Nikki Columbus on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Nov 23, 2023

MOTHERHOOD IS TRENDING in the art world—a renaissance, if you will, not seen since . . . well, the Renaissance. Long considered a career liability for young artists and art workers, motherhood has been embraced as a topic by women who are having children at an older age, after achieving some level of professional success—as seen in recent works by Camille Henrot, Tala Madani, and Laurel Nakadate. The motif has multiplied in thematic exhibitions with such imaginative titles as "Mothering" (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2021–22), "Mother!" (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2021), "Mother" (Mason Exhibitions, Arlington, Virginia, 2022), "Motherhood" (Oregon Contemporary, Portland, 2022), and "Design-ing Motherhood" (2021–, multiple venues), and it has swelled in books and symposia, including Hettie Judah's How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) (2022) and the two-day conference "(M)otherhood: Art and Life" at Tate St. Ives in England (2023).

The latest addition to this list could recently be found at the aptly named Museo MADRE (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina) in Naples. Curated by Florencia Cherñajovsky, the exhibition "Think Tank: REPRODUCTIVE AGENTS" promised a forward-looking perspective, one that would take into account how biotechnologies have broadened the range of bodies that can create life. Almost all the works were made in the past five years by an international coterie of thirteen artists. So why did my heart sink as I made my way through one room after another? The exhibition doubled up on obvious imagery—distended bellies here and there, disembodied uteri everywhere. Instead of offering a historical counterpoint, established artists didn't provide much more than name recognition. Pregnant Woman in X-Ray Suit, a 1965 sketch by Lynn Hershman Leeson that was stuck in a hallway, felt like a stand-in for more interesting work by the artist. And while affording visual pleasure, 1940s erotic ink drawings by Op art pioneer Victor Vasarely were a mystifying inclusion. (Does a woman getting fucked by a horse really count as "hybridity"?)

Interspecies relationships were explored more meaningfully in Lucy Beech's thirty-minute video Reproductive Exile, 2018, which considers how fertility treatments are powered by "women's work" across the animal kingdom. Did you know that some drugs meant to stimulate ovulation are distilled from the urine of menopausal women? Or that other hormone therapies are made from the piss of mares kept in a near-constant state of pregnancy? (Don't feel stupid; neither did Donna Haraway.1) Beautifully filmed in muted, aseptic hues, the fractured narrative calmly observes its forlorn protagonist, who has traveled to the Czech Republic to seek IVF treatment and surrogacy. Although the story seems straight out of dystopian science fiction, it's based in fact: There really is a bioprosthetic machine the size of a pack of baby wipes that mimics the female reproductive cycle, although genetically individualized models are still to come.

All the characters in Reproductive Exile are white, reflecting the enormous expense of fertility treatment and the desire of its beneficiaries to have a child that "resembles them," as the clinic director declares more than once. In the exhibition's next room, Tabita Rezaire's video installation Sugar Walls Teardom, 2016—a pink exam chair with stirrups and a video monitor—filled in the historical background. Amid a post-internet mash-up in vivid Technicolor (volcanic explosions, rushing water, and floating 3D models of, yes, a uterus), animated text acknowledges the Black women who made scientific contributions without their consent: Henrietta Lacks, whose cancerous cervical cells have played a key role in medical advances of the past several decades; Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and other enslaved women who underwent horrific medical experiments at the hands of the so-called father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, in the mid-1800s. The video concludes with a several-minute-long cosmic healing ritual for traumatized wombs.

Missing from this presentation of the autonomous uterus, however, was a sustained engagement with abortion. Despite the centrality of this basic human right to any discussion of reproduction—and its increasingly endangered status, including in Italy—the only allusions to it were the missile-like RU-486 pills and the clothes hanger on Elektra KB's felt-appliqué "Protest Signs" (2021–). Also notably absent were queer families and trans bodies, although these were teasingly mentioned in wall labels (referring to works not included in the show).

The exhibition left the impression that motherhood is biological, not relational. Especially given the recent spate of writings that seek to displace sexual reproduction in the making of families—by Ruha Benjamin, Haraway, and Sophie Lewis, among others—this curatorial insistence on traditional means of kinship was surprising, and it made for a narrow view on the subject. Despite the stated premise of moving beyond biology, the exhibition ended up centering it.

Biology is certainly central to "Cere anatomiche" (Anatomical Waxes), on view through July 7 at Fondaz­ione Prada in Milan. Admittedly, this exhibition isn't strictly "about" motherhood; rather, it focuses on the late-eighteenth-century scientific depiction of the female body, which was defined by its reproductive capacity. The show features hyperrealistic wax models as well as dozens of anatomical drawings borrowed from La Specola, Florence's museum of natural history, which is closed for renovation. Founded in 1775, just a few years after the Uffizi, the museum was home to one of the foremost ceroplastic workshops of the time. Waxworks were the preeminent technology for studying human anatomy when actual corpses for dissection were difficult to procure (and to preserve); they also provided popular entertainment (and titillation), and La Specola was an important stop on the Grand Tour. (The collection was admired by the Marquis de Sade, who fled to Italy the year the museum opened, and the eponymous heroine of his Juliette [1797] pays a respectful visit during her road trip to the region.)

