This is an art object

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles concerns the everyday routines of life. In 1969, following the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” as a challenge to the binary systems of opposition that draw the line between art/life, nature/culture, and public/private. The manifesto proposed undoing boundaries that separate the maintenance of everyday life from the role of an artist in society. Ukeles became increasingly disturbed by the separation of the artist in society from everyday activities, such as childcare, household work, and other routine labor practices that she felt should be reinterpreted within the contexts of personal and political aesthetic values. Ukeles has stated that “Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials…”

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Ukeles, 1969)

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Sophia Loren - From In the Kitchen with Love (1972)

Women laughing alone with salad? Pshhh.  Try “women smiling alone with ambrosia!”  Or maybe that’s potato salad.  I don’t know.  In any case, we’re taking it up a notch.

Sophia Loren - From In the Kitchen with Love (1972)

In case you were really hankering for some more “women alone with salad” pictures.

Zanele Muholi - Dada (2003)

Ex-Purple girl, Jackie Chiquoine, with Marina Abramovic - Chocolate Golden Lips

Marina Abramovic and Ulay - Imponderabillia (1977)

Marina Abramovic - Rhythm O (1974)

Asger Carlsen - For S Magazine #10

Asger Carlsen - From the series Wrong