Introduction
As a modern person he felt that in theory he had to agree with the equality of the sexes—still, if one looked closely at the situation one could not – and then, especially in your own house— her demand seemed to him comparable to an enslavement of his soul.
—Hannah Höch1
In recent years, the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles has garnered attention as an example of feminist politics in art of the late 1960s and the 1970s. One of the reasons that explains why her art still interpellates in the present in powerful ways, is because the gender gap and the precarisation of art workers has only deepened, and these concerns made up an important part of Ukeles’s work. Gregory Sholette mentions Ukeles’s manifesto Maintenance Art of 1969 within a feminist critique of art and labour: “Ukeles’ declaration about feminism, labor, and cultural criticism”, writes Sholette, “forms part of a pink thread that runs throughout the PAD/D Archive alongside resistance to gentrification and military intervention in Latin America.”2 According to Sholette, Ukeles’s work belongs “to a feminist cultural militancy that not only opposed patriarchal authority, but also broader issues of value accumulation and production.”3 Ukeles’s work also figures in the context of Julia Bryan-Wilson’s analysis of Lucy Lippard’s feminist labour. By working against a distinction between women’s public (visible) and private (invisible) labour performed at home, “Ukeles proposed making that unseen labor visible within the space of the art museum”.4 Lippard drew a parallel between women’s activities in the private and public sphere, as she compares the work of “a woman critic, curator, or historian” with housekeeping activities. In 1974 Lippard wrote that the role of an art critic, curator or historian is easily associated with women, because these are secondary activities, “or housekeeping activities, considered far more natural for women than the primary activity of making art”, the exclusive domain of males.5 However, Bryan-Wilson points out that rather than being dismissive, Lippard sees a parallel that actually elevates her art housekeeping: “for Lippard, the maternal act of caring for the household is one of dignity”,6 and, as we see it, this is the dignity with which Ukeles sweeps the floors and mops the stairs of the Wadsworth Atheneum in her performance Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance of 1973. In “What Do We Mean by ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Reproduction’?” (2016) Marina Vishmidt refers to Ukeles’s work as being “the classic example of the incursion of reproduction into the field of art” today. Ukeles’s maintenance art “involved moving the peripheral acts of institutional upkeep (cleaning, guarding) into the foreground as artistic performances themselves”, and in this manner Ukeles questions “why the artistic practices she pursued in her studio and the housework she did at home should be kept so inviolably separate.”7 Ukeles “sullied the autonomy of art with the heteronomy of domestic labour”; she subversively “sullied the sovereignty of the art institution… with the banality of ‘maintenance’,” argues Vishmidt. “Her gesture exemplified the political valence of revalorising reproduction as art”.8 Vishmidt rightly emphasizes reproduction—a central category of Marxian economic and social thought—recognising that Ukeles “turns the normalised understanding of industrial waged labour around and envisages society through its reproduction, through the maintenance of its most basic functions.”9 In this manner, Ukeles subverts the classical division between productive and reproductive labour that feminist Marxists began to critically reconsider at the time.10 The claim is that the reproduction of the conditions of production, pointed out by Marx in a letter to Kugelmann in 1868, should include the contribution of household work, which reproduces labour power.11 It is not by chance that Ukeles’s work is contemporary of the International Wages for Housework Campaign that Silvia Federici helped start in the US in the mid-1970s. “One of the achievements of the International Wages for Housework Campaign that we launched in the 1970s,” notes Federici in a recent interview with Marina Vishmidt, “was precisely to unmask not only the amount of work that unwaged houseworkers do for capital but, with that, the social power that this work potentially confers on them, as domestic work reproduces the worker and consequently it is the pillar of every other form of work.”12 It seems obvious to us that Federici’s words describe very much what Ukeles was attempting with her maintenance art, which includes not only the reproduction of labour power, but also the reproduction (in terms of its maintenance) of the conditions of production. Ukeles makes visible the unseen labour performed by women, as Bryan-Wilson and Vishmidt pointed out before, and beyond that “a common terrain”, using now Federici’s words, on the basis of which struggle could be organised. This common terrain shaped by Ukeles’s work is what we want to consider in terms of contributive justice and class solidarity.
