Introduction to the Maintenance Issue

In the late sixties and early seventies, curator Lucy R. Lippard’s exhibitions critiqued the commodification of art by “dematerializing the art object.” The works on display weren’t so much things as they were ideas, events, feelings, and experiences. By the mid-seventies, Lippard realized that conceptualism had also inadvertently signalled to the capitalists of the art world that ideas, events, feelings, experiences, and otherwise “immaterial” phenomena could also be bought and sold, and, even better, because they were immaterial, sold and sold again. Marx and Engel’s comment in 1848 that capitalism’s accelerated pace of production makes it so that “all that is solid melts into air” remained as true in the twentieth century as it did the nineteenth—but now the air had a price tag.

We like to imagine that our online activity is immaterial, ephemeral as an Instagram story, and yet the data that gets generated remains, cached behind proprietary walls. Our very subjectivity is dissolved into metadata that populates spreadsheets that are then sold to advertisers, instantiating a feedback loop of recommendations for fashion, books, music, ideas, events, feelings, and experiences. We know that the data streams that make up our online presence are binary code stored in servers somewhere like digital DNA, and yet our digital selves do not feel any more material when we step out into the “real world.” Glance across any packed metro car and it’s plain to see that the materialization of digital subjectivity is a craned neck and an overworked opposable thumb.

All this digital activity consumes space and resources from planet earth. Fibre optic cables knit together the world’s land masses, following the path of telegraph cables laid a century earlier. Always-on data centres hum in the repurposed industrial buildings of major cities and in nondescript buildings in the countryside, demanding, in the U.S., as much power as the annual output of 34 coal-powered plants. In 2011, Facebook’s servers got so hot they created their own cloud, drenching the electronic ecosystem below in rain. The condition of possibility for the latest technological development—algorithmic trading, ChatGPT, a rush of affirmations that hardly registers the next day—is profoundly material, expensive, and always in need of maintenance.

The poems, sounds, visuals, and experiments in this issue speak to the confounding contradictions of our digital present through the concept of maintenance: the maintenance of human nodes in digital networks, of the humanity that supports all digitality.

Jessica Bebenek’s videopoem “Reproduction” catalogues while simultaneously performing the tasks necessary for the upkeep of a domestic space. The simultaneity of doing while listing what remains to be done captures the endlessness of this work, a cyclicality that is visualized by the opening and closing shots of the blanket thrown over the made bed: morning to night to morning again. But it is in this quotidian rhythm that the piece finds its meditative moments, homing in on them with frank intimacy: a party dress turned into a diptych by the space between the washer and dryer, a memory sparked by the fading design on a coffee mug, a cat leaping off the bed. Bebenek defamiliarizes the to-do list, letting us hear it as a disembodied, weary imperative spoken both from within and without. Situating excerpts from feminist artists and critics alongside the everyday imagery re-emphasizes the reproductive labour that underwrites intellectual labour, combining theory and praxis in the way that Mierle Laderman Ukeles first manifestoed in 1969. After all, at the end of the day, the dishes and the laundry got done, and now it’s art.

Faith Paré’s “my little thingliness (SCRUB-A-DUB-DUB BEBOP)” is a sonic portrait of “the Black voice as instrument.” The audio poem uses multitrack layering, sound effects, sampling, and music to emulate Paré’s own range and variation of speech, a far cry from monotone recitation or predictable performance patterns. At its core the poem is a critique of the logic of commodification, of racial capitalism’s drive to make “thingliness” at every turn, but especially at the intersections of race and gender. Paré’s poem is kinetic, constantly moving out of the form it finds and into another shape, into another experimental gesture. Not even the alphabet is static. This movement, both formal and musical, allows for satire to exist alongside sincerity, and for the tradition of jazz singers Paré is writing and performing in/out of to be one of reciprocity, rather than linearity.

Michael Nardone’s and Andrew Whiteman’s collaboration “Tower 1, Tower 2” fragments the poetic “voice” of lyricism. Pieces of overheard speech separated by em dashes place us on the periphery of a dinner conversation about, what else, dinner and conversation. In the audio track, the singular speaker that might unify these voices is often eclipsed by a speech synthesizer, that piece of software that sounds almost like a real person, but not quite, because its patterning is based on speech in the abstract. Listening to the poem and grasping its concept activates a constant shuttling between part and whole, thesis and antithesis, a movement embedded in the non-linguistic sounds that are just on the edge of music, swelling between the first and second act into harmony, rhythm, synthesis.

