There is something appalling about the daily repetition of cooking and cleaning, the fact that it goes on endlessly, without an external goal. The circularity of the process—you cook and clean in order to live, only to get up each day to cook and clean some more—invites existential brooding. This brooding is valid in some ways—the circularity of the work of staying alive does beg the question “What’s it all for?”—but I’m also suspicious of my own horror of cleaning. Why does housework feel more futile than other kinds of work that I do to stay alive, such as getting up and going to work each day to earn a paycheck?
An artist I interviewed for this project told me that he has an embroidered sampler that reads “A clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” I’ve spent most of my life following that philosophy. For me, disdaining housework was part of my emancipation as a woman. I grew up in a generation where women were attaining education and entering the workforce in higher numbers than ever before. Our freedom was freedom to do something other than child-rearing and keeping house. Yet there’s something a bit rotten in my finding liberation in disdaining the work my mother and grandmothers did. This is one of the shortfalls of women’s emancipation. We have gained the right to enter the working world, but we have not succeeded in raising the stature of the work traditionally performed by women, not even in our own minds.
That's why Mierle Laderman Ukeles' “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” is still so provocative over forty years later. In 1969, Laderman Ukeles mounted an exhibition that consisted of her cleaning and maintaining a gallery space for several weeks, asserting this care as a work of art. In the accompanying manifesto she writes, “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…change the sheets, go to the store…I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.”
The “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” asks us to question the paradigm that values cultural creation above the maintenance of life. Housework, child care, and elder care are still either unpaid or poorly paid work with little protection for workers. This won’t change until we begin to value the work of caring. We can begin by valuing it in our own daily lives.