Reviewed by Allison Bambrick

Andrea Liss’s Feminist Art and the Maternal is an exciting exploration of the wide range of issues surrounding the translation into art of the drudgeries, joys, contradictions and controversies of motherhood. Drawing on the works of artists from the 60s and 70s, as well as more recent works, Liss provides thoughtful and insightful interpretations of works in diverse media such as film, photography, performance and installation.  She takes a personal and empathic approach to the art and to the artists themselves.  The circumstances faced by the mother-artists, as Liss terms them, has inspired provocative works that push back at the patriarchal conventions surrounding both art and motherhood.  Again and again, these artists have been told that motherhood threatens their status as creatives, and their choice of motherhood as a subject—whether it be the pregnant body, dirty nappies, or infant close-ups.  One mother is made to feel a period of maternity leave is one in which, unlike her academic colleagues, she has accomplished nothing.  Another is told quite bluntly by a male colleague in the 60s that her evident pregnancy represents her end as an artist. 

The work these women create often fights for the tasks of motherhood to be elevated out of the mundane into the high status afforded artworks in Western history.  The true scandal of this undertaking begins in considering that the subject matter of many of these works are not even considered acceptable outside of the home, let alone in the hallowed place of art.  Liss presents the issue of breastfeeding in public, which is still contentious in many countries and particularly, it would appear, in the United States.  She describes a series of artworks that confronted attempts to inhibit this elemental act of mothering.  One work, an installation at a former jail, puns on the term ‘let down,’ referring to the physiological commencement of milk flowing from the breasts.  A tap continually streams white liquid, while the audience, one person at a time, is invited to recline on a jail bed littered with fortune cookie notes reflecting on the range of mothers’ reactions to the act of breastfeeding—from pleasure and joy to pain and disappointment.

Feminist Art and the Maternal also explores many of the puzzles posed to the feminist mother in responding to the needs of a child, as well as their growing understanding of the world.  In Mama Do You Love Me (1996), Ellen McMahon installed giant objects such as a four foot plaster nipple and a dice where the dots were formed by inverted nipples.  In a dark room, viewers contemplate these objects, while a recording of the artist’s voice asks “Mama, do you love me?”  In Post Partum Document (1978), Mary Kelly reveals her son’s attempts to understand his mother’s different body.  Her work exhibits a collection of natural objects her son has found, as well as conversations between son and mother.  Though his questions are innocent, they are intensely weighted for his feminist mother:  “Where is your willy?” he asks, “Do you have a hole in your tummy?”

Through this text Liss brings forward a number of interesting art , delves into the manifold issues of motherhood, many of which remain, ridiculously, taboo.  Encouragingly, the book ends with Liss’s account that her college class on Feminist Art and Motherhood is increasingly popular.  Hopefully, over time, this shows it will be possible to diffuse the antagonism between the ideas of feminist and mother, and mother and artist.

Feminist Art and the Maternal
(2009)

by Andrea Liss
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816646234
192pp US$24.95