The Spanish collective Precarias a la deriva (Precarious Women Adrift) did exactly this. Born as a response to the general strike that took place in Spain in 2002 and that did not represent the precarious work done by women—“our jobs were neither taken into consideration by the unions that called the strike nor effected by the legislation that provoked it”, they claimed—they took the decision to organise their invisibility by naming their oppression, the first step, as Federici writes, towards transcending it.13 The Spanish art historian Patricia Mayayo has placed the stance taken by Precarias a la deriva in the context of the work done by several feminist artists during the 1970s, who pointed out the gender division of labour and that includes a contextual analysis of Ukeles’s work.14 According to Mayayo, an important point of Precarias a la deriva is that they take distance from the popular neo-Marxist line of thought represented by thinkers like Maurizio Lazzarato, Toni Negri or Michael Hardt, who share an understanding of house and reproductive work in terms of immaterial labour. Precarias a la deriva emphasise instead the contribution of feminist thinking from the 1970s onwards.15 In this regard, a strong link can be established between the approach of feminist artists of that period, like Ukeles, and the contribution of contemporary feminist artists today.
The emphasis of the analyses has mainly been on reproduction, and that has to be the case. However, there is a side of Ukeles’s work that hasn’t been explored so far. In Ukeles’s stance about labour, maintenance and reproduction there is something very important that has been overlooked. Where Ukeles treats both reproductive and maintenance labour as equally deserving by “doing the job” rather than representing or staging it, she is, in our view, pointing to class related social contribution and solidarity. She famously put it in her manifesto of 1969: somebody has to pick up the garbage after the revolution, or, as she did in 1973, somebody has to clean up the exhibition space. These jobs need to be done. Like child care. And it is this facet of Ukeles’s work that we want to focus on. We want to suggest a reading of the visibility that domestic and maintenance labour achieve in Ukeles’s work as effecting a form of justice that the US philosopher Paul Gomberg has termed “contributive justice”, that is, justice that is concerned with what people are expected and able to contribute in terms of work.16 It further means to create a form of non-hierarchical exchange that points to the re/production of life. There are important lessons to learn from it.
Ukeles’s Work
I became an artist to live the levels of freedom of my uncle Jackson Pollock… my grandfather Marcel Duchamp… my other grandfather Mark Rothko… Then I had a baby. I discovered that Jackson and Marcel and Mark did not change diapers.
—Mierle Laderman Ukeles17
It has been suggested that Ukeles’s maintenance art works as a revision of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour (Arbeit) and work (Herstellen). The “life” and “death instinct” that Ukeles refers to in the first page of her manifesto in 1969 would be in dialogue with Arendt’s categories.18 In essence, Arendt works out a distinction that emends Marx’s purportedly favouring labour as central category of human praxis.19 Arendt sees a fundamental difference between the “labour of our body” and the “work of our hands” that creates the living environment that is characteristic for the human beings. Instead, labour is destructive and devouring, according to Arendt, and it is visible only in distinction from work.20 Labour, “when it incorporates… and bodily ‘mixes with’ the things provided by nature, does actively what the body does even more intimately when it consumes its nourishment. Both are devouring processes that seize and destroy matter, and the ‘work’ done by labor upon its material is only the preparation for its eventual destruction.”21 To labour means to be enslaved by necessity. Here, we find in a nutshell a common topic of Western thought that conceals an ethnocentric, and racialised, prejudice.22 For example, Kant distinguished between those (operarii) who offer a service (praestatio operae) and those (artifices) who sell their products, and he refers to the Indian blacksmith who goes from door to door offering his labour as unworthy of citizenship because he hasn’t produced a work that can be offered for sale in the market. Ideally, sales give you independence but, as political economists from Locke to Smith knew very well, from the right to sell a work it doesn’t necessarily follow that you have to produce the work you sell with your own hands; others may work at your service, which doesn’t alter that fact that you are the rightful owner of the work.23 Kant was in no doubt that artists belong to the category of “artificers” and are worthy citizens. For us, the overused concept of art’s autonomy is built upon this modern distinction between labour and work, and Arendt was well aware of that. Thus, Arendt’s prejudice against labouring classes echoes a political and economic discussion that is rooted in a specific modern development of market relations based on primitive accumulation (Marx) and the colonisation of the world by European imperialist powers. In any case, the problem is that in today’s societies, Arendt argues, the main purpose of every working activity is understood in terms of “making a living”—i.e. as labour—and Arendt is quite right in this respect.24 Ukeles pursues a strategy that confronts Arendt’s bias against labour, especially when it comes to considering art as a unique form of work. Thus, Arendt writes that “works of art are the most intensely worldly of all tangible things; their durability… almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes… is of a higher order than that which all things need in order to exist at all”.25 As Ukeles is busy cleaning the dust from the glass vitrines of the museum, she challenges Arendt with the labour that is needed in order to preserve the durability of the works of art that Arendt so likes.26 By mixing up both work and labour or, more accurately, production and reproduction, Ukeles demonstrates that Arendt’s categorical distinction is untenable. Ukeles works without leaving behind a product: “my working will be the work”, as she writes in her manifesto, and shows thereby that the reality of “making a living” is a social battlefield that includes both production and reproduction.27 It seems obvious to us that in doing so, Ukeles is actually pointing at social relations.
