it's maintenance time

yesterday i went to replace the odor filter in our air purifier and through this discovered that there is a prefilter that i am supposed to be vacuuming or washing every two weeks. friends, in 6+ months of running this air purifier every day, i had not once cleaned the prefilter.

Rarely a day passes when I don't think about Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ A Manifesto for Maintenance Art. She wrote the manifesto in 1969, in her second trimester, in a fury, after a professor declared that once she became a mother, she would never be an artist.

Surrounded by artists reframing industrial processes and ordinary objects as art, she demanded the same attention for the maintenance and domestic labor typically performed by women, people of color and working class folks. She dedicated her talents to documenting and asserting the necessity, drudgery, and artistry of the thankless work of those who clean, tend, maintain, mend, and repair. Her manifesto demands the same respect and attention to the work of maintaining a work as creating one.