Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art

Gender, Identity, and Domesticity

Barbara Kutis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429886263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte contemporáneo

This book examines the increasing intersections of art and parenting from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, when constructions of masculine and feminine identities, as well as the structure of the family, underwent radical change.

Barbara Kutis asserts that the championing of the simultaneous linkage of art and parenting by contemporary artists reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that she calls the 'artist-parent.' By examining the work of three artists—Guy Ben-Ner, El?bieta Jab?o?ska, and the collective Mothers and Fathers— this book reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger issues of parenting in contemporary life.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender, gender studies, contemporary art, and art history.

1 The Artist-Parent Identity

This book examines examples of the increasing intersections of art and parenting from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, when constructions of masculine and feminine identities, as well as the structure of the family, have undergone radical change. Artists have long been parents but rarely have they dealt with it as the subject matter of their art. I call attention to artists’ representations of parenting, their children, and the domestic as a critical and much needed reflection on contemporary life. The simultaneous championing of art and parenting reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that I term the ‘artist-parent.’ Artists have been particularly attuned to the visual documentation of contemporary issues, though at the height of the women’s movement, motherhood (and fatherhood) were largely avoided as artistic subject-matter, and thereby scholarship, for fear of being labeled saccharine, sentimental, and kitschy. However, the contemporary period has witnessed a significant shift in topics explored by artists and new critical perspectives are brought to issues of children and parenting. By closely examining the work of three artists—Elżbieta Jabłońska, Guy Ben-Ner, and Mothers and Fathers—this project reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger, perhaps universal, issues of parenting in contemporary life.

Building on ideas articulated and explored in maternal studies, gender studies, and postcolonial theory, I examine how the contemporary familial structure, marked by the greater emphasis on women in the work force and the shift to male parenting, reveals a multi-faceted but persistent conflict within gender constructions of mothers and fathers. As such, many factors have influenced this project. First, several exhibits dedicated to the art of women, such as Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2007), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOMA PS.1 (2007), Mother/Mother at the A.I.R. Gallery (2009), and Elles at the Centre Pompidou (2009), spurred renewed interest in the art of women, and included the work of Elżbieta Jabłońska and Mothers and Fathers within their shows. Similarly, a rise of exhibitions and conferences focused on the intersection of art and motherhood, specifically, Maternal Metaphors I (2004) and Maternal Metaphors II (2006) which brought together a variety of maternal voices. Since 2010, there has been an explosion in the discourse of maternal art: Natalie Loveless’ New Maternalisms (2012, 2014, and 2016) brought together practice, theory, and history as a means to articulate the maternal as a political and ethical position in both North America and Chile. Lise Haller Baggesen’s Mothernism (2013), a traveling multimedia tent-installation and book, that according to the artist is “dedicated to staking out and making speakable the ‘mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.’”¹ Baggesen co-organized with Deirdre Donoghue a three-day international conference of the same name in 2015 and 2017, which discussed the “topic of caring, labor, and cultural re-production.”² And this is not to forget to mention the many conferences organized by Andrea O’Reilly through the Association for Research on Mothering and the Motherhood Initiative for Research on Mothering and Community Involvement, which brought together interdisciplinary voices—authors, activists, historians, critics, and artists to exchange ideas about the maternal. Additional evidence of this growing field is found in exhibitions such as The Art of Breastfeeding: Modern Narratives of Motherhood (2018) and M/Other (2019). These are just two of many exhibitions held on the topic of the maternal in art. In addition, the symposia such as Oxytocin: Birthing the World, and Oxytocin: Mothering the World organized by the Procreate Project in London reveal the growing critical discourse on art and a variety of aspects of lived maternal realities. And while not specifically labeled as exhibitions about fatherhood, in 2009, MassMoCA presented a survey of Guy Ben-Ner’s work, Friday the 12^th; and in 2019, Gallery 400 in Chicago held Alberto Aguilar’s first largescale survey, Moves on a Human Scale. Both exhibitions revealed the importance of the artists’ roles as fathers within their work, and thus reinforced the need to explore art and parenting, beyond the parameters of the maternal body.

