University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

(M)other work: feminist maternal performance art

(USC Thesis Other)

(M)other work: feminist maternal performance art

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content (M)OTHER WORK:
FEMINIST MATERNAL PERFORMANCE ART
by
Ashley Weeks Cart
______________________________________________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2010
Ashley Weeks Cart
Copyright 2010
ii
EPIGRAPH
Women are usually more patient in working at unexciting, repetitive
tasks…. Women on the average have more passivity in the inborn core of their
personality…. I believe women are designed in their deeper instincts to get more
pleasure out of life - not only sexually but socially, occupationally, maternally -
when they are not aggressive. To put it another way I think that when women
are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable.
- Dr. Benjamin M. Spock, Decent and Indecent (1970)
The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as
a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
iii
DEDICATION
For my daughter, Addison, without whom this would not have been
possible. Sunny, thank you for putting everything into perspective and providing
meaning when I needed it most.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the support, knowledge, and guidance of Carol Stakenas
and Dr. Andrea Liss. I would like also to express my gratitude to Rhea Anastas for
giving me the extra push, to Peggy Diggs for first igniting my interest in this field,
to my MPAS colleagues for inspiration and encouragement, and to the entire
MPAS program for providing space for and nourishing this kind of study and
academic discourse.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Preface viii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Lived 12
The Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Léa Lublin,
Mako Idemitsu and Mother Art
Chapter 2: Not a ‘Problem’ To Be Solved 34
The Art of Lena Simic, Elzbieta Jablonska and Maria Adela Diaz
Chapter 3: Intergenerational Comparative Analysis 49
The Reception of Feminist Maternal Performance Art
Conclusion 58
Bibliography 65
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Mon Fils 17
Figure 2: Maintenance Art: Mopping the Floor 20
Figure 3: Washing/Track/Maintenance: Outside, July 22, 1973 22
Figure 4: Touch Sanitation Performance 24
Figure 5: Laundry Works 26
Figure 6: Another Day as a Housewife 32
Figure 7: Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic 37
Figure 8: Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic 37
Figure 9: Through the Stomach to the Heart 39
Figure 10: Untitled (pad thai) 40
Figure 11: Through the Stomach to the Heart 41
Figure 12: 83 Waiters and a Helper 42
Figure 13: La Carga 46
Figure 14: La Carga 47
Figure 15: Stealing Beauty 61
vii
ABSTRACT
Feminist maternal public performance art connects maternal labor to
other forms of invisible maintenance and domestic work in the public domain.
Through performance-based practices, the artists discussed in this thesis reveal
the crucial, albeit undervalued, labor that maintains and upholds society and
the public domain, and the critical role that mothers can play in framing and
giving value and voice to this work. Through intergenerational, comparative
analysis of 1960s/70s and contemporary feminist maternal performance art, this
thesis considers the works of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Léa Lublin, Mako Idemitsu
Mother Art, Lena Simic, Elzbieta Jablonska and Maria Adela Diaz. Their practices
serve as a tool through which to challenge the institutionally, culturally and
socially prescribed role of motherhood to create a valuable, theoretical
maternal voice.
viii
PREFACE
In the first month of study for my Master’s in Public Art I learned that I was
pregnant with my first child. To embark on this intellectual, academic journey in
tandem with this other personal, physical, emotional journey was a profound and
complicated experience, to say the least. My daughter was thus born exactly
two weeks after the completion of my first year of graduate school. What I had
initially envisioned as my thesis for this degree was drastically altered by her
entrance into the world and by my engagement with this new maternal role and
identity I assumed upon her arrival. Over the course of the summer, as I became
more and more interested in the work of artists who directly tackled the
maternal, and found it more and more difficult to track down documentation of
or critical material on this kind of practice, I quickly realized that not only had my
personal outlook and interests been overhauled by motherhood, but my
intellectual and academic pursuits had also changed accordingly.
There is a gaping disconnect between the experiences of the maternal,
experiences shared by so many given that every single person on this earth is
here due to a woman’s labor, and the consideration, thought, and voice given
to mothers within public and intellectual discourse. This is particularly true in the
art world. My greatest hope is that this thesis helps to break new ground and
expand the theoretical and critical frameworks in which the maternal is
considered in artistic practice.
1
INTRODUCTION
Feminism and motherhood, much like art and motherhood, despite each
encompassing vast and varied subjects, have traditionally engendered
polarized discourses. It is assumed that in order to be a modern feminist, a
woman rejects the role of mother that has subordinated women and isolated
them in the private, domestic sphere. So too the avant-garde artist is perceived
as an uninhibited, autonomous individual, free from the constraints and
demands of maternal responsibilities, free from the so-called sentimentality and
emotional ties to family and children. As described by Jo Anna Issak in “Mother
of Invention”:
Historically the representation of motherhood has been in the hands
of male artists or authors. What men have created is an image of
woman so mired in the nature side of the culture versus nature
dichotomy that a woman who attempted to be a cultural producer
was perceived as a category error.
1
Institutional structures suggest that one cannot be both a mother and an artist, or
a feminist and a mother; the rejection of one identity is required in the
assumption of the other. While these terms may seem irreconcilable, bound to
collide and conflict, they in fact share more potential overlap and connection
than typically given consideration in social and academic discourse.
The roles of woman, artist, and mother are all culturally and socially
constructed identities. They come with the weight of societal expectations and
demands that prescribe and determine an ideal function and identity. As
described by Linda Nochlin in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,”

1
Jo Anna Issak, “Mothers of Invention,” in Feminism and Contemporary Art: The
Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (New York: Routledge, 1996), 140.
2
artists are shaped by a dynamic set of social, institutional, and cultural forces,
“an activity of a subject in a situation.”
2
More broadly, artist, mother, and woman
are each identities “built up minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and
the patterns of adaptation-accommodation may be established so early within
the subject-in-an-environment that they may indeed appear to be innate to the
unsophisticated observer.”
3
The assumption that the genius of an artist, or the
maternal instinct of a mother, or the femininity of a woman are natural or
essential ignores the very social and cultural structures that define and govern
the formation of these identities and patterns of representation. As described by
artist Suzanne Acker, “Both the woman artist and the mother operate in
constricted terrains, tracts contaminated by propositions entwined with age-long
tales of social and determinist Darwinism. To be a woman artist is to be a
taboo.”
4
Candace West and Don Zimmerman have theorized the concept of
“doing gender” to understand and re-envision the ways in which gender identity
is constructed and assumed. Rather than positioning gender as innate or natural,
West and Zimmerman suggest that gender is an active and accomplished
achievement:
When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property
of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the
individual and focuses on interactional and ultimately, institutional

2
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?,” in Women, Art and
Power and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 152.
3
Ibid., 153.
4
Suzanne Acker, “On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie,” in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology
of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, ed. Susan Bee and Mira Schor (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000), 256.
3
areas. In one sense, of course, it is individuals who “do” gender. But it
is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others
who are presumed to be oriented in its production. Rather than as a
property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature
of social situations: both an outcome of and a rationale for various
social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most
fundamental divisions in society.
5
This framing focuses attention on the social and institutional structures that
construct and constitute gender identity. By understanding identity formation in
this capacity, it is possible to envision identities such as that of an artist or a
mother as socially, culturally, and institutionally accomplished achievements as
well.
What happens, then, when a woman as an artist and mother manages
and incorporates these culturally defined disparate and disconnected roles into
a feminist maternal art practice, colliding terms and identities that are assumed
to be natural, fundamentally different, and ontologically opposed? What
happens when an individual both acknowledges the imposed cultural and
structural demands, expectations, and stereotypes of her/his assumed identity,
and thus draws attention to and subverts these structures in her/his artistic
practice? A new window of possibility exists in the practice of these artists who
open up the discourse, interweave and connect identities, and make visible and
public the structures that define and govern social roles and societal
expectations. By connecting these limitations, restrictions, and oppressive
structures to broader social ideologies, feminist maternal art critically challenges
and addresses these systems, and revalues and makes visible the
underrepresented, marginalized identities of oppressed, undervalued labor and

