Metaphors & Myths: Women Videomakers on Motherhood
Karen vanMeenen
The shift in contemporary feminist art addressing the subject of motherhood has been from work that is more conceptual and effete toward work based in real life, in documentary practice, as the video work of Myrel Chernick, Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe, Ellen McMahon, Shelly Silver and Beth Warshafsky demonstrates. For these videomakers, metaphor is both a linguistic tool and a visual mechanism. Their work in Maternal Metaphors conveys a variety of messages around the common theme of motherhood, deconstructing the cultural and artistic representations of the traditional (and stereotypical) “Madonna and Child.”
What these works also have in common is the use of a seemingly disjunctive structure to form a cohesive narrative and an intention, to varying degrees, to subvert traditional forms of documentary practice, to make connections between art making and other aspects of their lives. Documentary-based, fictional material in the form of myths and folktales figures prominently in many of the works, myth being not only an appropriate cultural allegory for specific character traits and situations but also a signifier for the mythologized modern history of motherhood in general. This material takes many forms including the creating and relating of stories as in Chernick’s Mommy Mommy (1993-94, 25:00 minutes, exhibited here as an installation) where a boy and a girl tell rambling stories on camera that are contrasted to the narrator’s precise, reconstructed moral tale. The story of a girl being saved from an ogre by her mother is threaded through Silver’s 37 Stories About Leaving Home (1996, 52:00 minutes). The challenges, conflicts and general ambivalence of mothering are also evident throughout the work. Hamilton Metcalfe, for example, allows her children to comment—on camera—about her parenting skills. Silver’s interviewees relate stories of mother-daughter estrangement and children being given away.
ROHESIA HAMILTON METCALFE, How Strong the Children, 1998
Hamilton Metcalfe’s How Strong the Children (1998, 28:00 minutes) is replete with the ironic redundancy inherent in the phrase “working mother.” Visually arresting with multi-layered and manipulated images, the multi-linear textual and voice-over narrative follows the artist as she struggles to interview her two young daughters about motherhood. The girls resist, subjugating their mother, the artist, by mimicking her attitudes and revealing her conflicted relationship to motherhood. Hamilton Metcalfe’s personal myths about the experience of having children are deconstructed by the children themselves, who continually defy her expectations. Instead of being an “adventurous” mother leading an “organic, in-sync” family, in which “everyone [is] stimulated…everyone [is] stimulating,” Hamilton Metcalfe finds herself the “servant to this very small person” who bears the artist’s own “freedom and independence-loving gene,” referring to this twist of fate as a “biological indignity.” We follow the discordant thread of Hamilton Metcalfe’s experience of motherhood throughout the video, as her children offer that she could be a “better mother,” that she gets “cranky” and should “stop working so hard.” Although she experiences no revelation as a result of her search, the title of the piece tells us where she is going: the children are strong enough to do many things without her. She includes a litany of fairy tales that portray children without parents, stories that have a “safe and happy end,” as she knows her own will.
SHELLY SILVER , 37 Stories About Leaving Home, 1996
In 37 Stories About Leaving Home Silver interviews three generations of Japanese women about their experiences of being a daughter and/or a mother. The piece begins with a short voiceover telling of a “dissatisfied daughter who was convinced she was living under an evil spell” so leaves her home in New York, but finds that the spell has followed her. She collects 37 small stones (in the land where she settled, Gods were to be found everywhere) to place in a crooked line (straight lines bring bad luck). Although this unfinished tale does not progress in the narrative beyond the introduction, here Silver is setting up a mythologized version of modern womanhood and creating a juncture within which the experience of women around the world can be related to that of the women of Tokyo she interviews.
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37 Stories brings together several folktales, most prominently weaving in the story of a mother who journeys to save her daughter from the ogre Oni, who has snatched the girl away on her wedding day. They are ultimately saved by showing the monster and his friends their “important place,” their genitals, the sight of which causes the monsters to laugh and spit out the river water they had drunk, allowing the two women to sail to safety. While the monsters scoff at this blatant representation of femaleness, it is this visual disclosure of the power of their womanhood that saves the women.
Visually rich with archival photographs and film footage, 37 Stories gives voice to a century of women. The interviews are loosely linked as the women tell stories of their past and present, revealing complicated lives and relationships, as well as the differences between generations owing to a changing society. One daughter proclaims that she “decided never to sacrifice [herself]” as her mother has. Her grandmother claims that her life was planned for her, saying without a hint of bitterness, “My life just happened to me, children and all. Laughable, no?”
While 37 Stories explores numerous ramifications of motherhood and involvement in the familial construct, from nursing an ill mother-in-law to estrangement to being raised by a geisha aunt, through the eyes of varied (if all twentieth-century Japanese) women, the other video works in Maternal Metaphors focus on more specific attitudes and perceptions. Myrel Chernick, in She and I (1995, 21:00 minutes), traces her grandparents’ emigration to Winnipeg, Canada, focusing on her paternal grandmother, Mirel, whom she never met. As a child, the narrator artist drew the various incarnations of her father’s family as it grew a generation before. With her father having only brothers, she invented a girl child, saying, “Only then was the family complete.” As Chernick follows the trail, using documentary footage and shots of her own daughter playing dress-up, she finds remnants of the life her grandmother led, tidbits of familial information. In her extensive texts, Chernick often shifts pronouns, transforming the autobiographical “I,” into the more universal “She.” In She and I, the subject shifts as Chernick blurs her own experience with her grandmother’s.
