Dress to Go Out/Undressing to Go In
Date: 1973
Art Form: Installation Art
Expanding on her Maintenance Art Manifesto, Ukeles began exploring maintenance as art by documenting her labor in the home and as a mother, including everyday, repetitive tasks like cleaning a dirty diaper or dressing her children to leave the house. By elevating domestic tasks to the realm of art, she brought attention to the importance and difficulty of domestic labor and the work of motherhood.
This series of photographs provides a moment-to-moment account of the task of dressing and undressing the artist's children, four-and-a-half-year-old Yael, and two-and-a-half-year-old Raquel, in shoes, jackets, and scarves. There is a hurried quality to the sequence, which demonstrates the painstaking, repetitive, invisible work of being a mother as well as the intimacy that exists within her family. Art historian and cultural theorist, Andrea List, writes that "the beautiful interplay of bodies touching, intertwining, and moving apart subtly describes the intersubjective knowledge of a mother who is in the act of working out how much of her own presence and support to give to the ever-changing development of her children ."
In this work, Ukeles uses black and white, artistic photography techniques to show us her everyday life as a mother. The careful and creative, but repetitive and exhausting work she does in looking after her children is very similar to the kinds of work that artists do, and these photographs tell us this by using the serious, somber black and white colors, composition, and display we usually see in galleries and not family photo albums.