Where the brightly lit rooms of La Specola were crammed with models, drawings, and specimens, harking back to its Wunderkammer origins, the galleries of Fondazione Prada possess the lavish expanse of a luxurious retail space. On the upper floor of the Podium building, cloaked in the sumptuous grays and browns of military-grade aluminum-foam walls and streaked travertine floors, four life-size wax figures are spaced far apart, like bomb victims lying on cots in a five-star field hospital. Much of the gallery rests in shadow; the only illumination comes from the motion-sensitive rectangular fixtures that hang above each display case. On the two occasions I visited, the exhibits were continually plunged into darkness as I and the other viewers stared transfixed at their overwhelming, uncanny oddity.

In contrast to other anatomical models of the period, these female figures are not depicted as corpses. Eyes open and heads tilted back as they recline on rose-colored velvet mattresses draped in ivory silk, the waxworks were called "Venuses" because of their idealized beauty—as well as, perhaps, their feeble attempts at modesty (cf. Botticelli's Birth of Venus, the Medici Venus, etc.). Indeed, some of their demure poses read almost as a stab at black humor: legs slightly crossed to protect one point of (visual) entry, while, just above, torsos are splayed—breasts wrenched apart and flapped open as innards explode outward. Although one figure appears intact, its midsection can be opened and "dissected," revealing layers of removable organs and, finally, a small fetus. Another nine wax models are cross sections of the uterus, chopped off at mid-thigh. These not only represent gestation but also police sexual activity, distinguishing the "female pudenda of an adult virgin" from the "deflowered female pudenda."

It's creepy but fascinating material, and it begs contextualization. Unfortunately, not much is offered within the space of the exhibition. (The doorstop of a catalogue, on the other hand, includes dozens of texts, mostly reprints, by historians of science, art, and visual culture.) Perhaps this is because the show was cocurated by David Cronenberg, the Canadian film director who specializes in body horror. His most recent film, Crimes of the Future (2022), proposes surgery as performance art and features an "inner beauty pageant"—a concept first suggested in Dead Ringers, his 1988 gynecological thriller (resurrected this past spring as a miniseries with a genuine interest in women's health, minus the original's taut style).2 Cronenberg advised on the selection of exhibits—according to Miuccia Prada's introduction to the catalogue, he "proposed a gender-based appraisal"—and contributed a (very) short film.

Sadly, the latter is a letdown. Beautifully installed inside a small octangular room on the ground floor with wooden risers flanking a double-sided screen, Cronen­berg's four-minute video removes the Venuses from their glass cases and digitally floats them atop gently lapping cerulean water. (Rumor has it that the director imagined the figures to be bobbing in the swimming pool at the Château Marmont.) The bonkers title, Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (2023), is underscored by the sound-track, on which someone seems to have left a faucet running while a woman sighs and breathes heavily—perhaps into the very receiver Cronenberg used to phone in the work.

That said, the short film permits close-up views and vibrant hues that can't be glimpsed in the penumbral installation upstairs. Cronenberg's camera, languorous and pervy, traces leggy translucent limbs upward to lovingly encircle squiggly, sausage-like intestines before arriving at the figures’ glassy gazes and slightly parted lips. Other shots focus on the areas of incision, the encounter of epidermis and entrails; the abject punctum amid all this flesh and tissue is the stray kinks of hair that have escaped the models’ undulating braids and fuzzy merkins. Another bonus is the time-lapsed disassembly of the one complete Venus, although it ends before revealing the fetus. (Was this vital, innermost detail too fragile or simply too far from Cronen­berg's interests?)

Despite the centuries between the works on display, the Naples and Milan exhibitions had curious similarities. Both prominently presented detached organs. Neither featured offspring beyond birth. And you won't learn from either show that pregnancy is the least interesting part of motherhood—it's not even a requirement. Sure, the growth of one living organism within another still seems weird and alien (and Alien) and thus can be visually compelling. But restricting reproduction to the sexual ignores the many, many ways humans have found to form bonds, create families, care for one another, and traumatize generations to come.

Nikki Columbus is a writer based in New York. Her conversation with writer Mirene Arsanios is included in the collection Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work (Mophradat and Archive Books, 2021).

NOTES

1. "Somehow, a feminist science studies scholar and lifelong animal lover, my menopausal self failed to know much about the pregnant mares and their disposable foals," Haraway writes. "Did I forget, never know, not look—or just not care? . . . Social movements for animal flourishing had noticed those horses and made a very effective fuss about it, and these movements were full of feminist women and men. Why not me too? Was it only after it turned out that HRT probably harmed my heart rather than guarded it that the horses came into my ken?" From chapter 5, "Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability," in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 111.

2. True heads can purchase Cronenberg's 2022 NFT, Inner Beauty: a JPEG of the director's kidney stones.