5
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2
(June 1987): 125.
4
maintenance work.
Much like an artistic practice, which involves work, commitment and an
active engagement with material, content, and subject, motherhood is a
dynamic role that involves labor and action. One is not innately or naturally a
mother just as one is not innately or naturally an artist. Motherhood can be
defined as maternal practice, as proposed by Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking.
Ruddick states, “To be a ‘mother’ is to take upon oneself the responsibility of
childcare, making its work a regular and substantial part of one’s working life.”
6
Both women and men can mother, but as discussed above, the role is
historically, traditionally, and institutionally constructed such that women primarily
occupy this position. Thinking about motherhood in terms of labor and work,
however, opens up the possibility for a maternal discourse that challenges these
social expectations and carves out space for valuation and agency within
maternal work and activity.
This thesis examines artists who do just that, artists who have used their
position as a cultural producer, a woman, a feminist, and a mother to critically
challenge, examine, and critique these varied identities and their positioning
within society through an artistic practice rooted in public performance. Through
intergenerational comparative analysis, this thesis considers the pioneering
practice of 1960s and 70s public performance artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles,
Léa Lublin, Mako Idemitsu, and collective Mother Art with contemporary artists
Elzbieta Jablonska, Lena Simic, and Maria Adela Diaz, who grapple with the
maternal experience through performance as well. This analysis focuses on the

6
Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1989), 17.
5
artists’ critical framing of the maternal, and their practices’ crucial connections
to labor, work, social demands, bio-determinist assumptions, and a shared
marginalized status with other service, maintenance, and domestic workers due
to their roles as mothers. The institutional reception of, the intellectual discourse
about, and the funding of these works and artists shed further light on the very
realities with which these artists struggle, realities they make public through their
work.
To understand the practice of and influences on Ukeles, Lublin, Idemitsu,
and Mother Art, women who paved the way for a critical feminist maternal
public performance art, it is crucial to ground the discussion in an understanding
of the period in which these artists of the 1960s and 70s worked, times which
heralded a moment of great social and political activism in the United States
and abroad. It was during this era that feminist impulses and activism reemerged
in many cultural and political spheres, including the art world. In response to the
traditional, domestic values forced on women in the post- Second World War
1940s and 50s, the voices of 1960s and 70s feminism were informed by women
such as Betty Friedan and her momentous book, The Feminine Mystique (1963),
which is often credited with launching the contemporary feminist movement. In
this book, Friedan discussed the problem that had no name:
The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of
American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction,
a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century
in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone.
As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover
material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured
Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was
afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: 'Is this all?'
7

7
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 13.
6
Friedan then went on to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in
1966 seeking to “bring women into the mainstream of American society in fully
equal partnership with men.” NOW advocated for the Equal Pay Act, additions
to the Civil Rights Act, and for the legalization of abortion, among other
important political battles for equality.
8
As these events unfolded in the political sphere, Lucy Lippard, Linda
Nochlin, Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock, Arlene Raven and Laura Mulvey broke
critical ground in the art world theorizing and discussing this traditionally silenced
female voice and giving critical weight to the work and practice of women
artists. For example, Lippard curated Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists in 1971
and c. 7500 in 1973 featuring the works of female conceptual artists. Nochlin’s
1971 text “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” re-framed art
historical discussions of gender and artistic production. Arlene Raven co-founded
the Woman’s Building in 1971 and went on to write extensively for The Village
Voice, Ms. Magazine, The New York Daily News, and October, while writing
books about contemporary art and feminism such as Crossing Over: Feminism
and Art of Social Concern (1988). Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker co-
authored the book Framing Feminism: Art and The Women’s Movement, 1970-
1985 (1988) incorporating texts they had begun writing in the 1970s. Laura
Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1971) was the first to
connect film theory, psycholoanalysis, and feminism, controversially identifying

8
Abortion was legalized January 22, 1973 when the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v.
Wade overturned state and federal laws that prohibited a woman’s right to that
procedure.
7
the male gaze and patriarchal positioning of the audience in Hollywood
cinema. While these individuals and many others may be cited as central
figures, voices, and influences in the shaping of 1960s and 70s feminism, it is
important to note that “feminism constitutes an ideology of shifting criteria, one
influenced and mediated by myriad other factors.”
9
The artists to be discussed in
this thesis were shaped by these voices, but also many other social, political, and
personal factors.
Feminist art practice of the 1960s and 70s was a crucial mechanism
through which women addressed and challenged patriarchal power structures,
misogyny, sexism, and cultural and political inequity. Feminist activist Carol
Hanisch coined the term, "The Personal is Political,” which became inextricably
linked to feminist art practice of the 1960s and 70s.
10
Feminism suggested that
women’s personal lives were deeply politicized and reflected sexist power
structures. Motherhood, of course, is a personal experience, constructed by
social, political, and cultural demands and expectations. Given that
motherhood has historically been delegated to the domestic, private sphere,
feminist art shared and also critiqued this traditionally private experience within
the public domain. These artists embraced the idea that life and art are
inseparable, a rubric echoed by many feminist artists, but particularly poignant
for women as mothers.
Not surprisingly, then, the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a respected

9
Butler, 15.
10
Carol Hanisch, "The Personal is Political," in Feminist Revolution: Redstockings of the
Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Kathie Sarachild (New York: Random House, 1978),
204-205.
8
1960s and 70s feminist artist who directly incorporated the maternal experience
into her practice and who shall be discussed in this thesis, was categorized under
the label “LABOR” in the WACK!: Art in the Feminist Revolution catalog, fusing the
experience of motherhood with notions of practice, work, and broader social
conditions of labor.
11
The irony, however, of this extensive exhibition that
highlighted 1960s and 70s feminist art practice is that it ignores the fact that
feminism played a role in the silencing of the maternal. Many feminists rejected
the role of mother, as it subordinated women, thus pushing the maternal even
further into a taboo terrain. Ukeles commented:
The feminist movement failed to a large degree because it never
understood the inherent power of what women were walking away
from, the power to connect with other people who did a similar kind
of work.
12
Feminist artist Judy Chicago, in fact, consciously chose not to have children as
she felt it limited her ability to function as an artist:
I have never regretted my decision not to have a child, because I
always knew that motherhood would interfere with my creative life. I
wanted my days to myself so that I could work in my studio. Moreover,
while I was in my thirties, when many women reportedly feel their
biological clocks ticking, I was steeped in research into women’s
history. Discovering that most successful women artists had been
childless, I consciously chose to pattern my life upon theirs.
13
Rather than challenging or questioning this pattern and these structural, cultural,
and institutional constraints, a truly feminist act, Chicago turned her back on the
maternal.

11
Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Marks, eds., WACK! : Art and the Feminist Revolution
(Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007).
12
Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” 310.
13
Judy Chicago, Beyond the Flower (New York: Penguin Group, 1996), 90.
9
This understanding of the artist as an uninhibited, autonomous individual
free from the demands or restraints of childcare or familial responsibility has been
a pervasive assumption, limiting the voices and experiences of women as
mothers within the history of art. Lucy Lippard highlighted the cultural taboo
placed on the maternal in her essay The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth, wherein
she questioned the absence of artwork that addresses the maternal in
contemporary art.
14
By not critically engaging the work of artists who infuse their
practice with the maternal experience and rejecting this work as sentimental,
emotional, and not serious, artists as mothers have been marginalized by the art
world. Sara Ruddick pinpoints the challenge of producing a serious and critical
maternal discourse:
In writing as in living, it is difficult to describe the pleasures of
motherhood without sentimentality, to discuss the inevitable pain
without false pathos, to balance the grim and the satisfying aspects
and to speak honestly.
15
Many female artists, particularly mothers, have been criticized for the emotional,
sentimental treatment of feminine, maternal, or domestic experiences within
artistic practice. Artist and curator Myrel Chernick commented, “I find that in the
art world, a woman is considered less serious if she chooses to have children.”
16
These subjects are not taken seriously and are not given the critical framing or
treatment of other artistic practices. While complex cultural and essentialist

14
Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays
on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976).
15
Ruddick, 30.
16
Myrel Chernick, “On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie,” in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An
Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, ed. Susan Bee and Mira Schor
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 264.
10
structures have limited women’s ability to process their identity as mothers within
their cultural production, many women have ignored this cultural restriction and
incorporated the maternal intimately within their practice.
This thesis aims to discuss these critical artists and artworks that break the
taboo and make public the experience of motherhood as a serious means of
engaging in the art world, connecting these experiences with broader social
conditions of invisible, undervalued labor. While mothers and domestic service
workers perform their labor out in the public eye, this activity is often overlooked
and culturally viewed as dirty and private labor that should not be performed
within sight of the public. The irony of this cultural demand is that “contrary to
myth, mothers do not work in private,” as they are out in the world picking up
children from school, grocery shopping, car pooling, running errands, etc.
17
This
ignored visibility of mothers in the public domain relates comparably to society’s
lack of acknowledgement of domestic labor and maintenance in the public
sphere. Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles commented on the sanitation workers with
whom she collaborated:
These workers would say, “Nobody sees me. I’m invisible.” I mean,
they’re out performing their work in public every day in New York City.
Why aren’t they seen? I mean, the disconnection between what is in
front of your face, and what’s invisible, what’s culturally acceptable,
thus formed and articulated, what is outside culture, thus formless and
unspeakable, was almost complete.
18
This shared demand for invisibility imposed by cultural and social expectations,
despite the crucial nature of their role to maintain and sustain society, connects
and unites mothers and domestic service workers. The artists discussed

