Can the Artist Give You Freedom? Do We Share Anything?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

First of all, I would like to say that I think you're all really lucky to be here. Looking at this program I see all sorts of people that I'm dying to meet and listen to, and I’m frustrated at my being so tied up. I congratulate you for putting this together. This is public art, right here and now. When you pick up the booklet in your hand, it makes public art feel so real, and substantial. Actually, when you move to other parts of the art world, you realize that knowledge of public art is lacking. In many universities and art departments, a basic knowledge of public art—what has happened already and what's going on now—is missing. It's an amazing thing to have all these people together in one place.

This is what I'm going to do. There's a 24-minute television program that was produced by the Annenberg Foundation, together with Oregon Public Broadcasting. A jury selected ten artists in the United States to comprise a piece called "Works In Progress," and I'm one of the artists. I have mixed feelings about the tape. I participated in some of it, but past a certain point, it was taken out of my hands. But it will give you some basic information, as well as a sense of scale, about my work. I would like you to watch it critically. It was made for public television, but it was made to be shown in schools as well, as an educational device. Many kids nowadays go through school without any art education whatsoever. The Annenberg Foundation was interested in this project as a way of compressing a lot of what's going on in contemporary art for general audiences and students alike. So, I'm asking you to look at the tape to gain information about myself, but also as a piece about art for the general public. After that, I would like to show some slides of a piece I did at L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art last year, in a show called "Uncommon Sense." The piece I did is called "Unburning Freedom Hall." It's not on the video but I would like you to see the images of it, and then we'll talk.

(a video program about Ukeles' work, focusing on the "Fresh Kills Landfill," is shown)

