PRACTICE MAINTENANCE

2021

commissioned by Daisy Ames, Studio Ames

Linee Occulte exhibition at Citygroup

In her 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ staked a claim: “My working will be the work.” Then balancing the demands of new motherhood and artistic practice, Ukeles determined that tasks of personal and professional maintenance are in themselves artistic acts. Against the conventional assumption of novelty as the determining factor of artistic value, Ukeles’ manifesto instead highlighted the unseen, everyday acts essential to the artist’s life and work.

Like art, architectural practice is often heedless of the labor of maintenance, both in the lives of designers doing the work as well as the spaces and buildings they produce. “Practice Maintenance” is a self-portrait of a young architect and new mother that reveals the unseen forces and activities that directly and indirectly enable her design practice, which today is primarily conducted through remote collaboration.

The drawing depicts the mundane utilities of creative labor under these circumstances in which private life is simultaneously exposed and erased. As video conferencing has become the primary mode of disciplinary collaboration during the pandemic, key components such as the monitor’s built-in camera, background plants, and just off-screen breast pump are carefully positioned within or outside the camera angle’s view.

“Manifesto for Maintenance Art” was a call to reassign value to the everyday tasks of an artist’s personal and professional life. To claim the long hours and repetitive actions necessary to sustain a professional practice and a young child as productive acts that also contribute to the strength and meaning of the work. These are acts of creative labor that are often overlooked, undervalued, and uncompensated. Today, as working mothers, independent practitioners, and alternative forms of collaboration are both direly needed and largely unsupported within the discipline, a discourse of maintenance within and around architectural practice is necessary.

“Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Ukeles, 1969)