Motherhood made Ukeles see maintenance as culturally abandoned work

Evidence

In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 116

Categorization

• SEED: Ukeles’ living-in-the-museum gesture is a strong image for an essay on how care work is excluded from what a culture recognizes as productive.