The New York City Sanitation Department in the late 1970s was not an obvious place to find a warm welcome for feminist conceptual art. But the newly appointed sanitation commissioner, Norman Steisel, had arrived as an outlier in the world of municipal waste. Before he began his career in city government, first working in budget offices, he had been a graduate student in chemical engineering and applied mathematics at Yale, where he fell in with a crowd of M.F.A. students. He understood the avant-garde “at least at a rudimentary level,” he told me recently, just as the art scene in SoHo was exploding.
So when he was introduced to Mierle Laderman Ukeles — who had an idea for a project that would involve thousands of members of his work force and an effort to radically alter the perception of garbage men, as they were then known — he was eager to hear what she had to say.
Second-wave feminism produced a roster of writers, artists and intellectuals whose influence and celebrity has endured, but Ms. Ukeles had never stood among them. Nine years ago, her profile rose considerably when the Queens Museum made her the subject of a comprehensive retrospective, her first. She was well into her 70s.
As it happened, Toby Perl Freilich, a filmmaker who had just finished a documentary about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caught the exhibit on its last day. Inspired by the artist’s vision, Ms. Freilich spent the subsequent years making her latest documentary, “Maintenance Artist,” which has been screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Forty-six years after she embedded with the Sanitation Department, Ms. Ukeles’s populist convictions, her belief in the dignity of labor, her wariness of feminist art committed narrowly to liberating women from the male gaze speak with a power to the tensions between class and gender politics roiling the country right now.
The title of the film comes from the designation that Ms. Ukeles, the daughter of a Denver rabbi, applied to herself in 1969 after the birth of her first child. At that time, she wrote a manifesto called “Maintenance Art” that outlined both a philosophy and proposal for a project she planned to call “CARE,” one that would consecrate quotidian labor as art.
Frustrated by the constant intrusions of child care and housework — “the back half of life,” as she called it — on her creative ambitions, she resolved to simply turn the work into her creative product. “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,” she wrote in the treatise, which was published by Artforum in 1971. “Clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”
The business of womanhood was relentless, and if men could forge brilliant artistic careers out of the freedom they were dealt never to touch a bottle of Windex, she would simply twist the paradigm, spritzing and dusting her way into the art world’s firmament. One of her first works, an “action” piece, involved scrubbing the floors and steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., in an effort to confront the visitor with what it takes to make museum-going — and, by extension, the public consumption of art — possible. Her objection to artists like Richard Serra or Donald Judd, who worked in a monumental scale, was, as she explained in an interview in Art in America years ago, that they were “lifting industrial processes and forgetting about the whole culture that they come out of.”
The inescapable fact about conceptual art, Ms. Freilich pointed out, is that “people hate it.” “Mierle’s work was accessible and very deep,” she said when we spoke about the film. “The conversation she was having, unlike many artists, wasn’t with Jacques Derrida. It was with people, and you didn’t need a college degree to understand it.”
But she also seemed engaged in a dialogue with other emerging artists — women like Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic — who were deeply invested in questions around female objectification, what their bodies mean to themselves, to the world, to the dominating and violent men who inhabited it.
Ms. Ukeles saw an entire universe of exploitation, both in the labor markets and in our domestic arrangements, that was being ignored at the expense of all the attention paid to subverting the erotic expectations of men.
The story of her involvement with the city’s Sanitation Department, where she eventually became artist in residence, is the story of her identification with the workers themselves. In her view, the garbage men were regarded with the same disdain that society directed toward wives and mothers. Both were responsible for cleaning up messes they did not make and were essentially hated for doing it.
Beginning in 1979, with the city’s blessing, she went around to meet every sanitation worker in every sanitation district in the city — 8,500 of them over the course of 11 months — to tell them how valuable they were and document their interactions. “I’m a maintenance artist,” she would say by way of introduction. “I feel that you hold up the whole city in your hands with your unending work. I think it’s time for the public to hear what New York City feels like, from the side of the people that keep it alive, every single day.”
The resulting piece, “Touch Sanitation,” was exhibited at a SoHo gallery in 1984. The gallery windows had been scrawled with the derogatory names sanitation men were routinely called; as part of the show, city officials were invited to wipe off the graffiti. A year earlier, she paneled a garbage truck with mirrors so that people could see themselves in the waste they created.
The city would soon move on to elevate another type of worker — the bond salesman, the broker, the wearer of shirts with contrast collars. But Ms. Ukeles boosted the morale of sanitation men (and they were all men at the time) when they were very much in need of it, when the city was reeling from the fiscal crisis and New Yorkers blamed the men tasked with picking up their trash for the fact that the city was filthy.
In reality, the problem was that it had lost 1,700 of its 2,500 street cleaners to the downsizing austerity now demanded. The invective aimed at sanitation workers from ordinary New Yorkers was remarkable, Mr. Steisel told me. Ms. Ukeles had gone around the city shaking nearly every worker’s hand, and she would gather children together to wave at sanitation trucks as they went by.
“This lady,” the film shows one worker exulting to a news reporter, “is our salvation.”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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