The Problem of the Maternal
Maternal Subjectivity and the Artist-Mother Divide. 2012.
There is a distinct difference between ‘motherhood’, the daily experience of chores and pleasures lived by mothers, and the ‘maternal’, a concept referring to the psychic dimension of feeling and emotion. The idea of maternal subjectivity, the process through which a particular identity is constructed through the experienced contradictions of motherhood, is relatively unexplored within visual culture. The representation of maternal subjectivity within art, and the deconstruction of the historically constructed image of motherhood are sparse within the growing body of Feminist Art Practice. It has been over thirty years since Lucy R. Lippard questioned the absence of motherhood within Feminist Art. “[N]o women dealing with their own bodies and biographies have introduced pregnancy or childbirth as a major image” (Lippard 1976 : 112). She begins to question the reasons for the lack of motherhood in art, and the lack of mother-artists. “Is this because many of these artists are young and have yet to have children? Or because women artists have traditionally either refused to have children or have hidden them away in order to be taken seriously in a world that accuses wives and mothers of being part-time artists?” (ibid.). In order to begin to answer these questions, we must not only look at the role of the maternal within art practices but also within the realm of the family and the socially constructed identity of ‘motherhood’.
The roots of our mother image, a figure that is all-powerful, all-loving and forgiving and responsible for our ultimate wellbeing have been perpetuated by the cultural image of the mother as selfless caregiver. Chodorow and Contratto note that many feminist and conservative writers shared the view that “perfection would result if only a mother would devote her life completely to her child” (Chodorow & Contratto 1982: 65). This attitude forms a powerful root of the mother image leading to a rejection of motherhood for many female artists. It also poses the question of sacrifice; do female artists feel they have to make a choice between being an artist and being a mother, inevitably having to sacrifice their connection to either one or the other of these roles?
“Now, when feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that idealised misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows. The result?- a negation or rejection of motherhood by some avant-garde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance -conscious or not- of its traditional representations by the great mass of people, women and men.” (Kristeva 1983: )
The ideal of the all loving, self-sacrificing, all forgiving mother is a notion that dates back to Greek and Christian mythology, the point from which the myth of the mother was formulated. Traditional art practice has enshrined this idea of motherhood from and for a patriarchal view, idealised in images of the Virgin Mary with child, the mother becoming object of art practice but rarely subject.
The Madonna icon still remains one of the most potent representations of motherhood. This idealistic and nostalgic image of the maternal from Christianity has formed the roots of our cultural perspective on motherhood. Julia Kristeva’s Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini, written in 1975, examines Bellini’s Madonna and Child paintings and theorises how the male artist has sublimated the maternal. Her thesis explores the theory that the maternal is not within the physical representation of the mother but that it resides outside the object and is repressed and transformed into the luminous spatialization of the chromatic hues and patterns of the painting.
According to Kristeva, male artists have sublimated the maternal because for them, the maternal experience is a non-symbolic state of plenitude and bliss that cannot be represented other than through transformation and sublimation. She suggests a correspondence between artistic creation and the maternal, however perpetuating the patriarchal notion that the two positions are mutually exclusive. A man creates through the practice of art however a woman is bound by her biology and can only attain the same creative position as the man by giving birth, she cannot sublimate only procreate.
