Maintenance Art

Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 1969. Typed, about four pages. The exclamation point is part of the title.

Ukeles wrote her manifesto in 1969, after the birth of her first child, while working out how she could be an artist and a mother at once. Her answer was to declare the work she was already doing, the endless keeping-up of a household, to be art. We should do the same in software and the maintenance of technical systems.

Two basic systems

The first part of Ukeles’ manifesto, “Ideas,” splits the world into two systems, much as the world of software engineering does. Development is individual creation: the new, the point og change, and progress — the bleeding-edge and the avant-garde. Maintenance keeps the new creation clean, sustains the change, and protects the progress. Our culture and economics rewards the first and pays the second badly or not at all. The line on this site’s masthead comes from this part, in Ukeles’ pithy metaphors: After the revolution, someone still has to pick up the garbage on Monday morning.

Proposal for an exhibition: CARE

The second part of Ukeles’ manifesto opens with “I am an artist. I am a woman.” She then proposes a museum exhibition of pure maintenance, in three parts I quote below, with her choice of pronouns:

  • Personal: the artist does her own household maintenance in the museum, every day, as the exhibition.
  • General: interviews with members of the public about their relationship to maintenance.
  • Earth: refuse and polluted material delivered to the museum and rehabilitated there.

It ends: “MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.” No institution took up the proposal, and CARE was never staged.

From proposal to practice

The manifesto reached a wide audience when Artforum reproduced it in 1971, in an article by Jack Burnham. Lucy Lippard then invited Ukeles into c. 7,500 (1973), a touring show of women conceptual artists. That year she washed the steps and floors of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford as performance. In 1977 she became the unsalaried artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation, and in Touch Sanitation (1979–80) she shook hands with all 8,500 sanitation workers and thanked each of them “for keeping New York City alive.”

Pretty far out — so simple and also so time-consuming. It gave me a thought and a goal — can I get 8,500 people in WordPress to thank a maintainer?

In open source

Software has the same two systems. Development is the launch, the new feature, the release post. Maintenance is the patch, the backport, the security fix, the triaged issue and the answered support thread, done every day by people who are often volunteer contributors, without sponsors.

The manifesto’s question applies without changing a word: after the release, who is going to do the work on Monday morning? This site exists to make that work visible and to get the people who do it thanked, credited, and paid.

More about Ukeles