Ukeles’s performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973 stands exemplarily opposed to Robert Morris’s staging of labour around the same time. It also opposes the pronounced virility of Jackson Pollock, Mayayo points out.28 In her manifesto Ukeles explicitly names her sweeping the floor of the museum “floor-painting”, undoubtedly a reference to Pollock. So, Pollock’s paint can become a bucket and dripping on the canvas is transformed into applying wax to the floor. In the photographic documentation of Morris’s 1970 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, by Gianfranco Gorgoni, we can see Morris depicted at work: “gloves on, shirt stained with perspiration and dirt. In one image, for example, Morris drives a forklift, a cigar planted firmly in his mouth. … In another image, the artist braces himself against a large wooden beam as three men scramble above him.”29 Morris succeeded in transforming the exhibition space into a work floor. From the point of view of proponents of systemic aesthetics like Jack Burnham, who was the first to have recognised the significance of Ukeles’s maintenance, Morris driving a forklift into the museum is equally valuable as Ukeles bringing to the museum a social concern by grabbing a cleaning cloth.30 Systemic aesthetics subsumes the political and social dimension of the work of art under an overarching systemic understanding of it. However, it is the social dimension of the work what concerns us here. As Morris presents the artist as worker, he is embracing a bodily effort socially gendered. Bryan-Wilson echoes the following review of Richard Serra’s Sawing in 1970: “The museum functions as a vagina, the invited artist as a penis. The museum, a pampered spinster by breeding, has discovered the thrill of getting herself roughed up in fleeting encounters with difficult artists”, and she concludes that the assertion shows “how art making performed on an outsize scale using heavy industrial materials was understood as the domain of men”.31 Now, the statement could also be read as an invitation to perform a sexual assault. The staging of labour that Morris pursued meant an affirmation of manual work predicated under romanticised industrial conditions.32 In doing so, Morris’s staging assumes a patriarchic logic. As in the case of the “lads” studied by Paul Willis in his celebrated Learning to Labor (1981), the moving around of the beams and their installation, the toughness and difficulty of the task speak of masculine values, of masculine problems. If we have to rely on the photographic documentation of Gorgoni, which clearly shows to what extent the installation was conceived as a staging of labour—for Morris actually poses as a worker rather than does the job—we see that the difficulty of installing the outsize pieces is presented as a property of masculinity and not of production. Willis writes in this regard: “The very teleology of the process of work upon nature and the material power involved in that becomes through the conflation of masculinity and manual work a property of masculinity and not of production.”33 Masculine work is distinguished in this manner from housework, which is busy with maintenance, with cooking, washing, cleaning…, which aren’t properly work, but a “personal service”.34 Female domestic work, Willis continues, “is simply subsumed under being ‘mum’ or ‘housewife’. ‘Mum’ will always do it, and should always be expected to do it. It is part of the definition of what she is.”35 On the one hand, it seems obvious that in getting down on her knees in order to scrub the floor of the exhibition space Ukeles is creating an antithesis of the typical masculine performance of her fellow male artists, perfectly exemplified in Morris’s staging of labour. Instead, Ukeles shows that in the case of housework that has to be done before man comes home, the exhibition space has to be prepared too, has to be cleaned up before the public gets in, and even before the artist and his assistants can step in and do the “proper work” (of art). In staging labour, Morris is simply forgetting how much the work depends on “past labour”, how much his status as an artist relies on household work; in fact, he is concealing all this work and subsuming it under his artistic ego. But Ukeles couldn’t or didn’t want to forget all the necessary work that needs to be done. She engages in and confronts thereby the traditional picture of the white male industrial wage-worker that Morris so happily embraced as an artist-worker. Ukeles’s stance means a clear positioning within class conflict and class interests.
