Curatorial Statement
The rapid advancement of medical technology has brought with it unprecedented bioethical dilemmas. Particularly in economically advanced countries, technologies are outpacing our ability to fully understand their moral implications. The exhibit TAKE CARE: The Art, Science and Bioethics of Motherhood considers civilization’s unease with modern family planning, maternal and fetal care, childbirth and child rearing. For the first time in history, there is knowledge available to mothers which forces them to make life or death decisions whether to carry a disfigured, malformed, or unintentional fetus to term, whether to use pharmaceuticals with their associated risks, and whether to risk passing on genetic diseases. In these situations, we are no longer able to rely on long-established religious, societal or medical expertise for guidance, and too often, we only grapple with such problems at the time of crisis. The TAKE CARE show highlights these bioethical dilemmas, with the hope that viewers will take the opportunity to better appreciate the complexity of these personal decisions in a rapidly changing world.
Annette Gates
More images of the artist's work
Kristina Arnold
Review of "Fragile Species"
Adrienne Outlaw
Artist Site
Sher Fick
More images of the artist's work
Lindsay Obermeyer
Artist Site
Monica Bock
Artist Site
Sadie Ruben
Artist Site
Jeanette May
Artist Site
Libby Rowe
Artist Site
EXHIBITION ESSAY
VERONICA KAVASS-NEW YORK BASED-WRITER-CURATOR
I am going to have my baby on the bed that has been passed down through the generations—the one my grandmother, mother, and I were born in. We have a midwife named Nancy. There will be no drugs involved. The delivery will not be videotaped by my husband. I am documenting all of it with poetry, which will be the words that emerge from my body while I am in labor.
-the idealist
There is one subject that pins every woman up against the wall and that is her ability to carry life inside her body and release it into the world. And the adjective that is typically associated with this is “scary.” It is scary for many reasons. Today when we think of pregnancy, it is easy to picture all the technological equipment involved, but perhaps difficult to understand what all that equipment can mean to a pregnant woman. Viewing the ultrasound is an emotionally charged experience. While it is merely the representation of something that is real, actually seeing one’s fetus pumping on the screen offers more to the legitimacy of the experience than the constant biological reminders like pickle cravings and nausea. Today’s sophisticated sonograms also allow for in-depth and heart-wrenching views of deformity or even death, as seen in a shot of a static fetus. How many times is the question “Are you going to keep it?” asked when a woman delivers the news about her pregnancy, including her genetic test, to a best friend? On top of this, women face other concerns, ranging from overpopulation, infertility and parental skills/relationships to money, Freud and hysterical outbursts.
While there is a lot of artistic material about or inspired by mothers, there is not that much about the process of becoming a mother. Many female artists, past and present, have either tried to avoid subjects that remind viewers of their roles in a patriarchal society or taken the opposite route and attacked them. When conceptual art was taking off in the sixties, women who took part it in were known as feminist artists while their men counterparts were simply considered conceptual artists. The female artist has always been gender highlighted but today, in this post-feminist era, there seems to be certain degree of shamelessness in that which differentiates women from men -- pregnancy being one of them. As Susan Sontag pointed out in Against Interpretation, “The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, some kind of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it.”[1] Art about pregnancy or motherhood rarely revels in the beauty of the experience without providing the dark side. Or another way to put it, art that glorifies pregnancy and makes it out to be one hundred percent blissful isn’t good art. Perhaps that is because art can be scary as it often highlights problems. TAKE CARE: The Art, Science and Bioethics of Motherhood may be labeled as a feminist show or a pregnancy show, but above everything it is an art show—for it is not about the art of motherhood but art about the challenges of new life and especially those problems inherent in an increasingly technological world.
From adoption rituals to the study of single-celled organisms, the nine artists in this show each reveal a different problematic constituent of motherhood. In his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel de Landa talks about an "organic chauvinism that leads us to underestimate the vitality of the intensive processes of becoming (what he terms ‘self-organization’) in other spheres of reality. Lindsay Obermeyer’s and Sher Fick’s work underscore the notion of repetition. Obermeyer’s embroideries are the extension of her unplanned adoption of a Romanian baby due the death of a family member. Hence, one life is replaced with another. As a coping mechanism, safe and recognizable movements can help people with mental disorders locate a comfortable space. In today’s society, of course, so do drugs. Adrienne Outlaw and Annette Gates explore the more technical realm of pregnancy. Outlaw’s fleshy forms and scientific videos floating inside breast-like structures give off a tongue-in-cheek quality to the artistic notion of providing information while offering a different take on tunnel/funnel vision. Gates’ cast-porcelain sculptures display the crystallization of life-growth as a study of the way cells operate in navigating genetic codes. Libby Rowe’s installation of deformed sock-monkey puppets works the hardest to contextualize the historical timeline of feminist/motherly concerns in to our current era.
The constant shedding of out-of-date knowledge and advancements in technology make more room in these twenty-first century mothers’ minds for scientific thought and maybe less about matters that concerned mothers prior to this era of information. Thusly, TAKE CARE is considered a “bioethical show” because it points at the departure from one era of motherhood and traces the outline of a new one. Is it saying this one is better than the last? It is hard to determine.
Where does motherhood begin and end? My first personal encounter with mothers in art happened in a cave in Azerbaijan near the Iranian border. It appears that women didn’t have arms back then. According to the drawings, they just had long hair, huge breasts, and a few had outstanding bellies. The last public example of mother-art that I witnessed was at this year’s Armory Show. Susan Hiller took photographs of her growing belly and displayed them with text from her journal for a poetic piece titled Ten Months (1977-79). The sixth frame included the text, “She speaks (as a woman) about everything but they wish her to speak only of women’s things. …” TAKE CARE addresses an issue which is at the heart of art practices, that is the nurturing and understanding of intentional and unintentional creation and it provides a range of aesthetic reactions to this crucial issue. At the end of it viewers will wonder what happened to the notion of the miracle.
[1] Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. USA: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966. (p. 69)