Dismantling extends beyond exploitative structures to the language of progress itself

Evidence

Purdy’s recommendation echoes Mierle Ukeles when she insists in her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art:” “my work is the work.” If we take this to heart, it suggests that we dismantle not only structures of exploitation and destruction, but the very language with which we conceive of progress. It asks us to stop, turn around, and then get to work. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 656

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key to the reader’s glossary: dismantling as stopping, turning around, then working — the halting point that rebuts the withdrawal misreading.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Ukeles’s maintenance art — how a gallery-based practice of caretaking (washing museum floors) lands as a model for getting to work rather than withdrawing.