I was invited to be in a group show called "Uncommon Sense." The curators were Julie Lazar, the director of experimental programs at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Tom Finkelpearl, who is the program director of Skowhegan School of Art. He's been a champion of public art for many, many years. This was an attempt to turn the museum itself into a site of public art. We worked on this show for several years. I had been in Los Angeles only once before. I grew up in Colorado, but I've spent most of my time, aside from travel, living in New York. When I thought of Los Angeles, I thought of civil disturbances: of (the Watts riots of) 1965 and the uprisings in 1992. I did some research about the difference between Watts in '65, which was a tidy little self-destructive riot that stayed in Watts, and the events of 1992, which spread all over Los Angeles. The research says this was the worst, most destructive civil disturbance in the history of the United States. People call it the "riot," "rebellion," or "uprising," depending on their politics. I saw it as this vastly frightening thing that I wanted to deal with. I wanted to deal with this hatred of the other that ends up being expressed in destructive violence. But I also was very mindful of my role as an outsider coming in to L.A. to discuss these topics and events. Who am I to come in and talk about this? So, in order to make the connection, I started this project by talking about an occurrence that happened in Philadelphia, not Los Angeles. The story that was the kernel of "Unburning Freedom Hall" came from a true event in 1838. Three groups of people in Philadelphia were unable even to rent a room to hold their meetings. Of the three groups, one consisted of women, one of African Americans, and the last was the Abolitionists. Even though Philadelphia is the city of the rhetoric of freedom, the home of the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, and is the City of Brotherly Love, they couldn't even rent a room. So they got together and joined in common cause. They got $20 each from 2,000 citizens, and built their own meeting-place. It was called Pennsylvania Hall, but amongst themselves they referred to it as "Freedom Hall." It's sole purpose was to be a Temple of Free Speech. It was a building full of empty rooms: big rooms for big meetings, medium sized rooms for medium-sized meetings and little rooms for little meetings. I had known this story for many years and it always sat in my heart. What caught my interest was that these people, when they built Freedom Hall, didn't build a ratty little something somewhere on the side. They built it near the site and on the scale of Independence Hall. The historical records maintain that they utilized the finest materials of the day. They had great ambition for their vision. They believed that this was the way of this country, that it could continually reinvent itself and open itself up so that everybody could be free: or else it's not a free country. The first day that it opened, on May 14th, 1838, they had conferences for all three groups. People came from many states of the eastern seaboard. Immediately, from the first day, panic set in around the city. People were frightened, even hysterical, about these three groups gathering and setting their own definition of who they were. This made people frantic. They started throwing rocks and broke most of the the windows of this building. The groups went to the Mayor and asked for protection against the mob. The Mayor agreed to help them. He came to the front of "Freedom Hall" and suggested that they cancel the meetings for the night, lock it up and give him the keys. They trusted him, but when he took the keys, he locked the doors and then said to the mob of people, who had not dissipated, "You will be my police." The mob burnt Freedom Hall to the ground. This drawing shows it an empty shell, but in fact nothing remained. It was an American Dream come true, but it lasted only three days and was never rebuilt. I thought maybe I could talk about what happened in Philadelphia, since it was not a "Los Angeles thing", but a "United States thing," a thing about this whole violent country. I thought perhaps by focusing elsewhere, maybe it would create enough space that people could deal with it. The piece had two major components: the first dealt with journeys outside the museum to build a coalition, just like the coalition that built Freedom Hall. The coalition that I sought to gather included the people essential to keeping a city alive—street maintenance workers, sanitation workers and firefighters. Without those three kinds of workers, we couldn't support a common place for us all to live in. To stretch out the dimension in time from the far past of 1838 into the future, I included kids in high school. I wanted to ask, "What are we leaving for kids? Are we simply leaving a heritage of fire that destroys?" I made over 20 journeys to negotiate with the city and attended many meetings. I said, "If you accept my proposal to collaborate on a piece with city workers, then I need you to give real currency." We negotiated that I would be able to make this artwork with real city time and work space. It required over 370 work hours times hundreds of workers, which is equal to a tremendous amount of money. We would show up at five in the morning in the yard of a sanitation or street worker, bring tables and materials and I would show slides of my work. I showed the people that I had worked with others just like them all over the world. I would then invite them to participate in "unburnings." I gave them empty vessels with which to create offerings to the artwork, which ended up involving over a thousand people. We created these sort of mobile studios. I did this in three different areas of Los Angeles; one was in South Central, which was the locus of the riots of 1992. We set up in a firehouse near the location of the Rodney King incident that originally sparked those riots. These firefighters had endured incredibly dangerous conditions during the disturbances. People were shooting at them in a blind rage against any and all representatives of city government. This forced them to drive through the fires with their lights off, to avoid being such a target. The police abandoned them and gave them no protection whatsoever. All of the fury that was originally directed at the police was turned onto the firefighters. It was total rupture of the social fabric. They felt abandoned by everyone—the mayor, the police, the community. Since then they have taken years to consciously knit back the social fabric. They are among the most admirable people I have ever met. Since the sixties, firehouses had become virtual fortresses, complete with barbed wire and high walls, etc. But the chief of this particular one instituted a policy to open all the doors and to allow kids from the primary school across the street to stop in and talk to the firemen. The men got to know the kids, talk to them about their lives and their school work. They have defined themselves as ever present members of the community. It is a great creative invention.

Through intense negotiation, I also managed to obtain permission to light fires in three different high schools. I encouraged people to approach it as a communal ritual. For instance, they wrote down things that they hated and then burned them up. This slide is the "unburning" of an elderly street cleaner. He took a golf ball and a Garfield cartoon character and surrounded them with flames. It reads, "Trying to survive the flames of inequality on unstable footing." This next one was made by a boy in high school. It reads "I dream in a bed. Less fortunate people don't have a bed, so I'm offering this bed to them so they'll be able to dream in a bed." He sewed a little pink satin quilt, made the bed and put it in the jar.

I insisted in my negotiations that I come back to the sites many times. It was a way to truly involve myself in these people's realities. When I came to the firehouse the second time, a man, named Antoine, saw me and headed out the door. I was told that he had left something for me. It was an "unburning" that is a memorial to his brother, also a firefighter, who was killed in the line of duty. Up against the side of the jar is a photograph of the 500 firefighters who came to his funeral. Inside the jar is a glove that reads "E.Q." His brother was so strong that they called him "Earthquake." Also inside is his own personal Bible.