17
Ruddick, 135.
18
Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” 313.
11
throughout this thesis aim to reveal this irony and contradiction and revalue this
labor and work.
What mothers and maternal art practice share is “not virtuous
characteristics but rather an identification and a discourse about the strengths
required by their ongoing commitments to protect, nurture and train,” to do the
labor and work involved in the care and maintenance of children and family,
and more broadly, society. Through intergenerational comparative analysis of
the performance art of 1960s and 70s artists with today’s contemporary feminist
maternal performance artists, this thesis exposes how these artists make public
the experience of mothering, providing an alternative to the hegemonic,
patriarchal assumptions about this role and carving out space for women as
artists AND mothers to be given critical value in the art world and society at
large. As Mierle Laderman Ukeles described:
I felt like two separate people… the free artist and the mother/
maintenance worker… I was never working so hard in my whole life,
trying to keep together the two people I had become. Yet people said
to me, when they saw me pushing my baby carriage, “Do you do
anything”… Then I had an epiphany… I have the freedom to name
maintenance as art. I can collide freedom into its supposed opposite
and call that art. I name it necessity art.
19

19
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art,” in Conservation and Maintenance of
Contemporary Public Art (London: Archetype, 2002), 9.
12
CHAPTER 1
Feminist artists of the 1960s and 70s invoked “the lived” experience of
motherhood (a concept coined by artist Léa Lublin) and offered a social critique
informed by this experience through performance art. Feminist art practices of
the 1960s and 70s were characterized by activism and political commentary, an
effort by artists to reveal and overturn the marginalized, second-class status of
women and make their experiences visible, important, and a part of public
discourse. As described by Cornelia Butler in the catalog for WACK!: Art and the
Feminist Revolution, feminist art practices can be characterized by “two central
tenets: the personal is political, and all representation is political.”
20
Performance
art, a means of practicing art characterized by theatrical actions often done in
public space, was taken up by a great number of feminist artists of the 1960s and
70s, allowing them to work outside the traditional, patriarchal, object-based
demands of the art world that had limited women’s inclusion.
Performance art has roots in a variety of cultural movements and artist
collectives including the live performances and collective gatherings of the
Dadaists, an informal artistic movement responding to the outbreak of World War
1, the Futurists (early 1900s), the Bauhaus of Germany which included a theater
element to their practice (1919), the Beatnik poets known for their readings in
coffee houses in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Gutai group of Japan in the
1950s, Allan Kaprow and his Happenings and Events (1950s-1970s), and Fluxus Art
practice (early 1960s), which was characterized by playful “scores” that took a
jab at the seriousness of modern art. Performance art was taken up as a practice

20
Butler, 15.
13
for it could not be bought, sold, or traded as a commodity as traditionally
understood by the art market. Performance art is a means of bringing art directly
to a public forum, easing the demand for galleries, agents, brokers, tax
accountants and any other aspect of capitalism to interfere with artistic practice
and production. So too in performance art, the artist is both the subject and the
object of the work, creating an opportunity for autobiography and commentary
on the very notion of the art object. Further, in performance art the “body is the
metonymic of the self, of character, of voice, of ‘presence.’ But in the plentitude
of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and
represents something else.”
21
This element is particularly crucial for feminist artists,
as performance artists may refer to a role, may perform and reference the
construction of self so imposed on women, separating their personal self and
subjectivity from that of the body/identity that they represent in their work.
As performance art was gaining momentum, the Portapak, the first-ever
lightweight home video recorder, became available to the public via Sony in the
mid-1960s. This device offered a new medium for creating and documenting art.
The Portapak made it possible for artists to record their actions, to experiment
with materiality, to reconsider notions of the viewer, the audience, the object,
the subject, and to invent a new aesthetic in an active capacity. Much like the
possibilities of performance art, video art appealed to women for it allowed
them to create art independent of access to a studio, or traditional materials like
paint, for the Portapak was light, affordable, easy to operate, and could be used
anywhere, at any time. Similarly, it came with no historic baggage or previously

21
Phelan, 150.
14
established standards or aesthetic expectations. Video art opened up the
possibility of engaging space in a fresh capacity, of considering psychological
factors inherent in notions of documentation, recording action, historicizing a
fleeting moment in a “permanent” capacity, and thus of capturing and
archiving these ephemeral performances to allow for further sharing and
circulation. Joan Jonas, a female pioneer of video art, created videos that
considered time, space, the objectification of the female body, and explored
identity and gender while experimenting with the materiality and technological
capacities of the medium. Martha Rosler, another important 1970s female video
artist said:
Not only systemic but also a utopian critique was implicit in video’s
early use, for the effort was not to enter the system but to transform
every aspect of it and to redefine the system out of existence by
merging art with social life and making audience and producer
interchangeable.
22
Feminist artists used performance art, including video, as a method and
practice to challenge the patriarchal demands of the market that historically
excluded their work and restricted their presence. Performance art provided
women the opportunity to turn against objects, a condition not only allocated to
art works but to women throughout history. Women have been historically
viewed and treated as objects of a male owner (husband, boyfriend, spectator).
Just as art objects such as paintings and sculptures were viewed as pretty things
to be owned and looked upon, so too were women. As feminism challenged this
objectification of women, 1960s and 70s performance art challenged the

22
Martha Rosler, “Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video: An Essential
Guide to Video Art (New York: Apertune, 1990), 31.
15
commodification of art. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, performance
enabled women to share their stories and voices in a public realm, a realm that
historically marginalized the female voice:
Largely disenfranchised by modernism and its histories, modes of
consumption and forms of exposition, many women felt estranged
from high art and esoteric debates about strategic practices within it.
In many cases the feminist impulse in art has expressed itself in direct
opposition to the modernist mainstream, favoring forms of art, excised
from history by modernism and excluded precisely for their obvious
gendering.
23
So too women could easily relate to this notion of performance, as they
daily were expected and conditioned to perform the role of submissive,
domestic female. As described by artist Cheri Gaulke:
When I was growing up I used to make my bed with precision
movements, imagining that somehow the boy I wanted to marry
was watching my performance and judging it. In the magazines and
on television, we see women posing while mopping the kitchen floor,
and we too learn to pose - as women. We played house only to grow
up to get the starring role. Performance is not a difficult concept to us.
We're on stage every moment of our lives. Acting like women.
Performance is a declaration of self - who one is - a shamanistic
dance by which we spin into other states of awareness, remembering
new visions of ourselves. And in performance we found an art form that
was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the
traditions governed by men. The shoe fit, and so, like Cinderella, we
ran with it.
24
Not surprisingly, women as mothers, who daily performed maternal
responsibilities, used performance as a mechanism through which to make sense
of and create art that incorporated the experience of motherhood in their
practice. Performance art offered the opportunity to make visible a traditionally

23
Griselda Pollock, “Histories,” in Social Process/ Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970-
1975 (Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, 1997) 46.
24
Cheri Gaulke, “Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Women’s Building” High
Performance Magazine, Fall/Winter 1980.
16
invisible role, without the constraints and regulations of the art market. And video
art made it possible for artists as mothers to record these actions from their
homes, to create art from within a domestic, private space and yet share it with
a public audience. Further, by declaring art as performance and thus
motherhood as performance, these artists offered poignant, critical commentary
on the social, cultural, and institutional structures that govern experiences of the
maternal.
Léa Lublin was one of the first feminist maternal performance artists to
connect her everyday lived experience as a woman and mother with her artistic
practice. Born in Poland in 1929 and raised in Argentina, Lublin coined the
concept of “the lived” to reconcile the disconnect between static media such
as painting and active experiences of everyday life in artistic practice. Her first
performance work Mon Fils (1968) made the experience of the maternal public
by “moving a moment of daily life to an artistic venue.”
25
Lublin invited the public
to observe her caring for her seven-month old son in the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, bringing the everyday maternal experience directly within
the institution and thus declaring it as art (Figure 1).
Not only did the work “inextricably connect her identity as an artist to her
identity as a woman and mother, refusing to privilege art over life,” but it
questioned notions of representation and exposed the power structures inherent
in art. Lublin was one of the first artists as a mother to so boldly and directly
address the challenges and controversies of working as a mother/woman/artist
in the art world and art institution. By bringing her personal domestic life into the

