the ultimate in commodity culture? And what happens when the object apparently exists as both art and equipment at the same time?

In his book, The Tears of Things, Peter Schwenger discusses sculpture which incorporates actual pieces of equipment, stripped of their obviousness to allow thingness to emerge. Disconcertingly, aspects of these objects remain simultaneously recognisable as equipment: the ‘norm’ resurfaces within the uncanny version before us (70). Duchamp’s snow shovel, In Advance of a Broken Arm, 1915, is one such work. Presented hanging, a shadow cast upon the wall behind is a key aspect of the work, perhaps alluding to what Schwenger refers to as a double exposure:

“The viewer of Duchamp’s shovel, then, is not seeing it as pure art, with an appreciation of its clean lines and abstract appeal. Nor is the viewer seeing the shovel the same way in the gallery as would be the case if it were hanging in the garage. There is an uneasy flicker between two versions of worldhood, more disturbing than if either version prevailed” (54).

Gabriel Kuri’s art practice also incorporates ‘things from the world’. His sculptures operate as combinations or arrangements of unaltered commodities, in which the space and the relationships between the objects are just as significant as the ‘raw material’ itself, perhaps even more so. The possibilities and potentialities of combinations add a precariousness kinetic quality to what is an essentially stable composition – the potential for change. “Kuri’s found objects, often quite mundane, are transformed in his work to become like chess pieces which suggest a multitude of potential moves in all directions” (Wood 101). The objects utilised by Kuri appear to be merely passing by, occupying a temporary role as an artwork before returning to their former lives. Kuri’s 2007 work Vacio Olivia consists of two stacked cans of green olives securing a section of weatherproof roofing roll. Did anyone ever eat those olives? Or are the same cans kept in an archive somewhere along with a roll of unused roofing?

Similar questions arise regarding various readymades which were ‘lost’ only to reappear in the form of a new authorised edition. Was Marcel Duchamp’s original Fountain from 1917 actually installed as a urinal somewhere lost in the mists of time? And if not where did it go? Although impossible to ever verify, a Duchamp in the bathroom would be the ultimate Rembrandt in the attic moment. As well as the found object becoming an artwork, Duchamp himself also investigated the idea of artworks becoming mundane things. His inverted or reciprocal readymade concept suggested a Rembrandt being used as an ironing board. Duchamp’s interests appeared to lie with the nature of object-being itself.

Perhaps “use in its purest sense is the inverse of the commodity” as Chelsea College of Arts professor Neil Cummings has written. The utensil is not dictated by desire and aspiration. In a way indicative of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs[4], western society no longer dreams of a bucket to make their lives complete. We exist beyond such physiological requirements; we now desire the brand that will bestow status in the eyes of our tribe. Utility is taken for granted. “Use could begin to operate as a brake, generate friction and slow the constant acceleration of a media saturated interpretation” (Cummings).

If this is the case, and use is a point of resistance to the seductions of the market economy, then surely misuse would be even more so? As with Yngve Holen’s sliced consumer appliances, unsanctioned use could operate as a subversive refusal of contemporary commodity culture. “It’s impossible to regulate for a useless corkscrew beautifully holding the door open” (Cummings).  The re-purposing of the used, the retrieval of the discarded, the restoration or adaptation of the broken – all undermine the dictum of a consumer society that repair should be obsolete. By mending, fixing, re-using, and re-circulating, the bricoleur fights back from the brink of extinction.  In his text “Reading Things: The Alibi of Use,” Cummings call for a re-engagement with the life-cycle of material things:

 “The difficulty, no, the necessity, … is to try and see through the glittering, reflective sheen of the modern commodity. Perhaps if we begin to chart the object’s encounters in the babble of use, the natural resting place for invention and memory, we may encourage some resistance. Things here seem closer to their being, worn, expressive, stripped of hype and glamour, in the relative economies of use and need. This is where, I believe, an object’s real life begins, moving from hand to hand, being bought, thrown out, collected, displayed, broken, sold, recollected and re-displayed. Something closer to the flea-market economy.”

As members of contemporary society, we are importuned to stimulate the economy by consuming more and more. It is no longer enough to live by the work-ethic as a productive cog in the machine. In the never-ending treadmill we must earn more to spend more, fulfilling “the double potentiality of man as needs and labor power” (Baudrillard Concept of Labor 30). The refusal of consumption thereby operates as a form of protest – as a refusal to engage with the demands of the neoliberal world. It also suggests a simultaneous refusal of production. If the drive to buy more is denied, the drive to work more (and earn more) is less urgent.

