Ukeles is King!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the resident artist for the Department of Sanitation, NY and my new hero! The unpaid position was basically invented for her 30 years ago and she has been there ever since. I recently did 2 presentations on her work from the 60s onwards, so, i feel pretty clued up about her and will now go forth to share my knowledge...Get ready!

Ukeles studied at Pratt, where i am studying at the moment, but was expelled as her work was deemed pornographic. This was in the early 60s before the feminist movement truly kicked off and her work was truly revolutionary. When studying at Columbia for her masters, Ukeles became pregnant. When it was visibly apparent that she was pregnant, her tutor (who had previously favoured her) basically dismissed her future career as an artist. After giving birth Ukeles became frustrated about the polarization between art and life when juggling raising a child with housework and making art. She decided that is an artist decides what is art, then why could she not define what she was doing as art (regarding cleaning)? Thus, the "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969" was published.

http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/pdfs/Ukeles_MANIFESTO.pdf

A vivid theoretical document linking feminism, social activism, ecology and an institutional critique to aspects of performance art and process art. In 76' she embarked on a project called "I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day" where she met with all 300 members of the Whitney Museum's staff and asked them whether they considered what they did as art or as work and could they ever perceive their actions as art. She systematically went on shifts with all members and documented her time with them through polaroids. The end result was a collection of 300 polaroids displayed on the gallery walls.

In 77' she took on her position with the DOS. Her first piece with them was called 'Touch Sanitation" where over the course of 3 years she met with all 8000 members of the DOS throughout NY. Again systematically she moved through all 5 boroughs of NY and shook each one of their hands and thanked them "for keeping New York City alive". Other projects she has undertaken have been a garbage barge ballet alongside the Hudson River, the "Social Mirror"; where she mirrored the entire side of a Garbage truck and the permanent "Flow City" piece. "Flow City" began in 85' and is a walk through installation (over a glass bridge) where people can observe the processes behind waste removal and so, raise questions about the sustainability of it all. There s a commitment to environmental consciousness rather than just waste removal.

"We have to understand that waste in an extension of ourselves and how we inhabit the planet, that sanitation workers are not untouchables that we don't want to see. She advocates having our facilities be transparent and be visited as a way for people to be accountable for the waste they generate"

P.S. Coincidentally my drawing installation teacher introduced me to an artist at the Creative Time Summit in 'Revolutions in Public Practice' who knows Ukeles very well and she has arranged for me to hook up with her at the end of November. YES!

Acconci Door

Actions speak louder only because of words,

So speak up and talk fast and keep your eyes wide open and your ear to the ground and your hands free and remember to rock a body but don't forget to rock a culture too.

P.S. I think Vito Acconci should be the supreme allied emperor of our Universe. I have found out where his studio is in Brooklyn. I am on my way to begin my career as a stalker.

Mary Adair

Sirs, i am still on a mission to update on works gone by. The next piece i am quickly going to update on is another character based performance. The idea for this was conceived at the end of 1st year when i came across a photograph of a woman on her wedding day, in Relics (antique store). The photograph was from 4os origin and i was drawn to it not only because of the Mona Lisa esque ambiguity to the woman's expression but

the fact that it was taken in charming old Greenock; which coincidentally is where i was born and went to school.

This was the resulting piece from the first posts regarding memory. I began to fabricate a life; a character; a story based on this image and for the woman. She became 'Francesca Cully'. I was so intrigued by my own visceral reactions and emotions to fiction that i wanted to explore how others felt. If i presented people with imagery and belongings and a story of this entirely made up character and they felt sincere human empathy did it matter that she did not exist? Is this the very nature of fiction? I began my exploration by becoming this fabricated woman, Frankie, and moving around Glasgow. With documentation i wanted to see how she might fit into this world, or how i could fit into the past. Through photoshop i wanted to create ambiguous images that could belong to any time.

Anyway, this was exhausted very quickly and never fully resolved and so stuffed away in some distant sock drawer of ideas. When presented with our 2nd year Public Art Project i decided to dive back in. I realised quite quickly that i was dissatisfied with my original project because regardless of how developed the character of Francesca became, my interest with the pho

tograph began as i was intrigued to know who she was. Public art and the outlets associated with it would be the perfect medium for me to embark on a campaign to find out about the real woman in the photograph. After contacting various billboard and multi-media companies i was granted a weeks use of the city screen that overlooks Renfield Street and is above Central Station.

The image was on a 4 minute loop with adverts for Sky Sports and for hypnotherapy amongst other things and stood out like a sore thumb. That's where the beauty was for me. This media screen is an attack on the senses; it is viewed by almost 1.8 million per week in Glasgow and the LED lights can be seen from the very top of Renfield Street. Flashing neon imagery and bold letter crash out at you and force you to take notice and then this sepia, outdated image appears asking the question "do you remember her eyes?" and gives contact details. Her presence is felt immediately and you began to consider the image is relation to the architecture, the other media and un-doubtedly ask yourself the question that is ultimately being asked of you; do you know her?

This piece was accompanied by an article in the Greenock Telegraph (local paper from where the original photograph was taken) discussing my project and hopes of finding out more about this 'mystery woman'. Sure enough, within 2 weeks i was contacted by a woman called Ailie Rankin who informed me that this woman was her grandmother. After meeting with Ailie and her sister i had this overwhelming backdraft of information and photographs about their grandmother, Mary Adair. Ailie and her sister were the only remaining members of their family and would have not know what their grandmother would have looked like at that age had their mother not passed away the year before leaving them all her old photographs. Kindly they let me borrow some photographs of their grandmother throughout her life. I wanted to reanimate them in order to complete this project for me. Bring them back to life.

