Mikva Dreams, intimacy as a collective memory
The Mikva Dreams is a performance piece that Mierle Laderman Ukeles enacted in 1977 and 1978. Covered with a sheet, the artist reads aloud a text discussing the ritual immersion that is the Mikva. The writing describes a moment outside of daily routines, the act of cleaning oneself as part of a religious tradition, a sacred ritual. In the text, while she recounts personal memories and experiences of the ritual, she also calculates the amount of time she would have to perform the ablutions and the construction of the space.
The performance in itself is an important stepping stone to understand Ukeles' capacity to weave in intimate and personal accounts into collective and political memories. Space and the construction of the Mikva are essential to understanding the dynamics of remembrance.
In cities, the Mikva is built using an approximation of natural water, that is, water collected through the force of gravity, usually rainwater. The rainwater is gathered into a huge container called the “bor” or a pit. A building is constructed around this bor. The building contains small individual sunken pools for private immersion. Each pool shares a wall with the bor. Each shared wall has a hole cut in it which can be plugged up or left open.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1978)
The construction of the Mikva is extremely codified. Possessing exact knowledge on the requirements for the space to be suited for the ritual is a sign of belonging. It's imagery, and the location is also essential to the sacredness of the action. The ritual of immersion is only a ritual if performed within a specific space. One interesting point to note is that the space is intimate to the narrator, triggers memories. She has gone to perform her ablutions over and over again. She may have moved from one city to another, gone to a different country. However, every month she enters a space that is identical. The specificity of the construction of the Mikva allows for her memory process to be continuous, and for the tradition to be shared.
The space is essential to her personal identity, but also binding of collectiveness. Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist, describes the “milieux de mémoires” as traditional societies capacities to partake in memory work collectively and in a dynamic way. The milieux are environments in which small groups of people vividly discuss cultural subjects and share histories through story-telling. He deplores the fall of memory, as modern societies create “lieux de mémoires”, spaces in which people allow themselves to remember. However, to him, those lieux become sterile and static spaces. Populations begin to forget as they separate memory from life and experience. The lieux can be museums, or monuments according to Halbwachs, their institutional quality hinders from collective memories and cultural identifications to be part of daily life. To him, remembrance is not maintained, cared for. However, Ukeles uses space as a symbolization of a ritual, a sense of belonging and remembrance. While the Mikva is separate in some ways from daily life, through the high sacrality of the space and religious practice, its repetition through time, its inherent link with intimate experience bridges it closer to life. Her relationship to her body and the action of writing the process of the ritual down moves the memory into a dynamic discussion. The performance in itself, the writing rehabilitates that milieux, the capacity for individuals to exchange and feel through story-telling.
Repetition is very much central to her work both as a technique and a concept (maintenance). As a technique, while it showed powerful in conveying boredom, exhaustion or the oppressive aspect of maintenance, here it can be argued to have a positive aspect. Repetition is highly ritualistic, imbued in tradition, and synonymous with Maintenance in Ukeles’ practice. Repetition sustains, helps the upkeep of her body and symbolises regeneration. Every time the narrator immerses herself in the Mikva, she comes back anew. While it occupies a great part of her life and takes up space, as shown in the photograph above, it soothes the constant production her body partakes in:
Her cells begin to die again immediately. Her womb begins to build its blood-nest again. Foreign matter makes contact and sticks to her, silently, right away. But she has a chance to start again.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1978)
Ukeles’ early cleaning performances, manifesto and Mikva performances have in common the tackling of the alienation of one’s body. Whereas the AIR Gallery cleaning, or Washing/ Tracks/ Maintenance, can be alienating for both the artist’s body and the audience through an oppressive use of space (as seen earlier), the performance partly considers the body as an alien, a producer of foreign matter :
She goes in, naked, all dead edges removed- edges and surfaces that have come in contact with the world. Nails, loose hair, She has scrubbed herself. All foreign matter removed. A discipline. Is it possible to clean oneself completely? What if she looked into a microscope? Would she find foreign matter?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1978)
The body is considered a living organism which is sometimes disconnected from the artist’s mind. It produces waste, that detaches itself from the body thanks to the water. It possibly harbours “foreign matter”, microparticles of dust, bacteria, germs. The use of the third person is at the same time alienating and binding. Ukeles seems to have reached a point of reflectivity in her practice, as she elucidates a past action. It looks at the past, remembers. The rhythm here again produces an idea of deconstruction, a feeling of disconnect, surrealism. In the extract above, she uses a technique of word association. This one is polished, curated. The sentence structures create a tone that resembles a calm, self-reflective thought. The short “a discipline” conveys different meanings that give strength to the paragraph. It comments on the sentences before, showing the perfecting of a cleaning technique. It is a discipline because there’s an art to it, a good way of cleaning oneself. It is also a discipline because it illustrates a tradition that allows for control over one’s body. The repetition of questions after shows the Mikva as a self-reflective practise, a way to inspect one’s body, psyche, and past.