By Dennis Hartley

Rimmer: [pretending to be interested in art to impress Legion] Now, this 3-dimensional sculpture in particular is quite exquisite. Its simplicity, its bold, stark lines. Pray, what do you call it?

Legion: The light switch.

Rimmer: The light switch?

Legion: Yes.

Rimmer: I couldn’t buy it, then?

Legion: Not really. I need it to turn the lights on and off.

– From the comedy series Red Dwarf (written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor) 

That exchange is chiefly played for laughs of course, but it also makes a point about the subjectivity of “art”. In my 2007 review of the documentary My Kid Could Paint That, I wrote:

Whose judgment determines the intrinsic and/or monetary value of a painting-a local newspaper reporter, a New York Times art critic or Mike Wallace? Does the eye of the beholder still count for anything? Does it really matter who painted it, if you feel it’s worth hanging on your wall? Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays-Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, and do you care? Does it really matter that the Monkees didn’t write any of their hits or play their own instruments?

How about an artist whose “art” was literally garbage? Would you label their work as same? In this fascinating documentary, director Toby Perl Freilich profiles the life and work of performance artist/self-billed “eco-feminist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who holds the title of  (unpaid) Artist in Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation. 

That is not to say all of her work is garbage. Frelich mixes the septuagenarian artist’s recollections  with archival footage to glean what led to Ukeles’s decades-long obsession with transforming the mundane tasks of everyday housewives and maintenance workers into a form of socially-conscious high art.

Ukeles didn’t pop out of the box fully formed. Early in her career, she experimented with everything from abstract sculptures to inflatable “air art”. But it wasn’t until after her marriage in 1966 that she discovered her path. In a 1969 manifesto, she stated in part:

Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs=minimum wage, housewives=no pay. […]  Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.”  (Balinese saying). […] My working will be the work.

Maintenance Artist is a thought-provoking film worth hanging on your wall.