Robyn Walton

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.

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,[1] 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.[2] 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’. 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.”[3] 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.

Footnotes

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

[2] “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.

[3] 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).

Works Cited

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

Zapperi. “Against Domesticity: Artists and Feminists in the Kitchen.” Work, ed F. Sigler, London, Whitechapel, 2017, pp158-160.