What Do We Mean by Class Solidarity?
Ukeles speaks of having experienced an epiphany as an artist, who also happens to be a mother. As an artist, she tells us, she enjoys the freedom of calling her housekeeping work art.36 However, since not everyone enjoys this level of freedom, Ukeles does something else. She doesn’t limit her artistic freedom to calling just housekeeping art. She takes the responsibility of calling art any other labour that lacks visibility and shares with household work the logic of femininity that, as we have seen, works perfectly in terms of the ideology of patriarchy under capitalism. Actually, she makes the case for it very clearly: “The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay”.37 Ukeles gets down on her knees and scrubs the floor of the exhibition space. She calls it art. With her performance Touch Sanitation of 1979-1980 something similar happens. Over the course of eleven months Ukeles produces a work of art that consists of shaking hands with each of the over 8,500 employees of the New York Sanitation Department (DSNY), of which Ukeles was artist in residence at the time, telling each of them, “Thank you for keeping NYC alive.” In his book Conversation Pieces (2004) Grant Kester briefly mentions Ukeles’s performance and writes that through her face-to-face encounter Ukeles publicly acknowledged “the positive value of work that is often either ignored or disparaged as unclean.”38 Together with the work of several other artists, like Hans Haacke and Adrian Piper, Ukeles’s performance represents for Kester a “subtle movement” towards “a more dialogical relationship to the viewers.”39 Thus, Ukeles’s shaking hands fits perfectly in Kester’s antimodernist dialogical framework. But, without intending to initiate a discussion on Kester’s dialogism here, if we look more closely, Kester uses dialogism to challenge dialectics by following an understanding of Bakhtin’s dialogic practice that has come to be fashionable, especially in the US. For Kester, a dialogue can only take place if the artist is ready to avoid any biases that may affect the dialogical process. The implications of Kester’s reasoning are important. Because, in this manner, Kester presupposes a form of disinterested rationality that only works if the work of the artist becomes de-ideologised, i.e., bereft of any particular tendency. We contest Kester’s view that Ukeles’s shaking hands and scrubbing the floor of the exhibition space are biased. Although Ukeles could easily have done a work of art that reflected the lives of maintenance workers or let them speak themselves, she rather practises a commitment to them—as Sennett would say—in order to act “in common”.40 In other words, class solidarity is at play here. Job performances that have been kept separate, reproduction and maintenance, are now given a “common terrain” of empathetic struggle under a single unifying concept, maintenance art, which in the context of Ukeles’s work for the DSNY points both to human life and ecological sustainability, the two sources of wealth that won’t survive capitalism, as Marx knew well.
The term class is highly controversial, and we do not want to engage in any sort of clarification about its use here. However, we do think that class is a term conceptually and analytically relevant, and that capitalist societies are organised in classes. While the traditional indifference of the mainstream art world about class—as if art could happen outside class relations, class interests and class struggle—doesn’t come as a surprise, it is perhaps more striking that in the politicised context of the 1970s in the US, artists like Robert Morris, and others in the Art Workers’ Coalition, were more interested in redefining artists and critics “as specialized kinds of workers… than in developing literal, lasting alliances with blue-collar labor” as Bryan-Wilson points out.41 As an artist, Ukeles does exactly the opposite. She looks for a collaborative engagement with the working class and, in doing so, she positions her work on one side of the fence, so to speak. Erik O. Wright quotes a poster of the late 1970s that shows a woman leaning on a fence. The poster reads that knowing on which side of the fence you are equals class consciousness; in addition, class analysis means figuring out who is with you there.42 The poster clearly posits class in terms of the non-Hegelian dialectics of “either-or”.43 It means that class consciousness is eventually a matter of choice as to which side of the fence you want to be on. And to be on one or the other side of the fence, as Wright shows, is related to legitimate or objective class interests; that said, to figure out what is legitimate and objective here is a thorny theoretical problem, which Wright recognises. Nevertheless, as Ukeles relates women’s household work with maintenance work, it may be seen as her pointing to legitimate or objective shared class interests that have been largely ignored and need to come to the surface of the struggle of the working class. She is pointing to that side of the fence. We argue that, in doing so, Ukeles set up the conditions for contributive justice.