P.S. Thankyou to my lovely friend Tom Hatton, photographer of dreams.

It's Been A While

My Lord. It's been over a year, almost 2, since my last post. Much has changed. Barack Obama is now President of the United States of America, Michael Jackson is dead, I found out I am not actually allergic to peanuts and subsequently embarked on my peanut honeymoon. However, much is still the same, I still appreciate a good moustache on a man, thoroughly enjoy dressing up and find deceased birds fascinating.

Since August 18th i have been residing in Brooklyn, NY whilst studying at the Pratt Institute of the Arts on exchange and in my 3rd year of Art School. In these 3 months i have managed to come across 3 dead birds. Beautiful little things - I put 2 of them in my freezer as i am using them for a performance/installation, which i will inform you about in time. The other bird, however, was still alive when i found it but looked severely injured. I took some time and deliberated whether to leave it or take it home and care for it. It was obvious the poor thing was going to die as its eyes were filled with blood, so i decided to take it and make its last hours on earth as comfortable as they could be, under the circumstances. Anyway, when i arrived home, police were outside my apartment as there had been an attempted break in on the 3rd floor. I entered my apartment and proceeded to fashion a nest out of a tupperware box and toilet paper for the bird. I left some nuts incase he was hungry. When i went into my room after the nest was completed i realised that i had been bloody burgled. Brand new Macbook pro (bought the week before), Ipod and jewellery gone. R.I.P. The bird died shortly after. I buried him in the back yard.

Anyway, enough of this. I am going to give a quick back draft on what I had been working on throughout my 2nd year. I was still pre-occupied and interested in performance and the female figure (primarily the discontent felt with my own). I was beginning to feel frustrated with females who were living their lives under the pseudonym "post feminists". I feel that i have been born into a generation x of women who are struggling to find their own identities, as there has been a prescribed collective identity forced onto us by the media The playboy symbol is marketed towards young girls for Christ sake. Is this empowerment? We have no sever unqualities to fight against like the suffragists, we have no repressed sexuality to fight against like the feminists of the 60s and 70s and we have no restrictions of feminism to fight against like the original post-feminists. What we do have is a very confusing situation where it seems as if all the doors are open to us (women) but this is not true. We have such a long way to go and we are constantly back peddling what the feminists strived to do by not appreciating this. We are lucky that we have had such inspirational women path the way for us but this has made us lazy. Women now feel liberated by declaring themselves "like a man". They can sleep around "like a man" or hold male-like attributes as being desirable in the work place. This isn''t what the early feminists were aiming for. We should be comfortable as females, we should be proud to be strong women by simply being who we are; women, without having to act "like a man". I had become interested in the glamourization (sp?) of porn stars, strippers and the sex industry in general after briefly attending a strip club on a friends birthday. I had begun chatting to a Romanian woman who di

d not try to sugar coat her situation in the slightest. She felt degraded and trapped. This became my piece. I wanted to degrade myself, i wanted to put myself in the most vulnerable position i could to investigate my own emotions (how my body and mind would react to being in such a position) and others reacti

ons ( to the uncomfortable situation). Baring in mind how insecure i am about my body. Ths became a performance piece in Blysthwood Square where i danced in my underwear, during the day, on a box until it broke and the police were called.

At the end of the performance i was left with the broken box. These remnants represented, for me, the attempt to try and break through my own insecurities and fears. The pieces were then cast from a silicone mold in plaster. The installation was set up in 3 waves; the black and white image in the background that you can see from the chairs; which are placed accordingly infront of the table (but not close enough to touch) and cannot be moved.

The Aftermath

I don't really want to wittle on about dead birds for my entire life (although it's going that way regardless). However, i just wanted to post that yesterday (2 days after the burial) i was walking past the pigeon grave and his pigeon pals were visiting...

Death of a Pigeon

As i walked home this beautiful Thursday afternoon i happened to bump into my good pal Joe, or Joseppieo as i like to call him. Anyhow as we engaged in some light hearted chit-chat we happened to pass a dead pigeon (i'm sure one of us had just mentioned dead animals, thus, this was quite coincedental). As i am fascinated by birds, dead ones in particular (just check my Annette Messager rant) i decided to photograph it. It looked as if had been petrified and was in a really peculiar position. Stealing it and making into a fantastic piece of pigeon taxidermy was on my mind. However, being the lovely people that we were, Joe and i decided it would be a nice idea to bury the pigeon in the park by the blossom trees so it didn't get eaten. It was, and still is, a beautiful day. A beautiful day for a funeral...

The pigeon as we found him...







Joe making the grave...



Pre- burial...





The funeral attendants (aka the pigeon's acquaintances)...







It was a simple ceremony...







Everyone was in agreement that the pigeon would have been pleased...



R.I.P Pigeon from 200?-2008

Speaking of Messager

She's not so bad herself...

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I always percieve Messager's work as being slightly ephemeral, everything looks so fragile. It makes me feel nervous and sad about the, perhaps, short lived nature of her work. The above piece has connotations of memory and a moment in time. I am still not sure if i want to involve clothing in my piece. Taxidermy is something i definetly want to have a look at. I can imagine myself when im in my 70's, alone in a massive comfy armchair with thousands of pieces of taxidermy around me to substitute for cats, as i am allergic. Perfection! Oh by the way, i have a massive tendency to get off the point... Due to this i can't remember what i was going to say.

Till we meet again.