Mierle Laderman Ukeles: No Material is Unpromising
Mierle Laderman Ukeles was looking for water, not trouble, when she set out on a tour of the forest trails surrounding Montalvo last year. “I always ask where the water comes from,” the Colorado-born artist explains, “because then you understand things.”
Drainage systems—whether natural or the man-made variety—fall into the category of things most of us enjoy not thinking about. Unexceptional and closely allied with dirt, such practical matters would seem to be the antithesis of art. Ukeles, now based in New York, disagrees. Her current titles include Artist-in-Residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Her large scale works have included a garbage truck covered in mirrors and a ballet performed by snowplows. They’re vivid reminders that our glittering cultural monuments, our pinnacles of personal achievement, are supported, iceberg-style, by a mass of unseen and unsung activity.
Although her medium is social systems, Ukeles works as a sculptor, trying to discover the underlying shape of operations we usually view piece-meal. Looking at the bigger picture first became a priority in 1969 when, as a new mother, she chafed at the different regard given to her work as an artist and her work as a diaper changer. Individual creativity, she argued in her Maintenance Art Manifesto, was not hierarchically superior to cleaning up. Rather maintenance was the renewable life-sustaining yin to innovation’s high-flying yang. In order to restore balance between them—and in her own life—she proposed doing her normal house-cleaning in an art gallery, with the products being exhibited as “dust works” and "soap sculpture.” Balance for Ukeles is not a static state. Rather it’s the point on which a phrase or a gesture teeters, offering sudden glimpses of multiple meanings and hidden assumptions: Dust works, indeed.
Ukeles, who has sited a recent project at an active landfill, is seldom daunted by unloveliness. But on her walk in Montalvo’s woods she found herself horrified by the oozing cankers she saw on the bark of otherwise stalwart oaks. Learning that this oozing signals the presence of SOD—the sudden oak death syndrome that has killed hundreds of thousands of trees in Central and Northern California since 1995—and learning also that infected trees might have only months to live, her first reaction, she says, was to run away. About to turn 70, she felt she had enough mortality to contemplate without dwelling on the potential death of a whole species.
As she describes her response to the doomed trees, Ukeles’s face elongates, her mouth forms an O, and she lets out a dove-like moan. That mournful sound and face eventually became her starting point for O OAKS OH!—the two part public event she is creating to address SOD. (Part one takes place at Montalvo on August 13; part two on December 2.) To counter her distress, Ukeles first went in search of knowledge. Those she talked with who are wrestling with SOD include biologists, foresters, Native Americans, spiritual leaders and activists—many of whom will share their findings at a LEARN IN which begins the August event. The day also includes participatory rituals Ukeles devised to confirm our connection with the oaks and channel that mournful O into an exclamatory one. Like a barn raising, O OAKS OH! assembles not only willing hands, but all available tools: science and history, art and faith, individual passion and public commitment. Engaging all parts of the community and both sides of the brain, Ukeles aims to turn the despairing, often tedious work of undoing an environmental disaster into a creative act—one that’s as inspiring as a new construction.