Contributive Justice
In a famous passage of the third volume of Capital Marx writes that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.”44 Despite increases in the productivity of labour that may shorten the length of necessary labour’s working day, the realm of necessity remains, to Marx, being the basis of the realm of freedom. Following Marx’s argument, it could be argued that the realm of freedom is the true realm of human flourishing and that the necessary labour is a burden that will be overcome some day by the complete mechanisation of productive work. Theories about the end and the refusal of work share such understanding.45 Such view is also to be found with Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists. In a talk with Kristin Ross, Lefebvre pointed out that they were envisaging the complete mechanisation of work, since “the complete automatization of productive work… leave people free to do other things.”46 We see this rather naïve approach challenged in Ukeles’s work. Ukeles focuses on the realm of necessity as a realm of labour that can not be avoided, can not be mechanised or automatised, and needs to be shared. By extension, without sharing, there is no realm of freedom or human flourishing.
The US philosopher Paul Gomberg has argued that the real question in conceiving justice is about, either “what we get” in terms of opportunities and resources or “about duties and opportunities to contribute”.47 According to Gomberg, distributive conceptions of justice “tacitly assume that labor is a burden”.48 Contrary to the liberal tradition, Gomberg envisions a form of justice that is socially contributive. While the liberal tradition focuses on the self, Gomberg advocates a collective labour contribution for the social common good. Labour sharing is one of his key concepts in this respect: sharing, to him, allows for people now confined to routine tasks to have the time and opportunity to acquire qualifications and to master knowledge.49 Let us now consider Ukeles’s 1973 performance in relation to Gomberg’s proposition. The question about washing and cleaning the exhibition space can be seen as making visible tasks that are invisible, which is important in itself. But we can also think of it as pointing to tasks that need to be done, and there is no point in avoiding them. Someone has to do it. Work relies on such maintenance, and this is the most basic realm of necessity that Marx somehow forgot to make explicit as he developed the concept of necessary labour. Maria Mies is right in this respect; she writes that the vision of society in which “labour time is reduced to a minimum is for women in many respects a vision of horror, … because housework and non-wage work have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines.”50 Ukeles knows this all too well and she is extremely generous in this respect. As a working artist and mother Ukeles goes to the museum and does the job of the janitor. Although a “transfer of power and value” always takes place in Ukeles’s actions, as Patricia Phillips has argued,51 we realise that there is something far more important going on here: Ukeles practises a division of labour in which everyone shares. It is a division of labour that can only work with non-hierarchical reciprocal exchanges. Thus, artists could clean exhibition spaces, and janitors, if they wanted so, could become artists or curators.52 That is, routine labour and even complex tasks can be shared, and need to be shared if we want to achieve the realm of freedom of which Marx spoke. Necessary labour becomes a collective engagement. In this respect, one of the important questions of what Mies calls a feminist concept of labour is that those working processes that haven’t been replaced by machines create human social relations, and these relations, according to Mies, are crucial in order to reproduce and preserve life. As an artist in residence of the DSNY, i.e. in the realm of necessity, Ukeles achieves precisely this: social communal relations, of which true wealth consists, and her The Social Mirror, a collection truck customised in mirrored glass, somehow underlined this.