25
Léa Lublin, quoted in “Biographical Essay,” Biography Resource Center, s.v. Léa Lublin
17
museum space, Lublin conflated art and life and declared them to be
inextricably linked.
With an art audience and viewer at hand, Lublin performed the role of
mother, commenting on the performative nature of this identity. Lublin made
obvious that mothering was not innate or natural, but rather a role, an act, a
work taken up by women due to the social, cultural, and institutional structures of
society. So too she declared the care and work of mothering as art, an effort
occurring simultaneously across the Atlantic Ocean in the United States through
the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Fig 1. Léa Lublin, Mon Fils, 1968. Courtesy of L’ADAC.
18
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ public practice is inspired by her role as a mother
and maintenance worker, which she connects to other forms of undervalued
labor, particularly in American society. When Ukeles became pregnant with her
first child, she was told by a male art professor that she could no longer be an
artist. Enraged by this bio-determinist assumption, Ukeles composed in one sitting
Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! proclaiming that “the identity of a mother
and the identity of an artist in one woman were no longer irreconcilable and
that this forced separation was no longer tolerable.”
26
The manifesto linked
motherhood with maintenance and discussed the death and life instinct, linking
death with individuality and the avant-garde and life with unification and
maintenance. She wrote in this document, “After the revolution, who’s going to
pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
27
Within Manifesto for Maintenance
Art, 1969! Ukeles “critiques the avant-garde association of artistic freedom with
individual autonomy… and [Ukeles] removes herself from the dominant
patriarchal ideology for denigrating aspects of female experience - including
child-raising.”
28
For instance, Ukeles’ practice connects the experiences of service workers
with her own personal experiences of domestic work as a mother. Inspired by this
connection, her practice has focused on highlighting the value and significance
of this labor in maintaining, sustaining, and upholding modern society. She

26
Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009), 52.
27
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!,
28
Butler, 311.
19
describes this kind of labor as “The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the
perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations;
equilibrium.”
29
Within her manifesto, Ukeles proposed an exhibition titled CARE in which
she would move her family into a museum and perform her domestic
responsibilities in addition to cleaning and maintaining the museum space, and
feeding and nourishing the visitors and spectators of the exhibition. She claims
“MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.”
30
This proposal is comparable to Lublin’s Mon
Fils, although Ukeles pushed the work’s intent one step further by proposing to
care for the museum as she simultaneously cared for her family, linking the
maintenance service of janitors to that of mothers. Ukeles said, “The museum’s
life-processes would become visible. That would be the art-work.”
31
Much in the
same vein as Lublin who was working abroad in France at the same time as
Ukeles proposed this exhibition, there was an impulse to make visible the invisible,
to make public the maternal, domestic experience, and to value a mother’s
work in the same capacity as one would value an artist’s process. While Ukeles
sent this proposal around to a number of art institutions, the project was never
realized. A portion of the manifesto, however, was published in Artforum in 1971.
Included with the publication were four black-and-white photographs of Ukeles,
visibly pregnant, staging acts of domestic labor, such as scrubbing a shower
curtain, washing a cloth diaper, mopping the floor, and cleaning a chicken foot

29
Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!.
30
Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!,” 3.
31
Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” 305.
20
(Figure 2). These conceptual images were to complement the theoretical text of
the manifesto, supporting the connection between maternal, domestic activities
as art. Ukeles declared, “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art.”
32
Lucy Lippard, having read the Artforum excerpt, then invited Ukeles to
participate in an all-woman conceptual art exhibition, c. 7,500, in 1973. In the
catalog connected to an earlier exhibition of conceptual female artists curated
by Lippard, she pointedly noted:
Very few artists of any sex in America do not work at something other
than their art to earn a living, though it’s true that women often have
three jobs instead of two; their art, work for pay, and the traditional
unpaid ‘work that’s never done.’ The infamous Queens housewife

32
Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!,” 4.
Fig. 2 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art: Mopping the Floor, 1969. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
21
who tries to crack the gallery circuit is working against odds no
Queens housepainter (Frank Stella was one) has had to contend
with. I admire tremendously the courage of those who stick to it.
33
As part of this traveling exhibition, Ukeles contributed fourteen site-specific
maintenance art performance pieces that were performed at six of the
institutions c. 7,500 visited. This included Washing/Track/Maintenance: Outside,
July 22, 1973, an eight-hour performance at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in
Hartford, Connecticut, that made visible the undervalued, domestic labor such
as mopping, sweeping, dusting, etc., required to maintain the daily functions of
a museum institution, much like the labor of motherhood for the functioning of
society (Figure 3). As articulated by Miwon Kwon, “Certainly, in step with other
practices of the period that directed their attention to the institutional framework
of art, Ukeles’ cleaning frenzy exposes the museum’s appearance of neutrality
and purity as artifice - an artifice that requires the repression of (the signs of)
bodies and time.”
34
Ukeles articulated her desire to make the invisible visible in
her description of these maintenance art performance works:
In these art institutions, I’d take over the persona of The
Maintenance Worker, who is supposed to be unseen, and cleans
behind the scenes, after hours. Or the guard, who keeps the keys
silently. I was trying to bring maintenance out in public.
35
While certainly these maintenance art works may be categorized as
institutional critique, a mode of artistic practice that reveals the systematic
functions and hidden hegemonies of art institutions such as galleries and

33
Lucy Lippard, Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists, (Ridgefield, Connecticut: The
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1971) 2-3.
34
Miwon Kwon, "In Appreciation of Invisible Work: Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the
Maintenance of the 'White Cube'," Documents, no. 10 (Fall 1997): 2.
35
Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” 306.
22
museums, Ukeles’ primary focus was on the work of the invisible laborers who
uphold these systems. As described in the WACK! catalog, Ukeles “brought
unseen acts of maintenance into public view as the art itself, turning a mirror
onto the hidden tasks on which our lives depend.”
36
In 1977, Ukeles became an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York
City Department of Sanitation, a post she continues to hold today. Through her
work with the sanitation department, she continued to align and publicly
connect the undervalued labor of sanitation workers with the domestic labor of
mothers. For example, her performance Touch Sanitation: Handshake and

36
Butler, 311.
Fig. 3 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing, Track, Maintenance: Outside, July 22, 1973. Courtesy of
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
23
Thanking Ritual (1979-1980) involved personally shaking the hand of every one of
the city’s sanitation workers and saying “Thank you for keeping New York City
alive” (Figure 4). This performance work “granted respect to the sanitation
workers in affinity with her own and other mother’s domestic work.”
37
Ukeles noticed when she began working with the New York City sanitation
department that when the workers described their experience they would say
things like, “Do you know why everybody hates us? Because they think we’re
their maids,” or “Because they think we’re their mother.” Ukeles made the
connection that “there were always images of women, but it never occurred to
[the workers] that this would be an insult to me. I was supposed to automatically
understand, oh, of course they hate you because they think that of you, the
man, are a woman, that if you were a woman it would be natural to hate you for
this.”
38
Ukeles’ thoughtful connection to and engagement with the marginalized,
disdained, status of women/mothers as invisible laborer of the family to the
similarly despised sanitation department as invisible laborers of the city, allowed
for a public performance practice that not only critically and conceptually
challenges the art world’s marginalization of mothers but also society’s
consideration of maintenance work and domestic laborers. Lucy Lippard
describes Ukeles’ practice in conjunction with Mary Kelly, another prominent
artist who engaged the maternal experience in her feminist practice of the 1960s
and 70s:

37
Liss, 48.
38
Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” 312.
24
[Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles] insist on the necessity for
feminist artists to think, to frame, as well as to picture, and in doing so
to criticize the ways in which women see and take for granted their
perceptions. … Ukeles embarked on a similar enterprise focusing on
strategic outreach into the public domain.
39
Ukeles recognized:
I had come to understand that, as a woman, as a mother, I was
connected to most people in the world - the whole entire world of
maintenance workers. Women were never invited to become a
maintenance class, we were just told: “You are like this. We know
what you think. We know what you are. You take care of us.”
Women have been defined like that within the domestic sphere,
while service workers, of either gender, do this stuff outside, to make
a living.
40
Working just after the publication of Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance
Art, 1969!, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro embarked on a project titled
Womanhouse (1972) wherein female artists were invited to create site-specific

