Social Mirror, 1983

Ukeles was a name I had never heard of before I went to hear this artist speak at Ronald Feldman Gallery. Born in Colorado in 1939 she lived in NYC in the 60s and became an artist in order “to be free.” Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko all influenced her as she began her career as an abstract painter. Her paintings morphed into thick bindings using cheesecloth (a cheap and readily found material) with poured paint and glue. She was heavily influenced by Dada at this time. Storing these immensely heavy works became too much of a burden and so she began to fill her works with air and then deflate them in order to more easily store them. These developed into her large scale air art happenings which often did not come to fruition. She showed the audience preparatory drawings for these works. One involved “softening” the Seagram’s building in New York because she saw it as a symbol of Apollonian order and purity.

When she became pregnant, she felt she had lost some of her freedom as an artist and became more of a “maintenance worker.” As a result she combined her maintenance role with her desired freedom and created “survival art.” During this time she wrote the “Maintenance Manifesto 1969.” It was influenced by the comprehensive city plan for New York. She sent this manifesto the Whitney and they suggested she send it to a gallery. Lucy Lippard, a famous critic, invited Mierle to be in the first feminist show in 1973 called “C7500.” Mierle scheduled a series of performances in the locations on which the show was on view. In the 1980s she created her most famous work, “Touch Sanitation.”

Touch Sanitation, late 1970s-early 1980s

Over an 11 month period Mierle spent time with an all male workforce of sanitation workers in New York City. She told them, “I am not here to judge you, but just to be with you and thank you.” It was a taboo situation but also thrilling for her as she met new people everyday. She was appalled that these men were not honored or respected but that they were the ones who kept the city clean. Every day she sent a tele (like a fax) to let people know where she had been and where she was headed. She even ended up in the National Enquirer under the heading “NY artist wastes thousands of tax dollars shaking hands with workers.” Little did most know at the time, it was so much more than that. She gave these men their dignity back in a city that had ignored them. Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta were two of her biggest supporters along the way. In 1984 she had two contemporaneous exhibitions: one at the transfer center and one at Ronald Feldman Gallery. On view were thousands of dirty gloves she had collected from city workers as well as a cross section of a landfill and a dump truck covered in mirrors. Hanging from the ceiling was a map of all the sites she had visited. She was attempting to make people aware of the waste they produced and what happened to it. Presently she is working on projects for Fresh Kills on Staten Island, the largest landfill on earth that closed in 2001. She feels it can be a school, educating people about the impact of materials we dispose of. She is also currently in a show at the Jewish Museum called “Reinventing Ritual.” In 2007 Ronald Feldman highlighted her work in his booth at the Armory and the New York Times critic Holland Carter reviewed the work referring to Mierle as “one of the greats.” A name to know for sure.