But Ukeles’s work also challenges Marx’s confusing distinction between necessity and freedom. The environmental aspect of her work as artist in residence of the DSNY, which already comes up in the last section of her manifesto in 1969, brings with it a facet of maintenance that cannot be seen in terms of a burden, but of social responsibility and collective sharing. Ukeles wants to share and contribute in a manner that is consistent with her own positioning within her artistic practice. Her labour then is fulfilment. The point is that in order to arrive at labour as fulfilment, working activities need to have a different economy of time, as Mies suggests: one in which the length of the working day becomes irrelevant. The question of a different economy of time is that the shortening of the necessary labour’s day is pointless if you cannot tell the difference between working and non-working hours. Labour as a fulfilment might take the whole day, and labour sharing isn’t experienced as a burden but as a necessary engagement for the common good. Mies writes in this respect: “time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but… times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed.”53 It is like those non-capitalist societies examined by Marshall Sahlins in his Stone Age Economics (1972), where activities like hunting or gathering resembled a walk, a picnic or an exploration of the terrain, and the rhythms of daily occupations laid the foundations for music and dance. Of course, European colonialists felt irritated by the fact that they couldn’t distinguish between productive and idle activities in those “primitive” societies, or, in Arendt’s terms, between work and labour, production and reproduction. But this is exactly the point. Herbert Marcuse understood it as the “ingression of freedom into the realm of necessity”.54 We argue that Ukeles gave us a beautiful practical example of a labouring society that doesn’t reject the realm of necessity, maintenance and reproduction, but embraces it through solidarity, sharing and fulfilment.
Final Remarks
We have suggested a reading of Ukeles’s work in terms of contribution and solidarity. We don’t claim that our reading is how Ukeles thinks about or sees her work herself: our reading is what Ukeles’s work has suggested to us. In this respect, our reading is influenced by a certain understanding of class and labour. Instead of emphasising the critical side of Ukeles’s work―her meaningful critique of patriarchy and capitalism―we have tried to focus on a different aspect that can be inferred from her labour; a positive side, so to speak. As Ukeles refers to “CARE”, her exhibition proposal of 1969, she writes that the exhibition space may look empty of art, but it will be maintained. The reproduction of the conditions of production that Ukeles refers to with her maintenance art has a positive connotation: the realisation that maintenance labour is at the basis of all labour, and to maintain we need solidarity and sharing. It is Ukeles’s achievement to have worked out both the practical and theoretical significance of maintenance, i.e. reproduction.
Footnotes
- Hannah Höch, “The Painter” (Der Maler), short story written in 1920. ↑
- Sholette, Gregoy. Dark Matter. Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press. 2011. p. 57. Sholette’s use of the word “pink” may be somewhat irritating for some readers. First of all, it is a nod to Lucy Lippard’s feminist writings, especially “The Pink Glass Swan: Upward and Downward Mobility in the Art World” originally published in 1977 and reprinted in a collection of Lippard’s essays on political charged feminist art. See The Pink Glass Swan. Selected Feminist Essays on Art. New York: The New Press. 1995. Secondly, the word “pink” may also refer to somebody’s leftist leanings without being a communist. Sholette has pointed out this use of the word in the political context of the 1950s/1960s. Since the beginnings of the twentieth century “pink” was used in the US to refer to those with leftist sympathies and the pejorative word “pinko” was coined to describe a person being sympathetic to communism. Not least, we should have in mind the meaning of the expression “red thread” that runs through a work. Sholette’s quip “pink thread” points to it by suggesting at the same time the political leanings of the artists referred to. We would like to thank Gregory Sholette for having clarified to us his use of the word “pink” in this context. Personal communication. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Art Workers. Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2009. p. 165. ↑
- Quoted in ibid., p. 164. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Vishmidt, Marina. “What Do We Mean By ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Reproduction’?” In Reproducing Autonomy. Work, Money, Crisis & Contemporary Art. Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt (eds.) London and Berlin: Mute Publishing. 2016. p. 48. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Cf. Barrett, Michele. Women’s Oppression Today. The Marxist/Feminist Encounter. 3rd edition. London: Verso. 2014 1980. ↑
- See Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. London: Verso. 2014. p. 47. ↑
- Vishmidt, Marina. “Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici”. Mute, 7 March 2016. Available online at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici# (accessed 2018-24-11.). ↑
- See Precarias a la deriva. “Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work”. Available online at http://republicart.net/disc/precariat/precarias01_en.htm (accessed 2018-11-24.) ↑