39
Lucy Lippard, Post-partum Document (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), xiv.
40
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” in Dialogues in Public
Art : Interviews, ed. Tom Finkelpearl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 310.
Fig. 4 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
25
installations and performances within a building in Los Angeles “to make public
women's private lives within the home.” The living room of Womanhouse was the
performance space where the women acted out aspects of “woman’s work.”
Two of the performance pieces were “maintenance pieces” because “women
spend a great deal of their time engaged in boring domestic activities.”
41
The
first of these pieces was the Ironing piece, in which a woman came out and
carefully ironed a large sheet. In the second piece, a woman scrubbed the
theater floor. While these women were not working from the experience of
motherhood, they were able to utilize concepts and struggles presented by
Ukeles in her manifesto.
The irony, of course, is that Chicago, as discussed in the introduction,
consciously decided to not have children due to pressures from the art world,
and went on to found the Los Angeles Women’s Building in 1973 with Sheila de
Bretteville and Arlene Raven. The Women’s Building was created as a physical
space that women would occupy and bring alive, much like Womanhouse. This
arrangement, however, favored certain women, particularly childfree women,
as, ironically, the Woman’s Building allowed dogs, not children, into artist’s studios
and, despite efforts by artist Helen-Million Ruby, childcare was never offered at
the building. This shared experience of discrimination, ostracism, and
marginalization due to their dual roles as mothers and artists united Helen-Million
Ruby, Jan Cook, Christy Kruse, Gloria Hadjuk, Suzanne Siegal, and Laura Silagi,
who formed the artist collective Mother Art. They began their practice by
conducting a month-long series of art performances titled By Mother (1977) at

41
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. “Performance,” in Womanhouse (Valencia, CA:
Feminist Art Program, California Institute for the Arts, 1972).
26
the Women's Building addressing this issue of maternity and art, and the lack of
support from their supposed feminist colleagues at the Building. The work
included the construction of a play structure for children outside the Woman’s
Building.
Mother Art aligned the work of artists who “set out to bring alive
unacknowledged and disrespected maternal experiences and to publicly
transform them into maternal discourses.”
42
Their most notable performance
work, Laundry Works (1977), was a site-specific installation piece involving
performances in various Laundromats throughout Los Angeles wherein the artists
hung their art and poetry on clotheslines and engaged with other women doing
laundry in the spaces about the labor involved in domestic work (Figure 5).
The performances were timed in sync with the wash-and-dry cycles of the
machines, emphasizing the busy, constrained schedules of mothers. The aptly

42
Liss, 76.
Fig. 5 Mother Art, Laundry Works, 1977. Courtesy of Mother Art.
27
placed location of the Laundromats not only allowed the artists to engage with
other mothers in a site of their work and labor, but also highlighted the lack of
“cultural space accorded to mother-workers and mothers working as artists.”
43
Laundry Works was made possible by a $700 grant from the California Arts
Council (CAC), which then was criticized by Senator Bob Wilson, Assemblyman
Robert Cline, Senator Dennis Carpenter, and ex-Governor Ronald Reagan as an
example of frivolous expenditure by the CAC of money from California’s state
budget. Carpenter accused the CAC of “supporting every hippie who ever
splashed a can on a wall” and of funding projects that “are not what you (state
senators) and I and normal people think about as art.”
44
Los Angeles Times writer
Suzanne Muchnic who covered this criticism noted:
Ironically, legislators and media spokesmen who often accuse
artists of being elitist make riotous fun of groups like Mother Art
who attempt to take art to ordinary people. The presentation of
plays in launderettes drew fire from people who evidently have
never spent a soul-destroying day at a laundry. It’s easier to throw
an idea out than consider its possible merits.
45
In response to this call for cuts in government spending for the arts, Mother
Art arranged the performance work Mother Art Cleans up City Hall (1978) in
tandem with a demonstration at Los Angeles City Hall with other local artists.
Present at the demonstration was artist, and fellow pioneer in performance art,
Allan Kaprow, who famously said, “"The line between art and life should be kept
as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible,” echoing the sentiment of 1960s and

43
Liss, 2.
44
Suzanne Muchnic, “Artists Take a Political Step,” Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1978,
M5.
45
Ibid.
28
70s feminist art, and the goals of Mother Art. On the steps of City Hall and in the
entryways of local banks (Mother Art Cleans Up the Banks, 1978), Mother Art
performed the traditional domestic duties of sweeping, scrubbing, and cleaning
to draw attention not only to the link between maternal domestic labor and the
upkeep of public spaces and public society, but a commentary on real fiscal
waste. Over a decade later, the Women’s Action Coalition protested at the New
York City Metropolitan Museum of Art and other prominent art institutions in
reaction to female artists’ exclusion from these venues. The women picketed with
brooms, and vacuums, and other traditional domestic cleaning supplies,
gesturing at the role of housewife that had factored into keeping women from
inclusion in these institutions, and “cleaning up” the gross flaw of the art world in
limiting women’s artistic work, a gesture much like its informative predecessor
Mother Art. Mother Art’s performance work brought the values of mothering into
the public sphere and provided rich and provocative critique of labor relations,
government spending, and maternal work in 1970s American society and
influenced the practice and work of future feminist artists.
Japanese artist Mako Idemitsu also engaged with Judy Chicago and
Miriam Schapiro’s Womanhouse and the feminist art practices occurring in
America in the 1960s and 70s, but brought an East-Asian perspective to her work.
Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Japan, and educated at Waseda University in Tokyo from
1958-62, Idemitsu first came to the United States for graduate school at Columbia
University in 1963. Here she met American-born painter Sam Francis whom she
married in 1966. After completing her degree in New York City, Idemitsu lived
29
and worked in Los Angeles from 1965-73. During this time, Idemitsu became a
mother to two sons, in 1966 and 1969.
Idemitsu’s impulse to work in video corresponds to the many parallel
activities that were occurring between American and Japanese video art in the
1960s and 70s. Given that Japan is the birthplace of video technology, East
Asian artists explored a medium and technology that was developed by their
culture. As described by Japan Society and EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix) in their
description of the 2009 exhibition, Vital Signs: Japanese and American Video Art
from the 1960s and 70s: “Using a familiar tool kit, [Japanese] artists explored the
nascent medium in unique and innovative ways.” There were many instances of
exchange between Japanese and American video artists in the 1960s and 70s.
For instance, Joan Jonas and Mako Idemitsu overlapped at Columbia in the
mid-1960s, and Jonas then visited Japan in 1970 with Richard Serra where she
purchased the Portapak JS. It was here that she began to explore this new
medium. Many of her video performances have been influenced by Japan’s
ritualistic performance traditions of Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku theater to which
she was exposed on this trip.
46
Idemitsu similarly blended her experiences of
American and Japanese culture through her performative video practice.
Idemitsu experimented with video art first through her documentation of
Chicago and Schapiro’s Womanhouse in 1972. Idemitsu filmed each room of
the exhibition from the perspective of a viewer, capturing themes of duty,
domesticity, and family. Through this documentation, Idemitsu examined the

46
For more detailed descriptions of Jonas’ early video work and influences, refer to Joan
Simon, “Scenes and Variations: An Interview with Joan Jonas” in Art in America (July 1,
1995).
30
culturally prescribed roles and identities of women, comparing her own
experiences as a woman, as a wife, as a mother, and as an artist from her
upbringing in Japan to her experiences living in the United States.
In 1973, Idemitsu returned to Tokyo with her family. Upon this return to
Japan, Idemitsu’s practice confronted the patriarchal constraints of the
Japanese culture and family dynamic. Idemitsu engaged a Japanese feminist
perspective that questions the traditional feudal legacy of Japan that taught
women to obey a male, either a father, husband, or son. Unlike American and
European feminism that marginalized the role of the mother, for it was seen as a
condition which contributed to women’s second-class status, Japanese culture
values the role of the mother, carving out a space wherein women can hold
power:
In any East Asian culture you will find that women have a very
tangible power within the household. This is often rejected by
non-Asian feminists who argue that it is not real power, but ...
Japanese women look at the low status attributed to the domestic
labor of housewives in North America and feel that this amounts to
a denigration of a fundamental social role – whether it is performed
by a man or a woman.
47
Idemitsu explored this complex tenuous notion of power through her
performances and video art. Interested particularly in the gaze, the viewer, and
the audience, Idemitsu critically engages the traditional role of mother, revealing
the complex relationships of mother and child, husband and wife, and the
consequent loss of identity and self that women experience. In her practice,
Idemitsu challenges the circumscribed roles and identities assumed by women
as mothers through capturing the performance and action of women engaging

