The Mother as Anchor for Play

“We… acknowledge the need for frivolity, humor and the absurd,”Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin, “Editorial Note,” Mother Tongue 3(Fall/Winter 2022 – 23): 10. also proclaims the Editorial Note in the current issue of Mother Tongue, a new print periodical focused on contemporary motherhood. This need for a spectrum of feeling is never more salient than in the early days of mothering, of which the poet Adrienne Rich evinces that we “remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom” punctuated by moments of “passionate love.”Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution (London: Norton & Company, 1995), 60. Of course, what Rich remembers is not little but a totalizing gamut of contradictory emotions spun by mothering. Two US-based contemporary artists in their thirties — Madeline Donahue and Alison Chen — working with the maternal, embrace these leaky, absurd, and sleep-deprived situations between children and mothers that comprise early family life.Nadine Zylberberg, “Painting Motherhood,” interview with Madeline Donahue, All’s Well by Nadine Zylberberg (website), accessed 20 October 2022, accessible online. At first glance, their media, approaches, and aesthetics are very different; Chen’s photographic and video work is muted, delicate, with limited colours, whereas Donahue’s paintings and drawings are vibrant, maximalist, and employ a flat perspective. Yet, both of them blur boundaries through absurdity and abstraction. Madeline DonahueWringer, 2022. Photo: Corey Towers, courtesy of the artist These works depict mothering as a series of playful performative encounters that address the porous boundaries between children and their mothers. Crucially, the mother remains the central subject, often centred in the frame. However, she is immobile or still while life moves around her. She is the anchor around which childhood happens. Although this could be read as the banal trope of the invisible mother subsumed by her children, the often-abstract positioning of the children or their body parts in the frame creates a shifting perspective.Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein, eds., The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2011). What’s captivating about these contemporary works is precisely how they reorient perspective to acknowledge and highlight the oft-cited invisibility as a reality that isn’t rooted solely in melancholy or lack. In time for Donahue’s highly anticipated solo show, Strange Magic (2022), at Hesse Flatow in New York, the author Amil Niazi writes a love letter to Donahue’s work subtitled “Madeline Donahue captures the ecstasy and agony of being a mom,” and she isn’t alone in her reverence.Amil Niazi, “The Art of Motherhood: Madeline Donahue Captures the Ecstasy and Agony of Being a Mom,” The Cut (website), accessed 5 October 2022, accessible online. Despite the feminist interventions following Mary Kelly’s iconic Post-Partum Document (1973 – 79), when motherhood became more than a niche consideration for artists, distancing from parental obligations as a sign of elegance and seriousness of craft continues.Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). We need more intricate representations of the abundant simultaneity of a mother’s emotions — the agony and ecstasy — of and in their bodies.Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London: Routledge, 1996). Judith Butler argues, “One is not simply a body, one does one’s body.”Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 358. In Donahue’s and Chen’s work, mothers are in a double bind of doing their body and being done by their child. Donahue’s painting Wringer (2022) centre-frames a naked mother contorted in a washing machine facing the viewer and her two children, who face her in return; this piece is similar to much of her other work, in which the brightly coloured bodies of children and their mother are exaggerated in humorous relation to each other. Leaky bodily boundaries are amplified in Mama Gone (2019), a single-channel video by Chen that, from a bird’s-eye view, depicts her son’s hands “doing” his mother’s body — that is, applying black paint over a portrait of her centred on a table. In a review for The Brooklyn Rail, the art historian Robert R. Shane describes this work as “a video of her child painting over her photograph,” highlighting how children efface a mother’s prior self.Robert R. Shane, “Painting At Night: An Artist/Mother Podcast Exhibition, Juried by Allison Reimus,” The Brooklyn Rail (July/August 2020), accessible online. The work is more than just a child painting over a mother. It depicts how children mark and extend us, and how, when we facilitate their actions, we are placid in observing their changes. Alison ChenMama Gone, video stills, 2019. Photos: courtesy of the artist Indeed, a part of us is changed after having children, and many mothers feel that their old selves are gone. Chen and Donahue both speak to this. But I refuse to consider such a one-sided melancholic reading. To read the works as focused on maternal effacement doubles down on the systematic erasure of mothers, especially mothers of colour, within the art world. It’s a form of critical neglect, which the feminist theorist and artist Trinh T. Minh-ha delineates as a form of censorship.Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “The Other Censorship,” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 225 – 35. Instead, we can see Chen’s son playing with her, moving on the screen as she stays still, captured in a photograph looking at him from below. There is delight in his voice as he repeats, “Mama Gone.” Chen reveals that she also considered that “his goal was to cover me up, to play hide and seek,” a game that young children love to play.Alison Chen, email to author, 20 October 2022. In that game, the hider must stay still while the seeker moves carefully, covering as much area as possible, and anyone who has played it with their children knows that they always prefer to be the ones searching. Madeline DonahueOver-touched (15 minute nap), 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist Donahue’s flat aesthetic captures how the mother and child are doing not just their own bodies but each other’s bodies. In Over-touched (15 minute nap) (2022), a drawing on paper, thirty-five hands that appear to be moving reach for a mother’s body in the centre of the piece. The uneven numbers (eighteen on one side and seventeen on another) point out how the pairs of hands (always reaching for a mother), regardless of the number of children, always feels multiplied and exponential. The mother is held — at least, held together. She isn’t pulled apart. The hands are gentle, even if all-consuming. They are performing maintenance on her — as Chen’s son does in Mama Gone. In one hand, the mother holds a mobile phone with a baby tracker app nearing fifteen minutes, the sleep cycle of some wakeful babies. The red tally marks show that the battery is almost empty, an apt metaphor for how much a mother can get done with little energy left. After all, as Donahue’s The Dream (2020) also depicts, mothering never stops. The Dream is a painting of a mother with her eyes closed, holding a baby mesmerized by the blue light of a mobile phone, while another climbs her as she brushes her hair. She is central and stationary, yet she is doing so much: she is propping up her two children so they can be active. It isn’t clear where the bodies and skin of these children and the mother begin and end. Donahue manages to impressively evoke this feeling of permeability with her signature style of thick lines that buttress colour. The feminist scholar Sara Ahmed posits that skin is the border between the self and the Other — “skin connects as well as contains.” How can that border be both a safety net and pervious to the Other? A question that both artists explore in their work. What can we do with the skin we are in and the skin we represent? In her queer phenomenology, Ahmed demonstrates that our feelings are bound by how “objects and others have already left their impressions” on the skin’s surface.Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 54. Chen’s single-channel video Yield to Them (2017) makes visible how our children’s impressions mark us and “do our bodies,” as her skin is covered in white paint. Influenced by feminist body art, in the video, a medium shot frames Chen immobile in the middle of the frame, cut off just above the lips, while her husband’s hand — standing in for her son in the performance — is in motion. Her husband’s fingers are covered in white paint, its colour resembling breast milk, and like a brush, they paint and splatter her collarbone and upper chest with their varied strokes, raps, and scratches. This movement reimagines the gestures of her son when he used to breastfeed. As a mother of two children obsessed with breastfeeding, I can relate. Chen tells me that, like Mama Gone, the piece is meant to be a mix of humour and absurdity — considering that it is a grown man re-performing a baby’s fitful movements.Alison Chen, email to author, 20 October 2022. Prefiguring Mama Gone, in this instance, Chen’s statuesque body is literally covered in movement. Alison ChenYield to Them, video still, 2017. Photo: courtesy of the artist One emblem of this movement and speed in the work is vehicles. In Donahue’s drawing on paper titledOffroad (2022), the mother’s skin, drawn in a thick line, is the track, and eleven types of vehicles outline her. The mother, centred, is lying on her side, a common position for breastfeeding, and appears to be sleeping or resting. Her eyes are closed, although of course, she isn’t resting. Donahue’s oeuvre betrays any notion of a mother’s rest — she makes life happen. Her child is looking up with towering, outstretched arms. Their hands are holding two of the cars in a pose as if to race them around their mother’s skin, unfazed by her closed eyes. Madeline DonahueOffroad, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist As the anchor for the playful encounters I describe above, the skin’s surface is highlighted in each artist’s work — in craft and in concept. Ahmed speaks of skin at length in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), arguing that “the alignment of some bodies with some others and against others take place in the physicality of movement.”Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 54. We can see how the mothers’ bodies align and misalign with the bodies of the children and partners that surround them — an orientation that connects Donahue and Chen. The mothers in their works are neither commanding nor are they submissive, even as they are stationary. These artists capture, with exaltation and humour, the unavoidable entanglement between mothers and their children, especially during a pandemic, when children made themselves available to interrupt every moment. Alison Chen, Madeline Donahue, Magdalena Olszanowski

The Mother as Anchor for Play

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