- Mayayo, Patricia. Cuerpos sexuados, cuerpos de (re)producción. Barcelona: UOC. 2011. Besides Ukeles, Mayayo examines the work of Eulàlia Grau and Mary Kelly. ↑
- Ibid., pp. 8-10. ↑
- About Gomberg’s discussion of contributive justice see section 4 below. Further, Sayer, Andrew. “Contributive Justice and Meaningful Work”. Res Publica. No. 15. 1 February 2009. pp. 1-16. ↑
- In Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cornelai Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (eds.) Los Angeles, CA: MOCA. 2007. p. 311. ↑
- See Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., p. 166. ↑
- See Benhabib, Seyla. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. 1996. ↑
- Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 1998 1958. p. 136. ↑
- Ibid., p. 100. ↑
- See Federici, Silvia (ed.). Enduring Western Civilization. The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its “Others”. Westport, CT: Praeger. 1995. ↑
- Arendt put it in the following way: “Men can very well live without laboring, they can force others to labor for them, and they can very well decide merely to use and enjoy the world of things without themselves adding a single useful object to it”. Arendt, op. cit., p. 176. On Kant see Williams, Howard. Kant’s Political Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. 1983; McNally, David. Against the Market. Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso. 1993; Wood, Elin Meiksins. Liberty and Property. A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment. London: Verso. 2012. ↑
- Arendt, op. cit., p. 128. ↑
- Ibid., p. 167. It would mean to yield to a fetishistic viewpoint to uphold that the social determinations that become a distinguishing feature of either work or labour somehow depend on the existence of a material bearer of such determinations, as Arendt seems to suggest. ↑
- See in Phillips, Patricia C. (ed.). Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Maintenance Art. New York, NY: Queens Museum and DelMonico Books and Prestel. 2016. p. 54. ↑
- Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE”.” In Institutional Critique. An Anthology of Artists’ Writings. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2011. p. 146. ↑
- Mayayo, op. cit., p. 53. ↑
- Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., p. 87. ↑
- It was Ukeles who sent Burnham her manifesto and he included the entire first section in his essay published in Artforum in 1971. As Ukeles speaks of the maintenance of the species, the perpetuation of survival systems and operations, it seems that the choice of words fascinated Burnham. See Burnham, Jack. “Problems of Criticism IX: Art and Technology.” In Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964-2004. Melissa Ragain (ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2015. ↑
- Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., pp. 88-89. ↑
- This is one of the most interesting conclusions we can draw from Bryan-Wilson’s study. ↑
- Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor. How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1981. p. 151. ↑
- Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and James, Selma. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 1975. p. 28. ↑
- Willis, op. cit., p. 151. We should note that the Arendtian logic of the “lads” is impeccable. ↑
- Mayayo, op. cit., p. 44. ↑
- Ukeles, op. cit., p. 145. ↑
- Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces. Community + Communication in Modern Art in a Global Context. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2004. p. 119. ↑
- Ibid., p. 60. ↑
- Sennett, Richard. Together. London: Penguin. 2013. p. 272. ↑
- Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., p. 138. ↑
- Wright, Erik Olin. Understanding Class. London: Verso, 2015. pp. 164-165. ↑
- Cf. in Shanin, Teodor. Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. 1983. p. 116. Harvey notes that in his late writings Marx is “drawn to a dialectics of ‘either-or’ rather than the ‘both-and’ of Hegelian transcendence”, which, by the way, is favoured in Kester’s dialogical framework. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2000. p. 174. ↑
- Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 3. MECW 37. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998. p. 807. ↑
- A paradigmatic illustration of it is the fascination with 3D printing and other digital technologies that will give rise to a mode of production with no marginal costs. See Rifkin, Jeremy. The Zero Marginal Cost Society. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin. 2015. For a critical view see Caffentzis, George. “The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri”. In In Letters of Blood and Fire. Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2013. ↑
- Ross, Kristin. “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents. McDonough, Tom (ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2004. p. 274. ↑
- Gomberg, Paul. How to Make Opportunity Equal. Race and Contributive Justice. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2007. p. 151. ↑
- Ibid., p. 150. ↑
- Ibid., p. 76. ↑
- Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books. 2014. p. 217. ↑
- Phillips, Patricia C. “Making Necessity Art. Collisions of Maintenance and Freedom”. In Phillips, op. cit., p. 51. ↑
- For a practical example see Gomberg, op. cit., pp. 76-77. Marx and Engels’s “naïve” views on the division of labour in communist society as expressed in the German Ideology points at it, and William Morris’s vision of communism, in which labours are continuously exchanged, isn’t that different. ↑
- Mies, op. cit., p. 217. ↑
- Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1969. pp. 21-22. ↑