As an artist, you work and work and work, often not inside the art world but in the "real" world and often come up against the issues of crossing boundary lines, of what is contemporary art, etc. You have to have a lot of faith. But then people give you things without asking, like Antoine gave me this "unburning." I was told that, in the firehouse, death and disaster are common topics of discussion, which serves to shed and expose the trauma quickly so that the men can go on and face the next fire. But Antoine was still unable to talk about his brother. Whatever Antoine thinks is art, he made a decision that it's good enough for him to give me his brother's glove. It's important to know that gloves have an almost creepy significance among firefighters and aren't surrendered easily. And to give me his Bible.

The second component of the work was going out into L.A. to ask people in the recycling industry bring in what ended up to be 28 trailers filled with 1 million pounds of crushed glass into the museum. My piece dealt with the opposition between shattered glass and whole vessels, represented by the unburnings. The piles of glass looked like air and water, almost nothing. We built encircling mounds. It is significant that the medium one uses to change shattered glass back into whole vessels is fire. Fire, in this case, had a constructive quality, whereas the fire I was discussing before had a destructive effect. The glass was accumulated over a number of months. I was maniacally washing it, to make it glisten and shine. I wanted to create a space out of walls and mounds that was in a state of uncertainty as to which way it would go: would it continue on up, or would it get burnt down once again? Some of the mounds were the traditional kind that are created in recycling yards and others were created almost by hand.

There was also a series of eight formal "Peace Talks" around a cobalt blue, stained glass, circular peace table that was the heart of my installation. Each peace talk was led by a local peace hero, whom I invited from a list of names I solicited from over a hundred local community groups all over L.A. One leader, Marsha Choo, who was one of the heads of the African American/Pacific Peace Alliance that had been created right in the middle of the uprising of 1992, spoke about how, even though she was so terrified that she lost 15 pounds in 7 days, she was determined to keep on trying to make peace. Upon making her own "unburning" five years later, Marsha said she was able to let go of a knot in her stomach that had sat there since 1992. Her own sister, sitting at the peace table across from Marsha, burst out crying and confessed that she had never been able to tell her how much she admired her for her great courage except here in this public art setting. There were many transforming moments in "Unburning Freedom Hall."

Synopsis by Carl Pope Jr.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ multimedia installations and performances have for the last thirty years raised public awareness of the invisible structures of cleaning and maintenance, traditionally considered women’s work. Making a feminist statement, Ukeles declared her housework as art, moving her private sanitation practices into the public sphere as a way of disrupting the social hierarchies surrounding women’s work and the feminized occupations of the maid, clean-up lady and garbage man.

Ukeles began her lecture by breaking down the binary, hierarchical opposition between lecturer and student by asking the students to introduce themselves. She then proceeded with her lecture by giving the audience background information about a 24-minute video documentary on her work. The documentary was a segment of a 10-part series called "Works in Progress" about contemporary artists. The series was produced in 1997 for public television by the Annenberg Foundation, together with Oregon Public Broadcasting.

"Works in Progress" provides a "compressed version of contemporary art intended for the educational instruction of the general audience and students," Ukeles said. She verbalized mixed feelings about the documentary but showed it anyway because it gave basic information about her work and provided viewers with a sense of her projects’ immense scale.

While viewing the video, I understood clearly why Ukeles feels ambivalent about the documentary. The video presents Ukeles as a "mad clean-up lady," instead of a feminist and critical thinker engaged in elevating the lowered status of those who clean up the mess that society makes.

After the video, Ukeles showed slide documentation of her most recent project, "Unburning Freedom Hall." The difference between the explanation of Ukeles’ work in the video and her own words in the slide presentation was glaring. Overall, her lecture illustrated the opposition that Ukeles constantly deals with in confronting patriarchal practices with her art and its public dissemination.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles responds:

Carl Pope defines me and my work in categories that I find too pre-determined and narrow. He criticizes the Annenberg video for not presenting me as "a feminist and critical thinker..." as if that is my main job. What he is leaving out is mentioning that I am an artist first. It is, I believe, primarily as an artist making art that what I try to do becomes worthwhile. I set up situations that are "in" "with" not "outside" trying to elevate the status of others. It is my status as much as anyone's that I'm trying to free up.