Can a garbage truck with mirrors on both sides reflecting the community it rids of thousands of pounds of trash each day be considered art? Or can art be an installation of maintenance workers' gloves hung ever so intricately in a garbage station? What about the choreography of sanitation workers performing a "work ballet" in a parade with dancing garbage trucks?
Who determines what art really is?
Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 70, whose creative works are mentioned above, says she has the power to decide. "Because I am the artist. Because I say so," she explained as she spoke to a room full of fascinated listeners at the Ronald Feldman Gallery on Wednesday night.
Ukeles, who holds a M.A. degree in Inter-related Arts from NYU, became interested in the art of maintenance after becoming a full time mother. The redundant and offending question of "Do you do anything?" from so many people frustrated Ukeles. But as many artists do, she let that frustration fuel her. Ukeles said to herself, "I am here to create something new in the world."
And that she did. Ukeles interviewed and researched maintenance workers and then used her findings to create installations about real people- important people. She published "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" in 1969. Her work led her to the New York City Department of Sanitation in 1977 where she became the unsalaried artist-in-residence, a position she still holds to this day. Ukeles spent nearly a year visiting each garbage station in New York City collecting data about the issues surrounding the city's vast amount of trash and getting to know garbage men and their daily struggles. Her research then morphed into several installations, exhibits and performances which profoundly impacted people's perception of trash men, waste, and environmental issues.
One significant performance work in 1984, "Cleansing the Bad Names," displayed the horrible names that sanitization workers said they had been called by the public in spray paint on a giant exterior wall. The work required members of the community to wash away the negative names.
Ukeles is currently working on a proposal for a project that will involve 1 million New Yorkers contributing items to be displayed in giant clear cubes around the city in one phase, and in another, transform the items into artwork that will hopefully reside in a park that is currently a fresh kills area for the city's waste.
So who can say that her work is not art, for it is the type of art that not only hangs on museum or gallery walls, but art that contributes to social transformation.
(Image borrowed from FeldmanGallery.)