The contemporary campaign for a universal basic income (or rather for less and better work) primarily aims to reclaim non-alienated production, but also seeks a world which is not a work society (Weeks 101-111). By aspiring to a societal organisation system which is different to the capitalist status quo, they wish to determine a new meaning of value which is not subsumed in the work ethic. Presently, work that is not remunerated is rendered economically invalid and therefore invisible.

This is particularly relevant in the area of reproductive labour, a term that applies to activities which sustain existing workers (such as cooking, housework and care-giving), along with raising children (future workforce), and maintaining social connections within the community and the household itself.  It is generally expected by much of society that somewhere in the feminine gender identity lies a natural urge to be caring and nurturing. Reproductive labour within the household apparently only ‘counts’ as work if a wage is paid.[5] When considered as work done for personal satisfaction, “labour is supposed to be its own compensation” (A. Fraser 109). By establishing domestic labour has the status of ‘work’, women could establish the option to not do it. Noncompliance must be an option, even if not acted upon.

“We do not get paid for making everyday life more enjoyable or simply possible for ourselves and for other people. The unremunerated labour of the affects continuously crushes the insulting pyramid of capitalistic values but this conflict is effaced day after day” (Claire Fontaine 145).

Domestic life has always functioned as an extension of the capitalist site of production, as a social factory within a work society. Its unwaged reproductive labour supports the productive labour which is required by the capitalist mode of production. The household thereby operates as a tool for capital, enabling the production of surplus value elsewhere (Weeks 120). “Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society” (N. Fraser 102).

Two key changes have occurred in the contemporary era which have had negative repercussions for reproductive labour within the household, simultaneously squeezing time and stretching resources. Both relate to the neoliberal emphasis on individualist responsibility, and the ensuing evisceration of the welfare state safety net. The first change has been the blurring between life and work. Our personal selves are being harnessed into work to meet a growing demand for emotional and affective labour within the service sector of a post-Fordist economy. It is no longer enough to merely provide the service – part of the job description is to appear to enjoy it.

Conversely, there has been a growing incursion of work into other aspects of life. With no off switch, our entire lives are subsumed to the capitalist mode of production. We have been commodified through Nielsenism[6] and by the gig economy (Simon 139). The Human Resources paradigm of the empowerment of worker flexibility is, in actuality, about increased productivity, power and profit for capital. Employers are no longer expected to provide a living wage, let alone ‘cradle to the grave’ pastoral care. Taken to an extreme, we are all now the unremunerated workers for Google and Facebook et al, generating their corporate value both by providing free content, and by being their saleable product (audience).

The other key change regarding domestic work relates to the Marxist concept of ‘immiseration’. In summary, Marx argued that the entire structure of capitalism necessarily implies a growing divide between the net worth of capital and labour (due to the extraction of surplus value) (451). With the gradual slide from a post-war ethos of redistribution via taxation, it has become increasingly difficult to support a family on one income. When all of the adults in a household are required to engage in waged labour, who is responsible for domestic labour? The net result of the two income family tends to be a double shift for somebody.  Of course, with sufficient resources, it is now possible to sub-contract out almost every aspect of household labour – not just nannies and cleaners, but My Food Bag, gardeners, dog-walkers, etc. – creating ever more precarious employment for the next rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.

These unresolved societal dilemmas have led critical theorist Nancy Fraser to consider the causes of our current social dysfunction regarding reproductive labour.  Her position is that capitalist society has at its heart an inherent contradiction: its unwavering demand for accumulation undermines the very social reproduction on which it relies. For a period in the middle of the 20th century this tendency was held in check by government policy which regulated capital to support social reproduction. Eventually economic pressure forced political change, and led to capitalism becoming increasingly parasitical, feeding off its own host. Reproduction is increasingly subjugated to production (N. Fraser 99-117).

As a society there is a need for a re-appraisal of the value of reproductive labour, both paid and unpaid. Perhaps it should instead be considered as ‘sorge’, a taking care of being in the Heideggerian sense, a kind of pastoral care of the world.

Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles uses the term ‘maintenance’ in a similar way. It is the “invisible work that makes all other forms of work possible” (Molesworth Work Ethic 135). In her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! she positions maintenance as a life force: sustaining the species, sustaining the equilibrium, sustaining change. Maintenance is her opposing pole to individualised dynamic change, whether destructive or constructive in nature.

