VALIE EXPORT A very different take on motherhood — art by women (not old masters)
By Waldemar Januszczak
I was taken aback by this touring exhibition. There are already plenty of pictures of mothers and children — but this female view is strikingly new
There are many reasons to enjoy — or in my case to love — Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol. The show is an in-depth examination of the relationship between mothers and their children, as seen by female artists from the 1970s to now. So it delves into the deepest human territory there is: the bearing of babies. Without which none of us would be here.
Of course, there are already plenty of mothers and children in art. The countless versions we have of the Madonna cradling Jesus might even lead us to believe the topic has been extensively tackled. It has. But only by men. The outside view is familiar. The inside view, a woman’s view, is not.
Bristol is the first stop of a touring exhibition, organised by the Hayward Gallery in London, that will also arrive in Birmingham, Sheffield and Dundee. You really should see it when it stops near you. It’s an eye-opener.
Until now, what we have mostly had in art on the subject of motherhood have been the dewy-eyed fantasies of doting artistic dads. From Perugino to Picasso, the fathers of art have gone soppy on us en masse. But their view has a narrow angle. On this evidence, and there is a lot of it, with 60 artists in the show, motherhood and childbirth have myriad moods, and none of them is as uncomplicated as a Madonna and Child by Botticelli.
To be honest — and I speak as a fully qualified doting dad — the amount of resentment, unhappiness, regret and frustration on display took me aback. There is wonder, too, and occasional flickers of joy, but they are outnumbered by the assortment of maternal sadnesses.
As it travels through Britain, the show will be reconfigured, so it is perhaps unfortunate that in its Bristol iteration it commences with a largely unhappy section entitled “MAINTENANCE”. It’s the section where women artists who have had babies remember and, in the main, lament the impact that motherhood has had on their careers.
Thus Valie Export, previously an explosive performance artist associated with the Viennese Action movement — who could forget the dramatic self-portrait in which she points a machinegun at us while striding wide in a pair of crotchless biker leathers that show off her pubic mound? — has metamorphosed into a glum social satirist. She comments on her days of motherhood by photographing a woman in the pose of a Renaissance Madonna with a washing machine full of kids’ laundry pouring out from between her legs.
