Perpetual Upkeep:

The symposium Perpetual Upkeep interrogates the relationship of art and maintenance, including artworks and practices that make visible the upkeep of dominant power structures and the technologies on which they rely.

 

The theme of upkeep and maintenance considers how infrastructures continuously maintain existing structures of power, and how the crises of today have their structural foundations in the past. In effect, Perpetual Upkeep positions crises not as unprecedented disruptions and catastrophes, but the effects of planned systems, their maintenance, or, conversely, abandonment, and targeted destruction. For example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine brings into focus the integral role of civil infrastructure, which became the target of military attacks in the ongoing process of destroying and redefining borders. This invasion also continues long-lasting colonial politics that, in addition to annexation of lands and redefinition of borders, includes strategies of resource extraction and cultural erasure.

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Thinking with Max Liboiron’s (Red River Métis/Michif and settler raised in Lac la Biche) Pollution is Colonialism, which gives accounts of anticolonial strategies in research, this symposium seeks projects that look at “the bones of colonialism” in the past and present as pieces in an ongoing process, and as a “set of specific, structured, interlocking, and overlapping relations.” What do infrastructures of colonialism look/feel/sound like and what resources do they require? How do relationships that uphold such structures materialize? How do researchers (who occupy stolen land) responsibly attend to the bones of colonialism without maintaining them?

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Acts of maintenance often remain invisible but are never neutral, upholding oppressive and totalizing structures of power. On the other hand, such acts are sometimes necessary for sustaining physical bodies and communities. How, then, might we expand our discussion of maintenance to include routines of care and alternative ways of living? Or, as Mierle Laderman Ukeles queries in her 1969 manifesto for Maintenance Art: “[A]fter the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

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Sponsored by:

School of Art & Design Visitors Committee

Art History Colloquium

Student Art History Association

Society of Art History and Fine Arts