“The speaker reaches this limit, this requisite of sociality, only by virtue of a particular, discursive practice called ‘art’. A woman also attains it (and in our society, especially) through the strange form of split symbolization (threshold of language and instinctual drive, of the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘semiotic’) of which the act of giving birth consists.” (Kristeva 1975, in Butler 2006: 116)
Kristeva’s thesis proves problematic from a feminist point of view. She excludes the representation of the maternal by female artists and is solely concerned with the sublimation of the maternal from the perspective of the male and is therefore in line with their patriarchal position. Her example, however, perhaps highlights some of the roots of this notion that a woman cannot be both mother and artist. If we look throughout art history, traditional painting represents motherhood in the form of the portrait or self-portrait, depicting idealised scenes of everyday chores and pleasures involved with mothering (see fig 2.) Few traditional women artists represented maternal subjectivity, the psychic dimension of the maternal, but were creating works in line with the notion of the idealised mother for a patriarchal view. It took many centuries before female artists began to try and collapse the divide between creativity and procreativity and represent a maternal subjectivity. Pregnancy and motherhood, through themes such as fertility, reproduction, metamorphosis, nurturing, and the maternal body were issues that dominated Louise Bourgeois’ work over the decades. It is clear that the strong emphasis on the physicality and psychology of the pregnant woman was an indication of the importance placed on the experience of motherhood for Bourgeois. It is a subject that remains one of her most powerful and important concerns throughout her artistic career and saw her making work around the idea of reproduction and childbirth well into her nineties. Bourgeois’ work represents a maternal subjectivity through the pairing of fear with the experience of motherhood; she admits to a fear of falling, brought about during her first pregnancy. As she explains,
“A woman who carries packages is responsible for what she carries and they are very fragile, and she is totally responsible. Yes it is fear of not being a good mother.” (cited in Coxon 2010: 109)Her earlier works address issues of fragility, balance and gravity and we can see the marriage of these ideas in relation to motherhood in Woman with Packages (1949) and Girl Falling (1947). These works make an explicit connection between the woman’s gravid state and the fear of gravity, an idea brought about by the artist’s own experience of pregnancy and motherhood. We get the sense of the weight of responsibility bearing down on these figures with the heaviness of the lines, and these multiple packages attached solely to the woman who is seen as an isolated subject. She spoke of the maternal anxiety she encountered saying it, “Persisted after conception. This is not something which disappears. For instance, when the children are much older you are afraid of something else. You are afraid of losing them; you are afraid of being abandoned; you are afraid of becoming aggressive; you are afraid of lots of things. So it is not a thing which stops when they are born. It diminishes, but it does not stop.” (cited in Coxon 2010 :110).
Bourgeois uses spatial metaphors in her work to explain and express the gap that opens up between mother and child once separated from the maternal body. Her art practice is her way of expressing this void, this fear and the terrifying responsibility of the role of the mother. She was also looking at alternative ways of representing the maternal subject, from the standpoint of her own experience, as an artist and a mother. Western art is full of depictions and imagery of the mother and child yet these images do not depict the real lived experience of the mother, but merely the ‘ideal’, the sacred and the unattainable.
Bourgeois’ subjects hold both vulnerability as well as a power, often portrayed as threatening. She often talked about this combined power and vulnerability. The ultimate power of creation that females hold coupled with the fear of losing this power was an issue she worked with. We can see clearly this relationship in many of her more recent works as well as her earlier drawings and installations. The environments she created like nests or wombs, enticing us in, could also be seen to trap us. Even her well known work, Maman (1999) comes from a place of interest surrounded by the notion of the maternal. The giant spider like sculptures are protecting their eggs, nurturing and creating a web yet the scale is immense and threatening to the viewer, symbolising female strength and motherhood. In works such as The Arrival (2007), we see a limbless woman giving birth, the lack of arms and legs serving to highlight the double-headed movement of their existence. This division is clear in many of her works- the dual entity, the double identity of the woman. For Bourgeois, once a woman becomes a mother she is always a divided subject. Rineke Dijkstra’s 1994 work in which she has photographed three mothers with their babies soon after giving birth is an example of how the traditional maternal image has been deconstructed by a contemporary female artist. This triptych series of photographic prints presents each woman nude with their new-born child held close to their chests. In contrast to the classical portraits of Madonna and child, Dijkstra’s subject is the mother and her lived experience of childbirth, rather than the sublimated concept of the maternal. There is nothing in the image that competes with the attention of the subject, the bare walls create a blank backdrop and the figures are simply ‘there’, grounded in the everyday. The women’s eyes are fixed at the viewer and not her child giving a direct focus on the mother as subject, as a being, as a person who has just gone through a life changing experience. The portraits of these young mothers depict the special and powerful occurrence that they have just been part of, and are reflected in their faces, eyes, aura and energies. The naked vulnerability of the portraits brings us back to the everyday. The true experiences of these young mothers are represented and stand out amongst a long history of mother and child images which portray the ideal notion of the maternal experience rather than the true and lived experience of the mother themselves. The story of Oedipus, told from the perspective of Oedipus himself who unknowingly fulfils a prophecy in which he kills his father and marries his mother, became the cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, and has subsequently formed the basis of much theory, debate and artworks since then. However the fact that this psychoanalytical theory prioritises the child’s perspective and negates the mother’s entirely has provided the conceptual framework for some feminist artists’ works during the seventies.