The most telling moment in the narrative is the revelation that a number of women in their seventies, when asked to be interviewed by the Jewish Historical Society, responded, “We didn’t do anything. We had wonderful lives, rewarding marriages, successful children. We have nothing to say.” Here women negate their own voices, while acknowledging that their lives fulfilled societal (and, by default, their own) conventions.
In Mommy Mommy, its video monitor placed on the chair used by the participants in the video, Chernick sets up the dichotomy of a squirming, crying baby boy and a sedate baby girl, held on their mothers’ laps. Viewers are meant to experience two vastly disparate visceral reactions to the raucous screaming of the boy and the peaceful, nearly angelic countenance of the baby girl. Chernick scrolls large, watery text such as “can’t you make him stop?” across the screen, superseding viewers’ desire to demand just that. With subsequent use of such texts as “the child stole her voice,” the viewer’s response to the boy’s screaming is transformed into an intellectual exercise, forcing viewers to question their own constructs. We are told alternately that the agitated boy’s mother is a “bad mother,” while the peaceful baby girl’s mother is a “good mother” and a “hot mama.”
The universality of this “everymother” who is judged solely on the behavior of her child at a given moment is further exemplified by Chernick’s intentional framing of the shots to exclude the mothers’ heads and faces. In addition, as in Hamilton Metcalfe’s piece, the voice of the child usurps that of the mother. In Mommy Mommy, a young girl sits with her legs crossed and thumbs twiddling, with her baby doll in her lap. Using a factual adult tone, she says of her doll: “She’s asleep. I can do my things, and have a relaxing day.” In an ironic linguistic and visual twist that harkens back to the infanticide of Chernick’s On the Table and On the Couch, the girl then lifts her legs higher, obscuring the doll and smothering its face with her elbow, ending with the ominous statement, “I might as well make sure she doesn’t wake up again.”
MYREL CHERNICK , Mommy Mommy , 1994
In contrasting the mothers of the crying and silent babies, Chernick approaches the issue of semiotics, asking, “perhaps their differences were actually similarities of difference?” and “she couldn’t be the mother without the child, now, could she?” Chernick is being sly here, using the rhetoric of the assumed universal experience of motherhood to criticize cultural assumptions. The artist remains self-reflective, utilizing the third person “she” to acknowledge in scrolling text that “she was, again, leaving out the mother’s voice” and immediately returning to the voiceover relaying the reconstructed tale of “The Powerful Lady,” the story of a young princess who earns her heroine status, first by succeeding in domestic endeavors and later by wisely wielding the powers she has been given.
Chernick openly explores the ambiguities inherent in domestic life; she does not shy from portraying this life as monotonous, including such quotidian details as the boy’s lengthy bout of crying in Mommy Mommy and the washing of a sink full of dishes presented in real time in She and I. She keeps a static camera, allowing the viewer to sit with the “action.” What at first seems tedious for the viewer may be doubly so for the participant, but in the end the ultimate rewards of mothering are evident: the sparkling dishes are piled neatly on the sideboard.
In Ellen McMahon’s epigrammatic Scorpio is Bright (2004, 1:45 minutes, see also the photo essay Alice’s Idea, reprinted in this catalogue), a teenage girl asks her mother to transcribe texts onto her body and photograph them. The mother relates her mixed feelings about the process and the daughter recites the texts we witness her mother applying to her body, which range from considerations of her experience (“Maybe I was just being selfish”) to personal maxims (“We can be free”). As she reproduces the words on the canvas of her daughter’s body, the younger woman’s voice is manifested visibly in the physical world. Not only is the mother complicit in this powerful and culturally transgressive act of ownership, she also realizes something that “makes [her] chest ache”: that her daughter trusts her enough to involve her in this intimate act. The viewer feels the closeness of their bond as the mother lovingly attends to her daughter’s unusual request, and the result is a stunning panorama of text and flesh, McMahon’s own familial fairytale made real.
BETH WARSHAFSKY, Regeneration, 1992
In Beth Warshafsky’s short work, Regeneration (1992, 2:00 minutes), photographic headshots of a mother and daughter are overlaid and slowly morphed into one another. As the speed at which each alternating image appears increases, the lines between the two physical realities become blurred. The emotional revelation that follows is that one cannot be sure which of the two one is seeing at any given moment, the resultant implication being that ultimately there is no difference in the eyes of the subjective outside world.
By transgressing societal expectations in these ways, these artists have implicated themselves in a subversion of human history itself. They have engaged in activities not sanctioned by their cultures, not the least of which is their ability to ultimately be both mothers and functioning artists, to succeed both maternally and metaphorically.
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January 22, 2007