M Gnanasihamany’s “This Will Work Better” would be a hilarious satire of immaculate yet generic contemporary interior design if it wasn’t so accurate, incisive, and poignant. “You are so clean it’s unnerving,” the poem tells us, and we remain unnerved. Scattered between affecting direct address and aphorisms like “Investment is both a dream and a waste of time” are low low prices, measurements, product descriptions, and IKEA names that come together to create a voice both familiar and strange, as alienating as it is appealing. The voice sounds so familiar precisely because it’s as distant and impersonal as the spaces we’ve come to call home. The paintings, meanwhile, subvert this alienation. With their soft treatment of hard surfaces, blurred edges, and heightened shadows, the manufactured interiors that are their source material are made to feel cozy, subjective, and real, even when “Natural light is, like all things, standardized.”

Katie Clarke’s “split screen” visualizes the cognitive dissonance of digital consciousness. The auto-populated search history reveals the ongoing process of self-maintenance, from finding trans-friendly mental health care to assuring that food stays good in the fridge, and, in the care for plants, to self-maintenance’s overall relational quality, in that caring for yourself always means caring for others, means “taking ownership.” Meanwhile, the journal sinks into the background, a smaller font, not even grammatical according to Word, a blue nag that Google dispenses with to encourage more typing. The split screen shows that we’re always doing two things at once, unable to let that which maintenance is intended to support take precedence. The idea that emerges from the synthesis in “split screen” is that the desire “to live in a queer utopia” is not “too much to ask,” but the only thing to ask for.

Jake Byrne’s two poems “The Wind Relapsing Into” and “I Am a Professional” surface the overlap of emotional labour in the public and private spheres; in public we keep to ourselves (you private person), while with sex this imposed privacy is shared, out in the open. “The Wind Relapsing Into” narrates a maintenance of the interior, the work of keeping oneself together in a moment of acute distress, when we might insist “There is no correct way to live.” Imagistic and deliberate, the poem lends the reader the same self-assuredness the speaker seems to lack. “I Am a Professional” carries this anxiety into the realm of intimacy, where the speaker reclaims this confidence while assuring both his client and the reader that he “[doesn’t] mind at all”—performing a double act of service. Byrne takes care of us, too.

Graeme Bezanson’s “Molehill Divination (2023.01.03 – 2023.01.09)” transcribes digital cartography, labour, and readership into a single poetic document. His conceptual premise peels back the layers that overlay all our activity in the twenty-first century, even when that activity involves maintaining structures and materials from the fourteenth. In datafying his work and literally mapping it onto another book, Bezanson shows that language, labour, and technology intersect in every instance of our subjective experience. From a limited assembly of words, something constrained but nevertheless new emerges, “an edited / greenness.”

Jeremy Desjarlais’s “The Integumentary System” focuses on that potent symbol of labour, the hands, punning on the French element in the word maintenance. The poem is as much about origins, etymological or otherwise, as it is about the “system” that protects while also constituting the hands we work with. Desjarlais finds a generative space in the impossibility of locating the boundary that separates inside from out, the present from history: skin is protection and body both, words are only expressive parts of a whole language. Definitions reinforce the boundaries between things, though “blood” that floods the space in between and that must be “sopped” will always reveal the contingency of this division.

The range of forms and styles in this issue speak to the many manifestations of maintenance. At once unassuming and ubiquitous, maintenance succeeds in hiding in between the moments that we believe make up a life while constituting much of life itself. Often deferred, put off, or ignored, the concept of maintenance today reveals a culture hurtling relentlessly forward toward more, better, faster, at the behest of digitality. In pausing to meditate on maintenance, in doing the work for itself, we can reframe this future-oriented propulsion as an effect of its own possibility, and begin to assess what is.

—Jay Ritchie, Curator

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A former editor for Metatron Press, Jay Ritchie is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing, 2024) as well as Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017). He has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst, where he won the Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry, the Skolfield/Goeckel Award for Poetry, and the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He has been the managing editor for Vallum: contemporary poetry magazine and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in SAND, Violet Indigo Blue, Etc., The Dalhousie Review, EVENT, Powder Keg, The Puritan, Spork, Peach Mag, glitterMOB, on CBC Radio, at the Newmarket National 10-minute Play Festival, and as part of a digital installation at the PHI Centre. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English at McGill University on a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and Graduate Excellence Fellowship, where his research examines how text and performance intersect in contemporary poetic practices. His current research project uses intermedial poetics to reframe central debates around text and performance by virtue of poetic practices not often explored by performance theory, and to bring controversies around the objecthood of texts into understandings of labour in the post-1970s shift to deindustrialization. He lives in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal.