Artworkers

“It was very hard work. Did that make it real work?” Such was Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s reflection, twenty-five years later, on her Maintenance Art series of performances which included mopping the floors and cleaning the vitrines of a museum in an exhausting all-day marathon.

Ukeles is one of thirteen international artists in Artworkers, an exhibition which investigates art-making rooted in manual work and everyday life. It links the emergence in the 60s and 70s of art-making based on the physical tasks and industrial materials of labour with that centred on the domestic routines and crafts of so-called ‘women’s work’. Male artists of the American avant-garde of this period frequently chose materials and methods derived from blue-collar work as a means of challenging conventional ideas of the nature of the artistic process. Not having the option of being part of the mainstream, women artists had anyway to find their own alternatives to traditional art forms. Whether through using in their art-making crafts such as weaving and needlework, or fusing it with daily routines of cleaning and childcare, they, like their male counterparts, suggested the breaking down of the boundaries between art and life and the role in that process of the “artworker”. From this basis, Artworkers further explores the ways in which the process, minimalist and feminist art of the late 60s and early 70s have provided a framework for important current trends in contemporary art practice. In doing so, it traces some of the new artforms contrived by younger artists from today’s increasingly diverse experiences of everyday life and work.