Performance artist Linda Montano invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community.

Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Lorraine O’Grady, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Stuart Sherman, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann and Chris Burden. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change.

Produced on the occasion of the biennal The Lulennial, organized by Fabiola Iza and Chris Sharp at Lulu, Mexico City, a 9-square meter independent space in Mexico City, whose economy, “in the sense of doing a lot with a little or sometimes nothing at all,” is one of the founding principles.

With Zarouhie Abdalian, Francis Alÿs, Paola de Anda, Carl Andre, Billy Apple, Darren Bader, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Robert Barry, Graciela Carnevale, Ulises Carrión, Lygia Clark, Isaac Contreras, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Tania Pérez Córdova, Eduardo Costa, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Marcel Duchamp, Koji Enokura, Lucio Fontana, Fernanda Gomes, Alberto Greco, Simon Gabriel Greenberg, Matt Hinkley, Hi Red Center, Tehching Hsieh, Douglas Huebler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jirí Kovanda, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Jenine Marsh, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Chantal Peñalosa, Goran Petercol, Kirsten Pieroth, Wilfredo Prieto, Ana Roldán, Lotty Rosenfeld, Karin Sander, Ana Santos, Martín Soto Climent, Mladen Stilinovic, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Goran Trbuljak, Lawrence Weiner, B. Wurtz, Lin Yilin, La Monte Young.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition I’M NOT A NICE GIRL! Eleanor Antin, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles at K21 Düsseldorf.

The point of departure for the exhibition is a series of documents that have rarely or never been shown before— letters, concepts, and photographs from the Archive Dorothee and Konrad Fischer which chronicle contacts between the internationally influential gallerist Konrad Fischer and Lucy R. Lippard, as well as women Conceptual artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Eleanor Antin, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Adrian Piper, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, and Alina Szapocznikow.

• Josef Bauer, Körpergalerie,1974
• Dear Trisha Brown: A letter from Robert Wilhite
• Dear Mr Christopher Williams: A letter from Robert Wilhite
• Nina Beier: In tribute to time spent walking with Will (2013)
• Will Holder: Caption card (2014)
• Democracy is Empty, A conversation between Doug Ashford and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, originally published in Documents, no.10, Fall 1997, pp. 23–30
• Lucky Dime, for Seth Siegelaub by Willem Oorebeek
• Thoughts on control by Raivo Puusemp
• Jan Mot and Germaine Kruip in discussion about Ian Wilson
• A letter to Céline Condorelli by Tyler Coburn
• A conversation between Eva Berendes and Doug Ashford
• A conversation between Lucy Skaer and Willem Oorebeek
• Invited by Tirdad Zolghadr, Marina Noronha’s Curatorial Systems Manifesto (as a response to Mierle Laderman Ukeles)
• Céline Condorelli, Three letters to all and no one: strangers, friends, collaborators, allies
• Notes on a lunch meeting (with Willem Oorebeek) by Kate Strain
• Sarah Browne, Remembering Gray, 2013: In collaboration with Alice Lyons
• Beatrice Gibson, A letter to Axel Wieder (and also implicity to Will Holder)
• David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey: A conversation
• Victoria Dejaco: Lantern slides

Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposal argued for an intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling ever since. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi. Over the past four decades, Ukeles has pioneered how we perceive and ultimately engage in maintenance activities. The work ballets derive from her engagement in civic operations in order to reveal how they work though monumental coordination and cooperation. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets is the first monograph on Ukeles’s seminal practice, and is as much an artist’s book as an art-historical publication.

Edited by Kari Conte. Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles; conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.