47
Sandra Buckley, ed., Broken Silences: Voices of Japanese Feminism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997) 278-279.
31
in domestic work, commenting on the labor and work performed and expected
of women, particularly mothers.
Another Day of a Housewife (1977) was the first of Idemitsu’s videos that
dealt directly with the monotony and drudgery of domestic labor and household
responsibilities and incorporated the use of a television monitor within the frame
of the picture. In this video, a housewife performs the daily labors and demands
of her role, capturing the everyday lived experience of many mothers and
women as they prepare food, clean the home, and care for their children. What
stands out in this video is the inclusion of a television monitor with an over-sized
eye watching the female character throughout the video (Figure 6). The eye,
while certainly symbolic of the husband, or child, or society at large that monitors
the work of the housewife, a woman constantly under surveillance and subject
to the gaze of others, may also represent the eye of the woman herself,
watching and questioning the performance of this assumed identity. As
described by Idemitsu:
This video was made in those days when I was really fed up with being
a housewife. In the endless repetition of routine house chores I noticed
another "me" was watching the housewife "me." Who am I? What is it to
live? I wanted to share these questions with others.
48

48
Mako Idemitsu, “Another Day of a Housewife,” http://www.makoidemitsu.com/www/
home.html (accessed October 1, 2009).
32
The inclusion of the television monitor, a smaller frame within a larger frame, is a
recurring technique in Idemitsu’s videos, now referred to as the “Mako Style.”
With the smaller monitor, Idemitsu explores the psychological positioning of the
women within her videos; she layers the complexity of their experiences of
identity as a social construct and societal demand. The intersecting roles of
mother, wife, and artist are roles with which Idemitsu continues to struggle in her
work and that she makes visible through the performative nature of her videos.
The maternal feminist performance art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Léa
Lublin, Mako Idemitsu, and Mother Art carved out critical conceptual,
theoretical, and methodological space for future artists, not only mothers, but
artists engaged in performance art, relational, aesthetics, video art, and
institutional critique. The pioneering work of these women not only made visible
the undervalued work of mothers and the invisible experience of the maternal,
but profoundly tied motherhood to broader systemic conditions of maintenance
and service work. By challenging the demands of the art market, and engaging
and conflating the role of mother/artist/woman, these artists of the 1960s and 70s
Fig. 6 Mako Idemitsu, Another Day of a Housewife, 1977. Courtesy of Mako Idemitsu.
33
created fruitful terrain for future artists and women as mothers to engage and
work critically, while challenging social, cultural, and institutional prescriptions of
these assumed roles and identities.
34
CHAPTER 2
The maintenance art and feminist maternal stance taken by Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, Léa Lublin, Mako Idemitsu and collective Mother Art in the
1960s and 70s continues to be relevant and urgent to today’s mother-artists. In a
society where women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and
where motherhood continues to be largely delegated to the private sphere and
a role assumed predominantly by women, feminist maternal practice is essential
in giving value and voice to invisible domestic labor. As described by maternal
scholar Paula McCloskey:
New generations of artists are exploring their lived experience in a
world where, although the context of maternity might be changing,
it still challenges us all socially, politically, and culturally in our everyday
lives…. Women artists will of course continue to explore maternity in
innovative ways that challenge us and force us to thought.
49
The three contemporary artists to be discussed in this chapter were all
born in the 1970s, entering the world at a time when the artists discussed in
Chapter 1 were immersed in their practice and engagement with the maternal.
Similarly, each of these contemporary artists was born and raised outside of the
United States and Western Europe, as Lena Simic was born in 1974 in Croatia,
Elzbieta Jablosnka was born in 1970 in Poland, and Maria Adela Diaz was born in
1973 in Guatemala. Raised in countries at the borders of the Western world with
challenging political and social histories, each of these artists is influenced not
only by her positions as woman and mother, but by the complex socio-political
histories and experiences of her nation of birth. Each of them now lives, works,
practices, or exhibits in the United States and Western Europe, as Maria Adela

49
Paula McCloskey, “Locating the Maternal,” in Maternal Matters and Other Sisters
(Liverpool: The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, 2009) 22.
35
Diaz lives just outside of Los Angeles County, Lena Simic teaches and lives in
Liverpool, United Kingdom, and Elzbieta Jablonska, while still living in Poland, has
shown her work extensively in both contexts. Their practices balance both a
Western audience and perspective with a continued investment, involvement,
and engagement with their non-Western heritages. Their voices expand the
feminist voice beyond the condition of simply woman or mother to include
complex political and cultural conditions of their non-Western upbringing.
Mainstream feminist discourse has evolved to include this multiplicity of voices
and these intersecting axes of oppression, allowing for women of varied
backgrounds, beyond that of just the upper-middle class, white woman, to
contribute a critical feminist perspective.
Inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!,
Croatian artist Lena Simic’s feminist performance art practice is informed by its
relation to the everyday, lived experience of motherhood. Practicing in
Liverpool, UK, Simic is a mother of three and deliberately addresses and
challenges the imposed stereotypes and roles of mothering in her practice and
performance work. She acknowledges the labor intrinsic to the experience of
motherhood and aims to make visible this maternal labor within an arts context.
In dealing with the maternal, I am interested in exposing its socio-
political constructions. I am not interested in celebrating the maternal
(in the tradition of cultural feminism and ‘earth-mother’ new age
movement), but rather making its invisible labour as well as its
tenderness, love and contradictions more visible.
50

In the vein of ‘the personal is political,’ she seeks to connect both spheres of her
life, the domestic (private) and artistic (public) and de-authorize the

50
Lena Simic, email message to author, January 4, 2010.
36
private/public binary. She connects maternal labor with maintenance art:
Maternal labor is a maintenance art, the constant work happening
underneath, at the base of society. Yet, maintenance art is also an
interregnum, a pause or a gap in any continuous activity or series. Both
in the context of the art world and academia, in the production of affect
and knowledge, maternal studies equals maintenance art – a reflexive
pause, which not only helps combat the prescribed and ideal
motherhood, but also negotiate one’s own mothering praxis.
51
Simic uses her practice not only to make sense of her personal experience of
mothering, but to challenge, more broadly, the public understanding and
definition of the role.
Simic herself references the work of Léa Lublin and Mierle Laderman
Ukeles as precursors to her practice, acknowledging the pioneering influence of
1960s and 70s feminist art practice. Her work Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic
(2008) has a similar method as Léa Lublin’s Mon Fils, although Simic did not
become aware of this work until after her performance. As part of a MAP Live!
event in Carlisle, UK, Simic performed and staged the daily labor of mothering,
including the rituals of bathing, dressing and feeding her child (Figures 7 & 8).
Much like Lublin, she brought motherhood into the public domain and claimed
the labor of motherhood as artistic practice. She included excerpts from her
private diary and images from her maternity-leave walks in the park with Sid,
making public these more personal, private experiences of motherhood. Unlike
Lublin who “lived” in the museum, Simic’s work was a performance piece
wherein she purposefully and dramatically overemphasized her movements and
gestures. By staging the labor of motherhood, Simic stressed that as a mother
and as an artist, she was performing a role that is culturally and socially

51
Lena Simic, “On Interregnum: Being Childfree, Maternity Leave and Maintenance Art,”
Studies in the Maternal E-Journal (August 2009).
37
constructed.

Through this staging and performance, Simic claims her personal stake and
consciousness in assuming this role. There is a self-awareness and deliberateness
Fig. 7 Lena Simic, Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic, 2008. Courtesy of Lena Simic.
Fig. 8 Lena Simic, Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic, 2008. Courtesy of Lena Simic.
38
to Simic’s mothering. While she acknowledges the cultural and institutional
standards that shape that experience, by taking conscious ownership of her
labor, by staging it as a performance, Simic draws attention to these very
structures and creates a new space and experience through contemplation
and engagement with her maternal labor. Simic describes her art-making
process, “The everyday got ordered and transformed first into something
repetitive and then something performative.”
52
Additionally, as the title of the
work suggests, Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic, she also claims her role as a
public subject, producer, and creator of the work as both mother and artist.
Also working in Europe and similarly raised in an Eastern European context,
Polish artist Elzbieta Jablonska’s practice uses performance to make
commentary on the societal demands placed on a woman as mother and
domestic caretaker. She interweaves the everyday activities and duties imposed
upon women into her art practice, creating a multilayered commentary on the
condition, status and expectation of women, particularly mothers, and the many
roles that they are expected to assume. After the birth of her son in 1997,
Jablonska very deliberately introduced the traditional responsibilities of mother
and housewife into her art practice, staging performance pieces that, like Lena
Simic, draw attention to, make visible, and comment on the socially constructed
expectations of motherhood. She explores the mundane rituals of everyday life,
such as the preparation of family meals, commenting on the role culturally

