On January 29th, our ART 110 class met outside Piotr Kowalski’s NOW and cleaned it. It was a form of maintenance art. Honestly it was a nice change of pace, I’ve walked past it hundreds of times by now, but not once did I really get to appreciate and see how dirty it actually was. The experience gives me a new perspective and makes me want to appreciate our campus a little more.
What is art? Well, that question can is different for everyone. Anything can be art depending on how you interpret it. To me both, Mierle Laderman Ukeles cleaning the steps of an art museum and Richard Serra flinging molten lead against the walls of an art museum, can be considered art. Richard Serra’s work was intended to be put in a museum and seen by others, while Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ was “maintenance art” that invovled cleaning the steps. However they both wanted to “display” their work, just in different ways.
I think Laderman’s work is considered art and not just because it was done in front of an art museum, but more because of what she was trying to do. The little things people do is art. Being hired or paid for it doesn’t change the message she tries to make. It’s about the struggles and how hard women work. Basketball can be considered an art in so many different ways but just because people get paid doesn’t mean it’s no longer art. I think anything could be art. By definition, art is a anything that expresses the author’s imaginative, conceptual, or technical skills. What makes an act art is what the person doing it is trying to express. All paintings in one way or another is art. Even house painting. When you’re house painting you can be expressing a number of different things such as what your favorite color might be or what mood you want the room to have. Canvas art may not be expressing emotion, but it can express the technical skill of the artist when recreating an image or their creativity.
I don’t think Jenifer Lopez or Mierle Laderman Ukeles has really made me think differently of specifically “women’s work”. I’ve always thought that work in general is an art regardless of who is doing it. I think all work is one way or another is art and it’s not subjective to women. It’s just something about hard work that’s inspiring which is why I’d call it art.
During class we walked about the women who cleaned Donald Trump’s star. I thought it was really interesting and could also consider that art because of the message she tried to send. I’m not really too sure about whose star I would want to clean. Famous people that get a star have never made a huge lasting impression. Maybe shrek.
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