“The adult woman who is a mother, in particular, continues to exist only in relation to her child, never as a subject in her own right. And in her maternal function, she remains an object, always distanced, always idealised or denigrated, always mystified, always represented through the small child’s point of view.” (Sieglohr 1998: 167)
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)uses psychoanalysis to address the position of woman in patriarchy and analyse the production of women as a sign within the patriarchal order. By retelling the Oedipus story from the perspective of the Sphinx, the silent half female creature situated outside the city gates, it embodies a female and maternal perspective by using Jocasta’s desire as its basis. The film constructs new relationships between the viewer and the female subject by presenting her through multiple voices and viewpoints. The dialogue is constructed from the various voices of Louise, her friends and fellow workers and brings a range of meanings to the film, which contrasts with the authority associated with the conventional voice-over. The riddles become questions, and contemporary dilemmas confronted by a young mother whose feminist consciousness gradually comes into voice.
Mary Kelly’s ground-breaking work Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), outlines the social and cultural interferences on the mother/child experience and their ‘ideal’ relationship, and uses the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan to represent the role of patriarchy in relation to this ‘ideal’ relationship. The work is based on her own role as mother to her young son as he develops and enters the patriarchal world through the learning of language. Kelly was the first artist to attempt to interrogate both the experience of a mother artist and the psychoanalysis of these experiences made her the first to bring the experience of being a female artist and a mother into one context. Her child therefore became both subject and object in the work, and Post-Partum Document is as much about the relationship between artist and object as it is about mother and child.
“At the roots of the PPD are five intentional contradictions: (1) the displacement of the fetishization of the child on to the artwork itself – a kind of compensation for the unavoidable loss of the child by replacing it with the lasting presence of an artwork designed for prosperity; (2) the parody of art commodification by the pristine and institutional presentation of the piece; (3) the intentional ‘conflict’ between patriarchal sources (Marx/Freud via Althusser/Lacan) and the feminist analysis; (4) the ‘disruption of the accustomed feminist biological/autobiographical readings; (5) the ‘visualisation’ of the mother/woman without ‘picturing’ her, and the resolute avoidance of photography.” (Lippard, 1982, in Post-Partum Document). The Post-Partum Document is made up of six units, each unit comprising of a written Documentation, and Experimentum Mentis which accompany the visual objects. The Documentation section attempts to explain the visual works within each unit and her motive for adopting a certain pseudoscientific language in these sections was to “counter the assumption that childcare is based on the woman’s natural and instinctive understanding of the role of mothering.”(Kelly: 1982) In the Experimentum Mentis sections, the mode of address shifts to the third person offering a distance, and a separation between subject and reader. In these sections, maternal femininity is drawn from the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, whose essays’ central concerns are that of the mother’s desire as desire for the child to be the phallus; the thing she lacks and therefore the thing she desires to hold onto. This question of loss that the work poses is based on the possibility of female fetishism, informed by Freud’s theory of castration anxiety. According to Freud, for the woman castration fears take the form of losing her loved objects, especially her children; her child is inevitably going to grow up, leave her, reject her, and perhaps even die. In order to delay this inevitable separation, the woman will fetishize the child by continuing to dress him, feed him and by keeping hold of things that belong to the child such as first shoes, first teeth and locks of hair. In Kelly’s PPD this ‘mother’s memorabilia’ or fetishism is visualised by her use of stained diaper liners, first baby vests, imprints, drawings, plants and insects given to her as gifts from her child. These were to be seen as transitional objects, in Lacan’s terms, as emblems of desire. This question of the mother’s ‘loss’ is further experienced by the child’s entry into the educational institution, which represents social repression and patriarchy for the mother. Documentation VI is concerned with the construction of the agency of the mother/housewife by the educational institution, which deprives the mother of her ‘natural femininity’ providing a sense of loss of the child/the phallus/the desire therefore leaving the mother with a sense of longing, a void that needs to be filled with another object for desire.
