ABSTRACT
The very performance of conservation raises questions about how the same set of gestures could be oppressive, caring and emancipating at the same time, and under what circumstances actions of preservation can be realized or reimagined. By using Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s performance Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object (1973) as a case study, I demonstrate how the process of preservation is entangled in different political and institutional contexts, and what it means to conserve a performance about conservation. I argue that in this performance, Ukeles confronted different practices of care within the institutional realm of an art museum to see whether the redefinition of maintenance as a repetition of labor, coded in social order and emancipation of the care work itself, is possible.
