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Sara Reisman - At Your Service

Mladen Miljanovic's I Serve Art (2006-2007) complicates an increasingly pervasive strain of contemporary art which is known as interactive art, and more specifically a subset of art that has a service function, which I will refer to as 'service art'. A critical moment in the history of 'service art' occurred in the late 1970s, when the term maintenance art was coined by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939 Denver, Colorado; lives and works in New York)  who began a residency with the Department of Sanitation in New York City (a residency that continues to this day) in an effort to break the barrier between art and life, following the birth of her first child. Ukeles' position as the unpaid artist-in-residence with the Sanitation Department led her to act as a kind of consultant to Sanitation workers in order to better understand the conditions in which they worked. If they could care for the City by managing its waste, Ukeles wanted to address their needs. In a project entitled Touch Sanitation (1979-1980), Ukeles set out to "face and shake hands" with all 8,500 Sanitation workers (read: garbage men) to thank them for keeping New York City alive. Also engaged in a Percent for Art commission with the City, Ukeles has spent nearly 20 years conducting reconnaissance at Fresh Kills Land Fill, which was once the largest land fill in the world, serving all of New York City from 2200 acres in Staten Island. Her research and recommendations for the site have been integrated into the master plan of Fresh Kills, which is being transformed from a land fill to a public park. This is an example of an artist providing services to fluctuating communities: sanitation workers, architects and planners developing Fresh Kills land fill into a park, and raising consciousness about our relationship between the waste we produce and the world.

Another American artist who has contributed to this notion of art as service is Andrea Fraser. Fraser's best known performance in this vain is Museum Highlights, (1989) which took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she performed as a museum docent, leading a tour through the museum, pointing out banal features like the drinking fountain as a work of great economy and monumentality, and the museum's cafeteria as "one of the very finest of all American rooms!" Here began Fraser's unique form of institutional critique as performance. The value of her service is directly proportional to the viewer's sense of humor and interest in critique of the institution. A more recent project - Untitled (2003) - now exists as a video, but began as a performance in the form of a transaction. Commissioned by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Fraser spent the night with a collector - they engaged in sexual relations - which was documented via surveillance camera installed in their hotel room. For this exchange, the collector paid Fraser $20,000, "collaborating" in the production of an edition of five tapes, one of which he was allowed to keep for his collection. Fraser was called "the hooker with a heart of gold" by Guy Trebay in The New York Times Magazine (June 13, 2004) and had to contend with feminist, and probably some non-feminist, colleagues who were appalled that she would sell out to this degree.

The links between Fraser, Ukeles and Miljanovic may at first appear to be tenuous. Ukeles is an urban environmentalist who finds beauty in everyday life. Touch Sanitation took eleven months to execute and involved ongoing discussions with the Sanitation workers who complained of a shortage of bathrooms. Ukeles made the Department of Sanitation aware of its employees' humanity and in turn the Department built new bathrooms that accommodated more workers. The most obvious value of Ukeles performance, then, is the outcome of improved facilities for the workers. But also the story continues to inspire a sensitivity to less visible forms of labor that make a system, the city, function. The value of Fraser's project is more complicated to equate. The benefits of Untitled include the pleasure - if there was any - between the artist and collector in their physical exchange, payment received by the artist, and a discursive outcome about the value of art and the position of the artist within the exchange of commodity. Of course in Fraser's case the more base notion of art as service comes from the idea of sex as service.

In Miljanovic's case, I Serve Art inverts the idea that art provides a service; he is in its service. Let's go back to the idea of art as service, which is so embedded in the values of the American art context. In the United States, a great deal of art that is funded by the government is deemed worthy of public support because the artwork serves a dual function: art education, art as community development, and art therapy, to name a few. Art museums in the United States generally have larger budgets for art education than for exhibitions, because art-as-art is too hard to justify on its own. Art as commodity sells in the market, but art as experience is harder to sell. It's considered a luxury because its value is hard to quantify. So Miljanovic inverts the idea that art must serve a function beyond art, and he puts himself in its service. An alternate reading of the title I Serve Art can be read, at least in English, as offering art, like one might serve food at a meal. I don't believe Miljanovic is attempting to serve - or dispense - art, but he is offering himself to his art through re-staging a military stance, that he has adjusted by trading in his obligations to national security and exchanging them for the development of his artistic practice. Here's where the equation becomes more complicated: military has been replaced by art, and now Miljanovic's dedication can take more nuanced forms, like the workshops he conducted for Udas Association for the disabled, and his personal attempt to decontaminate by spending nine months in isolation following his military service. Here we find self-service, or better yet, self-reliance, as an art form, where artistic rituals serve to decompress the body of trauma.

New York - 2010

  Mladen Miljanovic e- iserveart@gmail.com