“[T]hus, the mother’s secondary social status is not necessarily a result of the subordination of women by men, but rather it is an effect of the position occupied as the agent of childcare within the legal, moral, medical and pedagogic discourses of the educational institution… Consequently, the school becomes a site of struggle for ‘possession’ of the child; it is a struggle the mother always loses and it is this sense of ‘loss’ which produces a specific form of subordination for the woman in her capacity as a mother/housewife.” (Kelly 1983: 169). The role of the father within PPD is secondary to that of the mother, emphasising the patriarchal and social view of the mother’s assumed responsibility for childrearing and the distancing of the father who is to be seen as a representation of the ‘outer’ sphere of authority and the law.
“At the Oedipal moment, the mother, the father and child inhabit a closed field of desire. But for the mother, the distancing function of the father uncovers the source of narcissistic satisfaction which is sustained by her imaginary object, the child as phallus. This is the pleasure of maternal femininity. …This loss is preordained, on the one hand, by the natural process of maturation, and, on the other, by the prohibitions of the Father and the Law.”(Kelly 1983: 108)
This feeling of ultimate responsibility for the child, this need for the demand for love and the mother’s desire is ultimately problematic. The woman can never be the subject of her own desire; the child/ren she produces will ultimately leave her meaning that she must deal with this loss, forever longing to hold onto something which she cannot. She must ultimately sacrifice her desires; her castration fears take the form of losing her loved ones, fear of not being unconditionally loved. The mother’s responsibility to the child is that of enabling independence, for the child to function in the world without relying on its mother. Yet this non-parent ideal returns the mother to the site of the family and to the representation of maternal femininity. “[F]earing failure, she is distracted from the projects which interest her most.”(Kelly 1983:189).
The woman cannot continue like this forever, she therefore questions herself and her problematic situation, Kelly states that it is in this moment that a confrontation is founded.
“The construction of femininity as essentially natural and maternal is never finally fixed but forever unsettled in the process of articulating her difference, her loss. And it is precisely at such moments that it is possible to desire to speak and to dare to change.” (ibid.)
Susan Hardy’s photographic prints of the 1980s and 1990s also draw upon Lacan’s concepts, like Kelly, but reworking them to negotiate demand and desire from the perspective of the maternal. Hardy’s Demand and Desire (1988) represents both Hardy’s own experience of motherhood but also transforms this experience into a symbolic representation of the maternal. Her handwritten texts from the emotional and psychological dimension of herself as the mother are juxtaposed with documentary style photographs of her young daughter, a similar concept to that used by Susan Hiller in Ten Months where she has taken black and white photographs of her expanding belly throughout her pregnancy comparing the images with that of the lunar cycle. She presents these images next to diary extracts explaining her feelings at each stage of her pregnancy. This use of documentation, a scientific and objective form of representation, coupled with the artist’s subjective view of motherhood is challenging to the patriarchal role in the construction of motherhood by putting in the artist’s experience as subject. Although Hardy and Hiller’s works are less involved with theory than Kelly, they draw upon the same concepts of representing the maternal from the point of view of the mother rather than from a patriarchal position in culture. The constant return to an autobiographical approach within feminist art practice is a hint at the importance of this type of subjective approach for women and mother artists. There has been a strong feminist interest in the autobiographical, from the attempt to connect the ‘personal’ with the ‘political’, and the emphasis on women’s experience as vital in the creation of women’s knowledge. The use of autobiography within these art practices, gives them a voice and a true representation of their experience of motherhood. This focus on the mother as subject with feeling and emotion, knowledge and power contrasts with the common practice of writing about the mother as subject of science and biology. For Kelly, Hardy and Hiller, the use of autobiographical writing is a powerful tool within their art practice which not only rewrites a historically patriotic voice, but gives a new found power to the knowledge and experience of mothers.
