The personal is political
Other artists such as Mona Hatoum focus on various forms of the abject and invoke
the political. This idea of the personal versus the political holds an important
place in my work.
One intriguing question which persists in my work and which is the driving force
in all my artistic pursuits is the belief that all my experiences are not particularly
abnormal or unique. Indeed, my desire to articulate, demonstrate and exhibit
my enquiry into the self, stems from a strong belief that I am not alone in
my experience as a mother. Whilst a biologist demonstrates that the building
block of all living things is the cell, I believe that the self is the fundamental
building block of a coherent and healthy social order.
However, my experiences, which by no account can be called particularly extraordinary,
lead me to believe that the self is mostly misunderstood or effaced in order
to negate, as Bataille writes, the presence of the all encompassing abject experience.
Bataille disregards the hypocrisy of exclusion and the hiding of abject processes
which are very much part of life.
It is as if the inherited social order is the inertia or gravity, which the
self cannot escape from and which acts as the agent to destroy the abject within
the self. The question that drives my enquiry is then, how can a social order
continue to exist if it negates the existence of the abject within itself? One
method is the relegation of the abject to the private sphere and the public
dismembering of its existence. The festering anger, the silent sobs, the closed
doors, all merge and are confined to the home, which becomes a sanctuary for
these abject processes. The abject, however, is no less a public function of
the human experience than a natural spring spewing out water from the earth.
The earth, which is the recipient of abject objects such as corpses and shit
is at the same time the nurturer of seeds and trees. Therefore, by exposing
and framing the abject publicly in my artwork I am exposing that which is hidden
in the self. Piero Manzoni talks about art production as a deep exploration
of the self. He says that being subjective while being inventive is the only
means of discovering objective realities, and that this is the only possible
means to communicate . He explains that subjective invention through the production
of art emanates from the self and that objective realities are the public manifestations
of that art. Communicating is certainly an essential part of why I produce visual
art and my need to bring the personal to the public sphere.
This is undeniably a political process and I believe that it is fundamentally
this political process which would serve to eliminate the need for one human
being to dominate and/or suppress another. I am referring here to a human being
who chooses to expose a collective abject publicly and is then ostracised for
doing so. Stephanie Sehlach writes, in describing Joel-Peter Witkin’s work:
“Horror is not contained purely in the aesthetic, rather, it is the fact
of its possibility that both terrifies and attracts the viewer. He [Joel-Peter
Witkin] pushes forward towards realities which the viewer might prefer thrust
aside but which must be faced in order to live honestly.”
Like Witkin, I aim to strip bare inhibitions in order for the viewer to live
more honestly. Returning to the reading of the maternal abject of contemporary
times, I will now look at and explore the relegation of the maternal to the
personal or private sphere. In effect, when a Modern western woman surrenders
to the biological demands of motherhood, she enters the sphere of the private,
her home, where the only social or public interactions she has, take place either
through the father of her child or her child’s support agencies. Here she
is not seen and a social blindness takes place. The unquestioned fact that mother’s
daily work has no monetary value translates as peripheral or private in all
social manifestations. It would appear puzzling how the tasks of a mother such
as planning, analysing, supervising, cooking, feeding, nursing, cleaning, purchasing,
educating, counselling, documenting, preserving, liaising, and budgeting are
not ascribed an apparent monetary value. And yet, all these tasks performed
outside the home do indeed have wide ranging salaries and associated benefits
such as retirement plans and social status. Therefore the maternal, through
a series of historical, biological and economic realities has been relegated
to the private sphere where it is allowed to merge with the abject silently,
away from the public sphere. One only has to take note of the media debates
that take place periodically as to whether breastfeeding should take place in
public spaces. Rita Felski explains how the slogan “the personal is political”
serves to emphasize that , child- care, rape, abortion, and the gendered division
of labour are in fact political issues. She adds that these supposedly “personal”
problems, which have particularly affected women, are fundamental questions
of power, and underpin the most deeply rooted aspects of social organization
.
As a result, I choose to express the public manifestation of the personal through
the body of the mother and to expose it, like the abject, as belonging to the
public sphere.
Whilst the maternal experience has of course been present from the beginning
of time, its female expression in art is miniscule in comparison to other issues,
a notable example being the sexual.
Felski proposes that the whole notion of female aesthetic and the artistic process
is inherently an autobiographical function. If that is so, where then can a
mother with the previously listed tasks find the time to practice a maternal
aesthetic. This indeed adds to the isolation of the mother and the enforced
domestication of her work. It is as if the weight of her role serves to deny
its self-expression and becomes publicly scarce and private: abject.
To quote the Victorian feminist critic and writer Anna Jameson:
“You must change the physical organization of the race of women before
we produce a Rubens or a Michael Angelo.” 1
In other words, we must change a whole set of values and social structures for
women to be able to dedicate a good proportion of their life to the production
of art and to produce lasting masterpieces such as those of Rubens or Michael
Angelo. Then, once they have been able to produce works of such grandeur, a
further issue is to keep the author’s identity from disappearing through
male dominated historical channels.
The imposed isolation is not only the product of her home centred experience
but also of the mother-unfriendly environment outside the home. From non-sloping
footpath kerbs to a total absence of seats in supermarkets, these public indicators
communicate a social or economic taboo for women as mothers and pushes them
further back in the realm of the hidden and private. Figes concludes:
“The outside world seems at times so hostile and difficult to navigate
with a small baby that many women retreat into isolation” 2
And indeed this isolation feeds on itself and becomes a terrain fraught with
anxiety, low self-esteem and depression.
The “personal is political” in the works of Fiona Hall
Fiona Hall illustrates well the domain of the isolated, private and female work
with its tedious repetition, particularly in her piece Untitled: table construction
with white pipes. Here, Hall merges the abject drain pipes of refuse with the
repetitious and private work of women as in Untitled: table construction with
white pipes.
The white drains are pierced into thousands of small holes. These holes are
designed and traced in decorative patterns reminiscent of embroidered or lace
table cloths. As such, the abject pipes are rendered precious objects to be
admired. She also employs in her art knitting, beading and weaving, work which
has no beginning and no end, work which can be interrupted a thousand times.
This type of work symbolises the millions of cells a mother breeds which merge
in the domain of the private sphere of the mother : the domestic.
This notion inspires my bassinet piece with its thousands of pins laboriously
and painfully worked through the thick skin of the bassinet.
©2001 Mireille Astore
1.Holcomb, Adele M. Anna Jameson on Women Artists. In Woman's Art Journal Vol. 8 (1987-88)
2. Figes, Kate. Life after birth. Penguin Books. London, 2000.