ミエレル・レーダーマン・ユケレス Mierle Laderman Ukeles：「メンテナンス・アート」を作る美術作家
ミエレル・レーダーマン・ユケレスは1939年アメリカ生まれ。「環境」「フェミニズム」に加えて、今なら「エッセンシャル・ワーカー」「ケア」といった言葉でも語られそうなアーティスト。《Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!》では、家事労働の金銭的な対価がゼロであることも記載している。日々の生活を送る実感から、清掃など社会インフラや環境の循環を支える労働や労働者をフィーチャーした作品を制作する。
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) is a maintenance artist. Since 1969, the year she wrote Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!, later published in the pages of Artforum, she has devoted her practice to demystifying the invisible labor that undergirds society. “Maintenance is a drag,” she wrote in the manifesto, “it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.” In 1978, Ukeles became the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department, a position she continues to hold. Her monumental piece Touch Sanitation (1978 – 1980), for which she spent a year traveling around the city, shaking hands with every sanitation worker
and thanking them for keeping the city alive, is a touchstone for socially engaged art. She is currently at work on a project for Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, pursuing the first artwork to be permanently installed at what was once the largest landfill in the world.
The Brooklyn Rail, October 4 2016.
https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf
https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf
https://feldmangallery.com/assets/pdfs/Ukeles-Selected-Press-small.pdf