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Yesterday I visited Queens Museum to see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s survey show. Her ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’, written in 1969 after the birth of her first child, distinguishes two ‘basic systems’: development (positive feedback—generating change) and maintenance (negative feedback—generating homeostasis, equilibrium). Development, she argues, is celebrated, while maintenance (although crucial) remains unsung and overlooked. A feminist, Ukeles sees that art is identified with ‘development’ and domestic work with ‘maintenance’, even though art involves much maintenance activity. However, by proposing her ‘maintenance art’, she sought to exploit and upset that simple opposition. In 1976, for I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, she invited 300 custodial workers in a Wall Street office building to designate one hour of their shift as art. In 1979–80, for Touch Sanitation Performance, she traversed New York city for eleven months to shake hands with each of its 8,500 sanitation men, saying ‘Thank you for keeping New York City alive’—a gesture linking class and gender.

For me, Ukeles’s show found its perfect companion in the Panorama of the City of New York, which is on permanent display in the Queens Museum. It’s an incomprehensively massive, 1:1200 scale model of New York’s five boroughs, showing every street, every bridge, every building. Of course, one of those buildings is the Queens Museum itself—it’s a mise en abyme. The Panorama was made for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Back then, visitors were transported around it on tracked cars (called ‘helicopters’), receiving a recorded audio tour. Those cars have long gone, having been replaced by a pedestrian ramp. In 1993, the model was updated, with subsequent buildings—including the World Trade Centre—added. The Panorama covers 9,335 square feet of the Museum’s floor, rivalling the space taken by Ukeles’s show. (While her show is on, it has been dotted with tiny lights, marking the itinerary of her epic handshake tour.)

From the Panorama’s god’s-eye vantage, New York is an anthill. Looking at it, it’s hard to think of the city as anything but infrastructure—sheer logistics. If Ukeles’s art asserts its maintenance logic down-and-dirty at a personal and gutter level, the Panorama asserts the same thing from above. Perhaps ‘development’ and ‘art’ hover somewhere in between, as the fugitive meat in this high-low sandwich.