Second, several important texts about feminism, maternity, and art underpin this project. Marianne Hirsch’s 1997 study, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, provides the groundwork for the importance of the mother-artist-photographer in the operation of the familial gaze and memory. As she focuses her discussion on women artists, such as Jo Spence, Carrie Mae Weems, and Sally Mann, Hirsch suggests male artists, such as Vance Gellert, usurp the maternal through their own paternal photographs, which provides an interesting counter-perspective to the work of Guy Ben-Ner.³ In 1999, Hirsch edited an anthology of texts, The Familial Gaze, which emerged from an exhibition and conference of the same name at Dartmouth College. With essays focused on the presentation and re-presentation of the family, the anthology reveals the importance that photographs hold on the social construct of the family and cultural memory, and thereby maternity. In 2009, Andrea Liss published her important text, Feminist Art and the Maternal, one of the first texts to explore the work of women artists who engage with issues surrounding motherhood.⁴ Then, in 2011, Demeter Press published The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, which is an expanded text associated with an exhibition curated by Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein in 2004 at the Rochester Contemporary. What these texts and exhibitions have in common is their focus on women artists and mothering as it is articulated through the artists’ work. Similarly, Bracha Ettinger’s The Matrixial Borderspace explores, through psychoanalysis, how the subject and its other can be reformulated through written and visual texts by emphasizing “intrauterine feminine prenatal encounters.”⁵ In 2012, Rachel Epp Buller edited a collection of essays titled, Reconciling Art and Motherhood and in 2019, co-edited with Charles Reeve, Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, which are in line with Rosemary Betterton’s Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts, exploring the relation of the maternal, its embodiment, and art. These volumes unify many disparate voices, incorporating discussions of the maternal at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, but largely do not consider fatherhood. Strides are being made to be more inclusive of the non-female voice in parenting, as such artist Sarah Irvin launched the online database project Artist Parent Index in 2016 to create a dynamic tool that could be utilized by artists, art historians, and curators.⁶ Included in this database are artists such as Alberto Aguilar, whose video and photographic work often documents or reflects his life as an artist-parent. However, male parenting experiences and fatherhood continue to be lacking from this growing critical discourse which fundamentally relies on practices of care. Recognizing that women do not solely perform mothering or parenting, this project considers both men and women artists as parents, and thus posits the term artist-parents to characterize an identity assumed by both men and women who engage in art about parenting.⁷

Nonetheless, it is necessary to recount the rise in maternal theory, masculinity, and paternity to understand how the artist-parent is distinct from, yet overlaps with, the mother-artist. As such, I begin with Sara Ruddick. In her text, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989), Ruddick concentrates not on the biological or sociological aspects of motherhood, but on the diurnal activity—thinking—in regard to raising and educating one’s children. Ruddick argued that, “the work of mothering demands that mothers think.”⁸ This perspective, according to maternal scholar, Andrea O’Reilly, “enabled future scholars to analyze the experience and work or practice of mothering as distinct from the identity of the mother,” or in other words, that “mothering may be performed by anyone who commits him—or her—self to the demands of maternal practice.”⁹ Through this distinction, Ruddick argues that by thinking maternally nonviolent action will replace collective violence and therefore, as her title suggests, creates a ‘politics of peace.’¹⁰ This notion is poignant in relation to Jabłońska’s art practice as she carefully and thoughtfully considers the historical, political, and social implications of her actions and how it may change conversations regarding motherhood in Poland.

Adopting the definition of mother articulated by Lisa Baraitser as a woman who chooses to care for another, whom she defines as ‘child,’ I define the parent as a person of any position within the sex and gender identity spectrum, who chooses to care for another whom they identify as ‘child.’¹¹ Artist-parents, therefore, need not to be biological or cis-gendered parents, though as Shelley Park has acknowledged, the choice of non-heteronormative gender-conforming individuals to parent a child often places them into heteronormative constructs of family.¹² Basically, the perception is that if one is queer and chooses to become a parent, they are seen as engaging in the nuclear family structure—mother, father, and child/children. For this reason, J. Jack Halberstam advocates for gaga feminism, a “withering away of old social models of desire, gender, and sexuality, and as a channel for potent new forms of relation, intimacy, technology, and embodiment.”¹³ As Halberstam has argued, everything in our contemporary society has changed our daily experiences of sex and gender and it would “be weirder if our ideas of family, desire, the normal, the ordinary, the extraordinary did not change as everything else around us shifted, evolved, developed, and collapsed.”¹⁴ The notion that domestic work is performed by the female, the breadwinner of the family is the male, and that the family requires two parents—a male and a female—are ideas that are visible and challenged within this text.

While the artists discussed herein generally conform to heteronormativity, those constructs do not necessarily conform to the mother–father–child triad either. As such, in Revolutionary Mothering, a collection of writings by radical and queer black feminists, editors Alexis Pauline Gumbs and China Martens, advance a theory of mothering as an act of “creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”¹⁵ This text takes that final clause, ‘supporting life,’ as key to the artist-parent. While scholars such as Ruddick and Baraitser shy away from collapsing the masculine and feminine modes of childrearing into parenting because of the historical burden placed on women in terms of care, I, like artist Sarah Irvin, argue this is only conditionally true.¹⁶ This ‘second shift,’ as Arlie Hochschild termed it in 1989, is not always the unwritten second job of the working woman, as there has been a contemporary shift of men in providing care to their children.¹⁷ Furthermore, in Halberstam’s articulation of gaga feminism, the division of domestic labor does not need to be equal, but must be “acknowledged and chosen.”¹⁸ Care, as Milton Mayeroff articulated in 1971, is ‘the antithesis of simply using another person to satisfy one’s own needs. … Caring, as helping another grow and actualize himself, is a process, a way of relation to someone that involves development, in the same way that friendship can only emerge in time through mutual trust and a deepening and qualitative transformation of the relationship.”¹⁹ Caring, according to Mayeroff, is not predicated on gender identity nor sex. Rather it is the approach one takes toward another. Similarly, the activist artist project, Reproductive Media, founded by Cayla Ski...