Maintenance Art 2021, or: Maintenance is a drag, it takes all the fucking time – Craig McCorquodale, in collaboration with Flannery O'kafka (Glasgow)

Since 1911, the construction company McCorquodale and Son has provided maintenance and repair work to various homes across Glasgow, passed down and managed by every son in the family for 110 years. Craig McCorquodale - the last son and an artist - breaks this line of succession, severing the sequence. “Maintenance Art 2021, or: Maintenance is a drag, it takes all the fucking time” is therefore an attempt at colliding different modes of work to discover if art can happen on the spaces he’s been born into. Inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation, and working in collaboration with Flannery O’kafka, Craig McCorquodale momentarily plays boss at McCorquodale and Son by asking his Dad, Uncle and the male workers to pause their maintenance work to progress his.

Irreverent and resourceful, the invitation to stand before a camera and be gazed upon in a gallery asks questions of entitlement, otherness, work and play. Conjuring images oscillating between vulnerability and force, we see people with and through archetypes and encounter an uncanny portrait of masculinities which appears as part family album and part work calendar. We see men drop their tools, show their skin and change hands.

Concept and Lead Artist: Craig McCorquodale. Photographer and Artistic Collaborator: Flannery O’kafka. Co-created with: Robert Dingwall, Thomas MacDonald, Tony McCusker, Eddie Brady, Dylan Kirkwood, John Parker, Colin McCorquodale and Gavin McCorquodale. Production support: Jolene Crawford. Graphic Designer for accompanying print: Andrew J Beltran

With thanks to the Live Work Fund 2021, supported by Jerwood Arts, Wolfson Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Linbury Trust.

Foto: Craig McCorquodale