Endurance, Time, Guilt: Housework and Performance Art

This chapter explores how performance art has articulated the distinctive labour of unwaged housework. After presenting the problems feminists have observed in housework in terms of visibility, atomisation, and ambiguity, I outline the first attempts of performance art since the 1960s to render housework visible, social, and vivid, up to the end of the century. The chapter then examines the most important of these experiments, Linda Montano’s epic Seven Years of Living Art. Here, I argue, primarily through motifs of guilt, performance’s access to duration and private space is used to explore the gendered particulars of housework as a model for the internalisation of an intensive, self-disciplining, and unrelenting work ethic everywhere.