To look at the role of motherhood within feminist art is to recognise that motherhood and women are passed over in the unacknowledged name of devalued labour, whether in procreation or artistic activity. “To a certain extent the mother recognises the unconditional element of demand as a demand for love. It is this recognition which underlines her feeling of ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the child even when the sexual division of labour in childcare is radically altered to include the father.” (Kelly 1983: 109)
If we project our attention backward to the fifties, we can pinpoint the roots of these divisions among the sexes and the building unrest within mothers. The projected view of ‘togetherness’ between men and women and a return to domesticity for both sexes was an image projected by politics, media and visual culture in post-war Britain.
The separate spheres that mothers and fathers lived in saw the father as representation of the outer. Again the psychoanalytic literature of the time stressed that the father should remain the distant and remote visitor from the outside world, standing for law and order. Meanwhile, the role of the mother was held with utmost importance in that she took complete responsibility for the position of childcare. The importance of the mother-child bond was stressed in the parenting manuals and literature whilst the role of the father was excluded as he was not expected to take part in any childcare or housework. He was the provider of the wage and the authority figure to administer punishment when required/
“[T]he fixing and freezing of women as mothers, and nothing other than mothers, was central to the vision of the fifties.”(Segal 1990: 8)
The assumed biological imperative dictating women’s exclusive responsibility for the role of mothering had contradictory effects on women. Although the role of mothering was accorded a new kind of value and importance, the women themselves became isolated and unable to express themselves out-with the confines of ‘motherhood’.
Feminist art in the seventies began to interrogate this inequality of labour and look at the devalued labour of women and mothers. At the same time as Kelly was working on Post-Partum Document, she was collaborating on a project with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt called Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry, (1973-1975). This project was crucial to her undertaking of her own work but was also a significant document outlining the unequal division of labour between the sexes, not only in the workplace but in the home also. The female workers interviewed discussed their unpaid and undervalued labour in the role of wife and mother, reinforcing the perception that the division of labour was psychologically and gender based as well as socially determined. For the women of the fifties, there was no alternative, not even one to ponder on. It wasn’t until the seventies that women began to find their position intolerable and looked for alternative ways to express their identity and escape their submission. This shift in the position of mothers gave way to a new model of fatherhood that became apparent in 1980s Hollywood. Films such as Tootsie, Three Men and a Baby and Kramer vs. Kramer showed us a sensitive, nurturing father who was just as good at ‘mothering’. Kramer vs. Kramer in particular, highlights both the feelings of suppression of the woman to a point where she cannot continue, and the ability for the father to care, love and nurture the child better than the mother could. This extract from Joanna Kramer’s testimony represents her feelings toward her role as mother/housewife;
“Anyway, we became
more and more separate... more and
more isolated from one another.
Finally, I had no other choice, I
had to leave.
(…)
And that
just because I needed some creative
and emotional outlet other than my
child, that didn't make me unfit to
be a mother.” (Benton, 1977)
And in this extract we can see how Ted Kramer questions how his ability to parent is any less effective than that of a woman;
When Joanna said why
shouldn't a woman have the same
ambitions as a man, I suppose she's
right. But by the same token what
law is it that says a woman is a
better parent simply by virtue of
her sex?