 “I had come to understand that, as a woman, as a mother, I was connected to most people in the world – the whole entire world of maintenance workers. Women were never invited to become a maintenance class, we were just told: ‘You are like this. We know what you think. We know what you are. You take care of us.’” (Ukeles In Conversation 66).

Ukeles began documenting her own reproductive labour: “I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc.  Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art” (Manifesto). The resulting photographs were presented as Maintenance Art Tasks, 1973. By transforming her housework into artwork she was able to increase its status in the eyes of a work society which generally denigrates domestic labour as economically ‘unproductive’ (Molesworth Work Ethic 135). Live performance, such as 1973’s Hartford Wash: Washing Tracks and Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object, enabled Ukeles to position her maintenance practice firmly within the art establishment, and sometimes literally within the museum itself.

Along with blurring the lines between ‘work’ and ‘artwork’, Ukeles’s concern was with making the unseen seen, and the undervalued valued. By engaging directly with the people responsible for maintenance within the institution, her practice parallels domestic reproductive labour with low status ‘invisible’ maintenance workers of all kinds, highlighting the vital importance of both, and making them ‘visible in public’ (Molesworth House Work 79).

But is it the labour that was invisible or the person/object doing it? Or perhaps it is only labelled as maintenance if it goes unnoticed – and once in the public eye it becomes something else? Feminist Carole Pateman has argued that it is essential to patriarchal capitalism that maintenance labour remains invisible, or it has the potential to disrupt the very productive labour it is supposed to sustain (Molesworth House Work 88). (Consider the stagehands in a theatre production as a possible analogy here.) Maintenance tends to be considered well accomplished only if it remains unseen in the process. It should come as no surprise then, to find that Wadsworth Atheneum – the venue for Ukeles’s 1973 Maintenance Art Task performances – holds no documentation of the work (Molesworth House Work 95).

Touch Sanitation (1979-80), a key project for Ukeles, focused attention upon thousands of workers from the New York Sanitation Department, who tend to be taken for granted, stigmatised, and edited out of other New Yorkers’ field of vision (Ukeles On Touch 207-8).  She shook their hands and individually thanked them, and framed this action as an art work which became highly visible in the public realm. Ukeles displayed recognition, respect and gratitude to the workers concerned. Perhaps this is exactly what she is demanding on behalf of all of those workers engaged in reproductive maintenance labour – there are people that do this shitty job and we need to acknowledge them, appreciate them, and thank them.

As with Ukeles, the art practices of other women addressing the issue of work have frequently been performative in nature. “Daily, necessary, unpaid chores do double duty: they “get done” while art is being made” (Molesworth Work Ethic 43). Local artist Joanna Margaret Paul has used moving image to record aspects of her domestic life, making art out of, and during, her familial responsibilities. Directly referencing Ukeles’s ground-breaking Maintenance Art Tasks in its title, Paul’s 1982 moving image work Task showcases the care involved in ironing small children’s clothing. In this short super-8 film disembodied hands performing a mundane task are transformed, by virtue of repetition, into rhythmic action and gesture.

Is it possible to make gender divisions visible without thereby naturalising or normalising them? These ‘housework’ artworks draw attention to women’s unpaid labour and status, but doesn’t film of Joanna Paul ironing, or of Martha Rosler hanging out her washing,[7] also risk reinforcing stereotypes about women’s work? One successful alternative which avoids these particular pitfalls would have to be the subversive challenge of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which Rosler demonstrates kitchen utensils alphabetically. Using the format of an educational film, Rosler initially plays it straight (apron, bowl etc.), however the gestures that accompany each tool become increasingly aggressive and bizarre. The fork becomes a stabbing weapon, while the ladle is used to discard food rather than serve it. The whole ensemble begins to read as a domestic form of martial arts exercise. “The kitchen is literally represented as though it were a battlefield: the parodic repetition of daily gestures conceals the alienation of housework” (Zapperi 160). Eventually she uses her body to form letters: “In demonstrating women’s instrumentalized position, Rosler, within the logic of her alphabetic order, finally turns into a tool herself” (Eiblmayr 153). The film concludes with a rebellious Zorro slash, and an ironic ‘whatever’ shrug, perhaps signifying an anarchic refusal to comply with societal expectation.

