4 Working machines, Manifesto for Maintenance

“Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” is a brilliant, three-and-a-half-page, typewritten document divided into two parts. In the first Ukeles lays out the distinction between what she calls “two basic systems: Development and Maintenance.” The former, associated with the avant-garde and implicitly male, is concerned with “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing.” The latter includes tasks generally associated — at least in the private sphere — with women and domestic work: “keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.” The problem, Ukeles notes, is that our culture values development, while maintenance “takes all the fucking time.”