I guess I've had to think a
lot about whatever it is that makes
somebody a good parent: constancy,
patience, understanding... love.
Where is it written that a man has
any less of those qualities than a
woman? (Benton, 1977)
This new found father image brought about by visual culture and photography portrayed a softer, more sensitive image of the father who was more involved with the daily upbringing of the children. Jan Saudek’s photograph of father and child provided an aesthetic which was to become commonplace during the eighties surge of the modern father. Saudek’s portrait provides a bare chested father with new-born infant held close to his body, which is in stark contrast to the father images of the previous decades which saw the smartly dressed father standing at the head of the family portrait. The sensitive, emotional side of the father who is far more involved with the daily care of his children is adopted by some visual culture although it still remains rare within fine art practice. If we are to question the lack of art practice around the subject of motherhood, we must also note the severe lack of art practice around the subject of the father and fatherhood.
As the late seventies to early eighties portrayed an image of a new, modern father, who took more responsibility for the duties of childcare and housework while women were enjoying their working lives, a batch of social surveys in the mid- eighties contradicted these claims reporting that nearly three quarters of ‘working’ wives did all or most of the housework, and many reports found that the changes in paternal behaviour since the fifties were slight. It seemed that fathers were willing to participate in the more pleasurable aspects of childcare such as playing and taking the children out, but the majority of routine care such as cleaning, feeding and bathing were still left to the mothers.
The forces that promote or prevent a more equal sharing of childcare between men and women involve external and social factors as well as internal psychic factors all revolving around questions of power. There are still vast economic inequalities between the sexes, if we look at the highest paid artists in both sexes, the woman’s earnings are vastly below that of her male counterpart. There are many psychological reasons behind men’s unwillingness to participate in active parenting such as the fear of the loss of authority and status as provider but if we also consider the exclusion of the male in the experience of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding we could detect a sense of emotional rejection in the father as well as an undermining of their importance in the act of creation. This feeling of ambivalence and fear in fathers could perhaps be a reason for their unwillingness to participate in childcare. Although it seemed as if many men were still lacking in parental participation and the mother’s labour was being exploited, there was a minority of cases of reversed-role parenting where the father took the majority, or all of the responsibilities for childcare, and it was noted that, “the most remarkable finding about reversed-role parenting with full-time fathers is how little difference it seems to make to children, female or male, which parent parents” (Segal 2007: 39). If this is the case it seems unlikely that the emphasis on the mother-child bond is key to the upbringing of well-balanced individuals, and again emphasises the question of fathers’ willingness to participate in equal childcare. The women’s liberation movement of the seventies had identified the woman’s role in the family as the basis to their subordination although some studies suggested that women may fear the loss of their power and domination in the home if they were to allow men to take over their role there. Were women eager to maintain their sense of dominance in the home as their working lives provided less power than that of their male counterparts? Perhaps women were afraid of losing the one aspect of their lives, in motherhood, that provided them with a sense of power over men.
Although the home and family life is at the root of female subordination, there are other spheres equally crucial to the creation of male dominance such as the political and cultural spheres of contemporary life. Segal suggests that “the contribution which shared parenting can make to modifying established power relations between men and women may be less than one might hope” (Segal 2007: 41). Yet surely if the subordination of women and the suppression of motherhood is rooted within family life then this would have to be the first sphere to induce change. The role of the ‘maternal’ in the home must see sufficient changes to bring closer the separate spheres of the mother and the father, thus providing a platform for change in the other spheres of contemporary life and allowing the woman an equal freedom of creativity outside the home. “The greatest unsolved problem we continue to face is how to create public and private social arrangements that acknowledge women’s full presence in the world outside the home. This would entail social policies and community structures that enable both women and men to shoulder more easily the responsibilities of caring for dependent people in whatever way they can.” (Segal 2007: 22).