The “personal is political” in the works of Mona Hatoum
A clear example of the political nature of the personal can best be illustrated
in Mona Hatoum’s performance Pull and the three installations Recollection,
Mother and Child and Prayer Mat.
In Pull The viewer was invited to pull a hank of hair hanging down in a specially
constructed niche below a TV screen. When the hair was pulled, the artist’s
face on the screen registered a feeling of pain or discomfort. The hank of hair
was in fact attached to Hatoum despite the illusion of the TV screen above it.
The TV screen and the viewer acted as the public sphere and the artist’s
face and body physically behind the screen acted as the personal sphere. In
this three day performance Hatoum placed her actual face and body behind a TV
screen rather than making a recording representing it. This is in order to draw
the spectator’s attention to the private versus public dichotomy and to
invite the participating viewer to question the realm of the public and the
private.In Recollection where hundreds of hair balls are strewn on the floor
of a room, she confronts the viewer’s revulsion with the personal bodily
item: hair. Hair invokes contradictory reactions from fascination to abjection,
particularly when detached from the body. A detached hair on a shoulder is brushed
away while a mass of hair on a shoulder acts as an attractor. Catherine de Zegher
extrapolates Kristeva’s systemic abject through Hatoum's works by explaining
how the connotation of beauty and identity, the most delicate, eroticised and
lasting of human materials is also considered unclean. De Zegher believes that
Hatoum leads us directly into symbolic systems of purity - that is abjection
and consequently towards issues of power and oppression. She says that Hatoum’s
work is
“a complex reflection on bodily pollution, involving the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, and life todeath.” 1
According to De Zegher, this work affirms the way in which social ordering is based upon behavioural patterns of dirt-affirmation and dirt avoidance. In choosing a personal bodily item and placing it in a public room for viewing, Hatoum has successfully highlighted the political nature of the personal object.
Mother and Child holds a specific interest for me through its implied violence and the piece’s relationship to the maternal abject. Violence is inherit in all my work and I am interested in Hatoum’s interpretation of this particular form of violence that's associated with the mother-child separation. I am drawn to this piece with the title “Mother and Child” as the two chairs have an unequal but inescapable relationship. They are angular, cold, and cage-like symbolising an entrapment, but at the same time there’s a symbiotic relationship between them because they are similar. They are facing each other and positioned too close for comfort. If one were to imagine people sitting on them, the body on the large chair would simply engulf or squash the person sitting on the small chair. It seems as if Hatoum in this piece has come as close as she could get to materialising and symbolising the maternal abject, the maternal separation and the conflict she feels as an artist within this separation. The conflict expressed in this piece is by no means Hatoum's particular relationship to her own mother but rather a symbol of what any person endures throughout their life through the three interlaced phases of the maternal abject..
These three examples of Hatoum’s work relate to my own work in the way
they render the personal abject experience as a public manifestation. Emotions
and gestures which typify the mothering experience such as the breastfeeding
infant, the cuddles, the entrapment, the claustrophobia, the birthing pains,
the visceral infant, the dread, the self-doubt, the sleeplessness I render public
in my work. This is not unlike the way Hatoum explored the façade of
the public rendered private with the performance piece of hair pulling, the
viewer’s and her own relationship to hair, her cage like chairs and her
relationship to her own mother.
Another work, Prayer Mat, which consists of thousands of nickel-plated brass
pins standing upright on a black canvas, fascinates me with its repetitive nature
and its reference to the religious abject. Here in the middle of the piece sits
a compass, which directs the person towards Mecca during prayer as is required
in Islam. Its satirical stance is rendered poetic however with its invocation
of the starry nights. This ambivalent work informs my bassinet piece particularly
with its thousands of steel pins piercing a treasured surface.
©2001 Mireille Astore
1. Catherine de Zegher. Hatoum’s Recollection : About Losing and Being Lost In Mona Hatoum. Phaidon Press, London 1997.