Rosler assumes the role of the utensil, however it may be constructive to consider the exact opposite, with the useful object acting as a possible analogous stand-in for domestic labour itself. The Oxford Dictionary definition of a utensil is “a tool, container, or other article, especially for household use.” In ancient Rome this term also applied to a household slave, who was seen as a living tool for doing.[8] Similarly in the contemporary period a person could be considered an appendage of their machine, or a tool thing to be utilised in the domestic sphere.

As such, William Morris’s well known aphorism regarding the household object could also be applied to the woman of the house. “If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”  Consider the wife as chattel. Within this construct, the typology of a wife falls into two categories, useful appliance or possessed trophy. Ideally both – but perhaps not at the same time. In a similar manner to Baudrillard’s theory of collection, the ‘perfect’ wife should be both utensil and possession. To misquote Baudrillard:

“Every wife thus has two functions – to be put to use and to be possessed… At one extreme, the strictly practical wife acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure wife, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection” (Marginal System 86).

This dual identity of the wife is a slightly schizophrenic one, fulfilling a societal expectation to flip constantly between the two personas of ‘Doll’ and ‘Drudge’.[9] But how to be both? It seems an impossible demand. There is enormous pressure to be some kind of social-norm super-woman: the housewife who can be the perfect courtesan and simultaneously a domestic skivvy. Feeling obliged to look good, (with heels and lipstick, boob-jobs, hair-dye, face-lifts, etc.) plus curate and maintain a spotless home. To manage it all seamlessly and appear an oasis of perfect calm. Or as Ukeles puts it in her Manifesto:

 “clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”

Perhaps getting older is the freedom to opt out of these external expectations – the freedom to embrace the flaw, the glitch, the less than perfect. To say fuck that, and live in an untidy house filled with books and art. To hold back the chaos only so far, while allowing it to slip in around the margins, generating sparks of possibility in our Petri dish.

The midlife crisis for those engaged in reproductive labour is a rejection of predictable invisible utility. A rejection of sameness, of servitude, and of feeling responsible for everyone else’s happiness. A refusal to collude with misogyny. It is an aspiration to more. An aspiration to an engaging and stimulating alternative life, to self.

Similarly, the midlife crisis of the domestic utensil is a rejection of so-called usefulness – using the vocabulary of functional purpose within a syntax of dysfunction. Frustrated tools discover thingness through an obscuration of purpose. The new objects offer up a certain ambiguous utility to us, the viewer, whilst simultaneously holding themselves apart. They stage an occupation of the space – as a form of passive resistance or strike action. Perhaps tired of being taken for granted, they are engaged in an “act of non-cooperative cooperation.”[10] Stoppage becomes a demand for autonomy.

“…a strike is a refusal, a powerful way of saying, quite simply, “no”. By ceasing to work, strikers seek to make their labour – often so functional and efficient that it goes unrecognized – visible” (Bryan-Wilson 214).

Helen Molesworth asserts that in our work-dominated culture “not working is extremely difficult to do… When workers strike, they do not do so out of laziness or a desire to not work. They hope instead to promote better working conditions” (Molesworth Work Ethic 201). Through non-compliance the useful object gains bargaining power – demanding visibility over purpose, demanding value beyond function, demanding to be acknowledged and appreciated. Abstraction from function enables an alternative existence.

For both tool and worker, a refusal to serve restores some sense of thingness. If, as Bill Brown says, the concept of thing “names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (Thing Theory 4), then perhaps what is at stake here for those engaged in reproductive labour is the nature of subject-subject relations.

Robyn Walton

Image by the author; untitled, March 2017 (photogram).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. University of Minnesota, 1993.

Aristotle. “Politics.” Politics of Aristotle, edited by Peter L. Phillips Simpson, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/auckland/detail.action?docID=867055.

Baudrillard, Jean. “A Marginal System: Collecting.” The System of Objects, New York, Verso, 1996, pp85-106.

---        “The Concept of Labor.” The Mirror of Production, St. Louis, Telos Press, 1975, pp.21-51.

Bell, Kirsty. “Uncommon Objects.” Alicja Kwade, edited by Veit Gorner et al., Berlin, Distanz, 2010, unpaginated.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Belknap Press, 1999.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Brown, Bill. Other Things. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

---        “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, Vol 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn 2001) pp1-22

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Theory and History of Literature; v. 4. Manchester University Press, 1984.

Chave, Anna C. "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism." The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (12, 1994): pp596-611. ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/docview/222973781?accountid=8424.

