Post 025: Post-Continuation
towards the art of maintenance
Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creations; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.
— Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Contribution to the catalog of c. 7,500. Index card, 4x6 in. (10.2 x 15.2 cm)., 1973
Over and Done With
A.R. Ammons
Continually is continuously
from time to time
and continuously is
continually all the time. Earlier this month, TC’s prompt in our poetry workshop was simply continue. Since, I’ve been thinking about this gesture—one that is neither the impulse of beginning nor the satisfaction of end, but in the infinite space between two false poles. Both post pre- and pre post-. The middle of continuation requires motivating beyond the optimism of start, demanding sustaining without being tempted by completion’s supposed finality. The challenge, or perhaps invitation, is embodying continuation’s potentials without slipping into spirals of accumulation or endless scroll. In its most useful, the space of continuation can ground us in our lineages: by the fact that the art and the struggle we are doing today is linked to long histories before us and after us.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about the feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose body of work considers the art/work of maintenance.1 Experiencing the invisibilising of caretaking’s repetitive labor inspired several artistic projects in the 1970’s and 80’s, including Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, where she washed the steps of Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum, and Touch Sanitation, where she spent almost a year shaking hands with and thanking all 8,500 sanitation workers in New York City. (Indeed—thank you to the workers who paved our roads during this weekend’s winter storm.)
Perhaps towards continuation is part of the intention of maintenance—how our actions of repair and clean allow objects, homes, archives, relationships and even movements to go on. This kind of labor can counter the capitalist impulses for producing the new and disposable—I think of the “repair cafes” popping up in community spaces where folks bring objects to fix instead of buying replacements, investing in continued use.
The ways that this kind of labor is not only made invisible but always gender, raced, and classed makes it all the more urgent to engage in. If maintenance is care and maintenance allows continuation, continuation can be a gesture of care. Care is attention and maintenance is attention, too. In Ukele’s own words, maintenance is “trying to listen to the hum of living.”2 If a hum is sound continuing, let’s listen.
Upcoming
This Saturday I’ll be DJing Celebrate 365’s Celebration from 5-8 pm. Join us virtually!
The first of two virtual workshops hosted by exquisites is coming up on Thursday, February 5th! Join us at 8 pm EST for “Punk as Poetry.” Register for free here!
We had our first session of For Keeps: Archiving for Artists recently and alexa and I felt so motivated that we’re adding mostly co-working meetings between the quarterly check ins/discussions. For more and to sign up, fill our this short form.
I first encountered her work in a college Feminisms and the Arts class—hi, Terri!
Art in America, “Manifesto for Maintenance: A Conversation With Mierle Laderman Ukeles” by Bartholomew Ryan, March 18, 2009.