52
Lena Simic, “Impossible Expectations and Everyday Interventions: A Document of
Maternity Leave” in n.paradoxa Vol. 22, 79.
39
imposed on women that obliges them to feed and serve others.
53
Her performances entitled Through the Stomach to the Heart involve the
preparation and serving of food, a responsibility traditionally and primarily done
by housewives and mothers, privately, behind the closed doors of a kitchen.
Jablonska makes this activity visible and public by offering food to gallery and
museum visitors (Figure 9).
These performances are reminiscent of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work wherein he
prepares and cooks meals, traditionally vegetable curry or pad thai given his
Thai heritage, for gallery and museum visitors (Figure 10). Tiravanija began this
kind of interactive artistic practice in the early 1990s with a “desire to not just
erode the distinction between institutional and social space, but between artist
and viewer.”
54
Nicolas Bourriaud describes Tiravanija’s work as relational

53
Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art
(London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007), 159.
54
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004) 56.
Fig. 9 Elzbieta Jablonska, Through the Stomach to the Heart, Inner Spaces Gallery, Poznan, 2001.
Courtesy of Elzbieta Jablonska.
40
aesthetics, “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human
interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent
and private symbolic space.”
55
This kind of practice is concerned with the social
role an artist can play in the creation of her/his work, with a focus on connection
and engagement.
Jablonska as a woman, however, is also concerned with making
commentary on the condition of women, thus rather than involving the
audience directly in the food-making process like Tiravanija, she labors alone, as
women traditionally have within the nuclear family. While both artists are working
from the traditions of critique and practice of the 1960s and 70s, “recalling the
premium placed by performance art on the authenticity of our first-hand

55
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002) 4.
Fig. 10 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (pad thai), 1990. Courtesy of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York.
41
encounter with the artist’s body,” their intent, effect, and reception are distinct.
56
Clearly the gender of the artist is essential in the reading and reception of these
works.
During performances in Zielona Gora (2001) and New York (2003)
Jablonska included tags on each appetizer informing the consumer of the
calorie content and how much exercise was necessary to burn it off (Figure 11).
This addition suggested the extra responsibilities required of the modern woman
and mother to maintain a physically fit, healthy, slender figure. Jablonska
references the multiple duties and expectations culturally imposed on mothers,
including serving and caring for others while remaining desirable and attractive
objects.
Much like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jablonska connects motherhood and

56
Bishop, 54.
Fig. 11 Elzbieta Jablonska, Through the Stomach to the Heart, Zielona Gora, 2001. Courtesy of
Elzbieta Jablonska.
42
maternal labor to broader conditions of inequality. Jablonska’s practice makes
visible the invisible labor that keeps society and the public domain functioning.
Her performance piece 83 Waiters and a Helper deliberately made obvious the
work of the service industry that is supposed to remain invisible and unnoticed by
the people it serves. During an opening at the Atlas Sztuki Gallery in Lodz in 2006
Jablonska hired 83 waiters to serve at the event and instructed them to
overzealously carry out their duties, thus interfering with the smooth unfolding
ritual of the art world (Figure 12).
As described by Marek Krajewski, “Brought together in one place, they became
visible, contradicting their professional transparency.”
57
Jablonska uses and transforms cultural stereotypes and clichés associated
with motherhood and domesticity, connecting these socially constructed roles to

57
Marek Krajweski, “Elzbieta Jablonska,” in New Phenomena in Polish Art After 2000
(Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2007), 56.
Fig. 12 Elzbieta Jablonska, 83 Waiters and a Helper, 2006. Courtesy of Atlas Sztuki Gallery, Lodz.
43
broader societal inequities and undervalued labor. As described by the Centre
for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland:
Can art be created out of banality and ordinary life? Art without huge,
blown-up ideas? Jablonska speaks about important things in a simple
way. In contemporary society, typical womanly works are embarrassing
and enclosed in the four walls of private homes, marginalized.
Jablonska makes them visible and enhances their status through art.
58
Jablonska’s performance art references service and helps to generate a
productive and critical connection between the labor of the housewife and
other service industries. Much like Ukeles’ ties with the New York City Sanitation
Department, Jablonska critiques the demands on contemporary women
through thoughtful connections and links to service and labor.
Working across the Atlantic Ocean in Central and North America,
Guatemalan-born and Los Angeles-based artist Maria Adela Diaz deals directly
with themes of labor, work, and maternal responsibility fused with experiences of
corrupt political regimes in her native country. She conveys her objections to
political deception, patriarchal societies, and discriminating philosophies through
her sublime, poignant video and performance work much in the same vein as
Mako Idemitsu.
59
Diaz shares a vested interest in making her personal
experiences public and visible. For instance, she chose to feature pages from her
diary in the recent publication Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New
Generation of Women. She describes this selection, “A diary is personal. By making
it public and showing women of my generation puzzle pieces from my life, I hope

58
Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland.
59
Maria Adela Diaz, http://www.mariadadeladiaz.com (accessed November 16, 2009).
44
to inspire and intrigue.”
60
Trained as a graphic designer from a young age, Diaz was 20 when she
went to work at the first Guatemalan fine art magazine, ARTERIA. Since the
magazine appealed to an elite audience, it was during this time that Diaz began
to question, “How can you really get to the people that need to see art?”
61
In
addressing this question, Diaz began experimenting with performance art on the
streets of Guatemala as a means of bringing her voice to the public. Diaz
became a mother in 1997, and as a single parent and as a woman struggling
with the patriarchal power system of her native country, her public performances
allowed her to make sense of “all the characters, all the roles, [she] has to play
as a woman.”
62
She reflects on her experience as a graphic designer as well:
Graphic Design gives me the opportunity to be involved in the world.
To research is a very important exercise. It gives me material to work with
and know more about what happens around me, it makes me feel
grounded.
63
Diaz immigrated to the United States in 1999 with her young daughter, and it was
then that she purchased a video camera to not only allow her to document her
performance work, but to allow for more flexibility in creating and staging her
performances.
Informed by her experiences as a mother and as a Guatemalan citizen
under that country’s corrupt military regime, Diaz’s video and performance work

60
Paula Goldman, Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of
Women, (Novato, California: New World Library, 2006) 198.
61
Maria Adela Diaz, interview with author February 20, 2010.
62
Ibid.
63
Maria Adela Diaz, http://elles.centrepompidou.fr/blog/?p=235 (accessed February 20,
2010)
45
offer beautiful, powerful commentary on these oppressive structures and roles.
Diaz sees her artistic process as an important healing mechanism in her personal
struggles and explains that the most important element of her work is actually
performing and doing the action. Her video work, which pairs hypnotizing,
peaceful footage with equally enchanting, haunting audio results in the
revelation of darker, more severe social, political, and cultural critique. Diaz
describes her work as biographical and inspired by her personal life experiences.
Her video, La Carga (2005), which in English means “The Load,” specifically
concerns the labor, work, and struggle assumed by a mother, particularly a
single parent. Diaz explains that this video is an extremely important work that
reflects a culmination of many years of struggle and isolation that she
experienced as a single mother and immigrant to the United States. After five
challenging years in the U.S., she felt compelled and inspired to create this
video, explaining the deep need she experienced to perform this piece.
The three-minute video portrays Diaz literally carrying her naked daughter,
almost full-grown at age seven, through barren rough terrain (Figures 13 & 14).
The setting for the performance is the land near Diaz’s home in Simi Valley,
California. The isolated, sparse environment is representative of Diaz’s years
adjusting to life in America as a single parent. In addition, the exposed
vulnerable state of her daughter lying helpless in her arms juxtaposed against the
harsh landscape and bright daylight sun emphasizes the need for a mother’s
care and protection.
46
Diaz trudges through the dried-out, barren terrain, as her daughter clings
to her arms. At one point she stumbles, momentarily dropping her daughter to
the ground before scooping her back up and continuing forward. A long path is
visible in the distance, signifying how far Diaz has come, and suggesting how
much further she must go. Diaz describes the work:
Carrying my daughter in my arms walking through difficult trails and hills.
In this piece, I try to express my conviction that a mother is inevitably
bound to fulfilling her role as a mother and taking care of a defenseless
being that needs her. This piece speaks about the difficulties I have to go
through as a single parent. It also portrays women as strong and able to
overcome any obstacle and discover unprecedented strength within
themselves because of their children.
64

64
Diaz, http://www.mariaadeladiaz.com.
Fig. 13 Maria Adela Diaz, La Carga 2005. Courtesy of Maria Adela Diaz.
47
Diaz visually represents the literal labor of mothering, the shouldering of
the burden and weight of caring for a child. Much like the video work of Mako
Idemitsu, Diaz’s video work presents what at first appears to be a beautiful
portrayal of the mother/daughter relationship; it then carefully unfolds to reveal
the struggle, conflict, and challenges of fulfilling this role. While it may not be an
easy path, the journey and labor of motherhood offers strength to the women
who assume the responsibility. Diaz states:
I question myself a lot about what it is to be a mother. I do not want
to sacrifice my creativity, my career, my dreams. I must force myself
to keep moving, to keep producing, to keep creating despite the
struggles I face as a mother. Being a single parent has made me
stronger and given me the strength to keep going forward. Through
my art, I want to project this meaning to other people.
65
For these performance artists, motherhood is political. While the mantra of
today’s feminism may not be as overtly “The Personal is Political” as it was for