Claire Fontaine (James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale). “Human Strike Has Already Begun.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp144-145.

Cummings, Neil. “Reading Things: The Alibi of Use.”  (extract from the introduction to Reading Things, Sight Works. Vol.3, ed Neil Cummings. Chance Books London 1993.) Accessed via www.neilcummings.com/content/reading-things June 2017, unpaginated.

Eiblmayr, Silvia. “Martha Rosler’s Characters.” Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, edited by Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press, 1998, pp152-65.

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. MIT Press, 1996.

Fraser, Andrea. “How to provide an artistic service: An Introduction.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp107-109.

Fraser, Nancy. “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review 100, July-Aug 2016, pp99-117.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art”. Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp1-56.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Hackett Publishing, 1987. Accessed 30 June 2018 via monoskop.org/images/7/77/Kant_Immanuel_Critique_of_Judgment_1987.pdf

Kwade, Alicja. “Alicja Kwade.” Living in the Material World, edited by Martin, Sylvia and Beate Ermacora, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseen, Krefield. Snoeck, c2014, p129.

Lütticken, Sven. “Attending to Abstract Things.” New Left Review #54, Nov Dec 2008, pp101-122.

Martins, Sergio.  “Jac Leirner.” Art Forum, January 2013. pp227-8.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol.1, ch.25. Accessed 30 June 2018 via www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

Meyer, Kathrin. “Event Horizon.” Alicja Kwade, edited by Veit Gorner et al.. Distanz, 2010, unpaginated.

Molesworth, Helen. “House Work & Art Work.” October, vol. 92 (spring, 2000), pp71-97.

Molesworth, Helen and Julia Bryan-Wilson. Work Ethic. Pennsylvania State University Press, c2003.

Morris, William "The Beauty of Life," a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design (19 February 1880), later published in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878 - 1881 (1882).

Müller, Vanessa. “Non-objective Objects: Some Remarks on Works by Thea Djordjadze.” Afterall, 1 April 2010, Issue 23. pp82-88. Accessed 30 June 2018 via www-jstor-org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/stable/20711783?seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents

Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Sigler, Friederike. “All That Matters is Work.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp14-25.

Simon, Joshua. Neomaterialism. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2013.

Thompson, Luke Willis. Lecture delivered September 2014. BFA Year 2, Elam School of Fine Arts.

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Accessed 30 June 2018 via www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969

---        “On Touch Sanitation.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp207-208.

---         “In conversation with Tom Finkelpearl.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp64-66.

Walton, Robyn. Kimchi Quesadilla. Research essay for BFA (Hons), Elam School of Fine Arts. 2016.

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.

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Footnotes:

[1] “When a tool is seen it stops functioning… In brief, according to Heidegger, a tool oscillates between two modes of being: ready-to-hand, or present-at-hand. We use the hammer without giving it a second thought, but the broken hammer forces its presence upon our consciousness” (Walton).

[2] The term punctum is used here in the sense developed by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida.

[3] Duchamp argued he ‘created a new thought’ for the object when he chose the urinal for his work Fountain.

[4] Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychology theory proposed in the mid 20th century to illustrate the stages of motivations in human society. Its pyramid structure begins with a concern for physiological survival at the base level, moving through to self-actualisation at the tip.

[5] The 1970’s saw a feminist campaign for wages for housework, perhaps as a means of drawing attention to inequality, rather than in the expectation of actual success (Weeks 119).

[6] ‘Nielsen - what people watch - what people buy.’ Nielsen is a global data analytics company that analyses consumer behaviour.

[7] Backyard Economy I & II, 1974, Super 8 film (Molesworth Work Ethic 137)

[8] “The Definition of the Slave. Property is part of the household and property is the multitude of tools that household management, like any art, needs to complete its work, namely life. Among these, the slave is property as a living tool, needed as an assistant to work other tools, and he is a tool for doing, not for making, since life is doing and not making. Property is also what belongs wholly to another, so the slave belongs wholly to another. Accordingly, the slave by nature is a human being who is by nature the possession of another as a tool for purposes of doing or action.” Aristotle, Politics, Book 1 ch 4.

[9] The exception here is the ‘Success-wife’, who is liberated from all utility to become absolute trophy.

[10] Art critic Anna C. Chave has used this phrase in reference to the women of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as they both confirm and deny patriarchal stereotypes of femininity (598).