65
Maria Adela Diaz, interview with author, February 20, 2010.
Fig. 14 Maria Adela Diaz, La Carga 2005. Courtesy of Maria Adela Diaz.
48
feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, motherhood continues to be a subjectivity
shaped by socio-political and structural influences. For this reason, artists
continue to, and need to, grapple with maternal matters. As described by Lena
Simic:
I found out about Léa Lublin’s project after doing my piece with Sid,
but that just goes to show that we can’t think in terms: ‘oh we’ve
done that already – mothers have been in galleries with children,
it’s nothing new, the world has moved on, things are ok now’.
We need to remember that we have to keep on fighting again
and again and again, always anew…. Revolution is ongoing…
The maternal is the subject that will not go away.
66

66
Lena Simic, email message to author, January 4, 2010.
49
CHAPTER 3
One of the core characteristics of each of these feminist maternal public
performance art practices is its deliberate challenging of traditional, patriarchal
,market-driven, object-oriented art making. Capitalism and market-driven art
practices are crucial components of the patriarchal systems that govern the art
world and market, thus further limiting a maternal voice within the canon. The
ways in which the artists within this thesis have found solutions to overcome this
marginalization and to challenge these patriarchal modes of artistic production
are crucial to the critical nature of their practices and contribution to the art
world. Lena Simic speaks directly to this desire to push against the market in her
practice and family life:
Education tends to make children into consumers, we are concerned
to help them grow into humans who will see beyond the dominant
system that we live in, consumer capitalism.
67
The funding, reception, and intellectual discourse of these works is mixed, at
times demonstrating the many ways in which the art world has progressed and
expanded artistic voice, and other times revealing the ways in which the
struggles of today’s artists are comparable to the challenges of their 1960s and
70s predecessors.
As mentioned in the Introduction, Judy Chicago, a well-known and visible
feminist artist, chose to pattern her life in a capacity that aligned her with the
patriarchal systems of the art world, thus foregoing child-bearing. Chicago
continues to be tuned into the art market and has sought and received
institutional validation throughout her career, something that she thought would

67
Lena Simic, email message to author, January 4, 2010.
50
not be possible with the “burden” of childcare and maternal responsibility. Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, by contrast, recognized the demands of the capital-oriented
art world, and its entrenchment in patriarchal power systems, and specifically
challenged the market and an object-oriented practice through her public
performance works and residency with the New York City Sanitation
Department. Her performance-based work allowed for a conflation of her artistic
and maternal experiences, and allowed her to work outside the constraints of
market-driven, object making. To support her practice, Ukeles has received
funding through public art commissions, through publicity by working with the
New York City Sanitation Department as an unsalaried artist-in-residence, and
through representation by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. While
Ukeles does not engage in an object-based practice, her performances and
conceptual practice have become a marketable means of engaging in the art
world. By developing a critical artistic practice and gaining credibility in the art
world and beyond through her ongoing continued commitment to labor,
sanitation work, and maintenance art, Ukeles has developed a successful means
of practicing in the art world without a dependency on object-marking.
Thus Ukeles, despite patterning her life in such a way so as to challenge
market-driven consumer-capitalist art production, has been received into the
canon of art history as a crucial and essential voice, as a feminist, performance
artist, theorist, and conceptual artist. She stands today as a powerful example of
a woman who has worked against the odds as a mother-artist to be received
critically within the art world. This reception has been slow, however, and was not
as prominent when she first began working in the 1960s and 70s. This has been
51
the case with each of the artists discussed in Chapter 1. Mako Idemitsu, Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, and Léa Lublin were important inclusions in the 2006 feminist
exhibition, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, but besides Ukeles, there is
limited literature and documentation of the works of Idemitsu, Lublin, and Mother
Art.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, Idemitsu was a crucial addition to the recent
exhibition Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and
70s, which traveled to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art;
Hiroshima, Japan; the Houston Center for Photography, TX; the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Japan Society, New York, NY,
where she was showcased alongside such renowned artists as Joan Jonas, Chris
Burden, Allan Kaprow, and Nam June Paik. Idemitsu was also included in The
Museum of Modern Art’s 2009 exhibition Here Is Every. Four Decades of
Contemporary Art in New York City, which showcased the museum’s
contemporary collection and examined the transformation of media culture
over the past forty years. In this exhibition, not only was Idemitsu’s practice
included in a well-established international art museum, but she was presented
alongside such canonized artists as Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, and Nan
Goldin. Like Ukeles, Idemitsu has gained critical reception and consideration by
the contemporary art institution in her later years. Both artists continue to
practice and exhibit their work, demonstrating a commitment and investment in
their practice that is finally beginning to take hold in contemporary discourse
about conceptual, performance, and video-based art practices.
Dr. Andrea Liss’s 2009 publication Feminist Art and the Maternal is the first
52
book to critically examine feminist maternal art practice in an academic and
intellectual capacity. Breaking the taboo of discussing feminism, motherhood
and art, Dr. Liss expands the discourse on feminist art practices. Her extensive
examination of Ukeles’ practice, including works not traditionally discussed by
Ukeles, and her primary interviews with members of Mother Art provide essential
and innovative perspectives on these feminist art practices. These 1960s and 70s
practices reveal the limited resources provided to these artists and collectives in
realizing their work. From Mother Art’s paltry $700 from the CAC to Ukeles’
unsalaried residency with the New York City Sanitation Department, these artists
had to learn to work in economical, efficient capacities that not only could
accommodate their financial limitations but the complexity of their lives as
mothers raising children while building a critical art practice.
Maria Adela Diaz, Lena Simic, and Elzbieta Jablonska face a comparable
challenge in terms of receiving funding and critical reception for their work.
Jablonska has been most extensively documented and funded for her public
performance works, most of which occur within traditional art institutions. She
was included in the Global Feminisms catalog, giving her practice some critical
weight and consideration; however, it seems marginal compared to the
attention and reception of Rirkit Tiravanija’s practice, which, as discussed in
Chapter 2, has similar methodologies. Again, gender is not something to be
taken lightly, even today in what is supposedly a post-feminist world where
women have equal access to and consideration as men. While Tiravanija’s
methodology has become an acceptable and understood means of engaging
in the art world, it is likely that his practice (and the respects he garners as a
53
male) are what have opened these institutions up to being more agreeable to
including Jablonska’s work. These established methodologies allow for the
inclusion of Jablonska’s feminist maternal perspective because it is performed in
a way that the institution understands, knows, and has accepted.
Lena Simic teaches at the Liverpool Hope University and thus receives
support from the institution for her art practice through access to facilities and
stipends for symposiums and workshops. Simic is regularly funded by the Arts
Council England, which typically grants £5000 for performance development
and tours of her performances. Occasionally, she also receives artist
performance fees for her work which range from £50-£600. Simic speaks candidly
about the challenges of receiving funding for her work Sid Jonah Anderson by
Lena Simic, even today when performance-based practices are a well-
established method of artistic production:
For Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena Simic I did not receive any Arts
Council England funding. Whilst I did apply for 'development' money –
telling them I wanted to work on Contemplation Time, they refused my
application because it was not product-based. I did not have a
booking at the time, which is funny, cause I couldn't have had a
booking - I was pregnant and the idea for Sid Jonah Anderson by Lena
Simic live art event did not occur to me then. I just wanted to explore the
state of late pregnancy and maternity leave through arts practice.
68
She accepted her lowest fee ever for this performance in the form of £50, but
then later published an article in the journal n.paradoxa reflecting on this work
and received £250. Simic acknowledges that she must be flexible in how she
approaches and seeks funding.
Simic is also a member of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at
Home, which is an artists collective funded by 10% from each of the members’

68
Lena Simic, email message to author, February 4, 2010.
54
personal salaries. The Institute is transparent about its operating budget, as
revealed on its website http://www.twoaddthree.org, and it is interested in
funding and sponsoring projects that “discuss homemade aesthetics, the
private/the public, the familial, class and money matters.”
69
Maria Adela Diaz self-funds her artistic production. Her career, and the
financial support thereof, is generated by her work as a graphic designer. She
runs her own design firm, Eureka 22, but laments that the graphic design industry
has become incredibly commercial in nature and she does not resonate with the
demands of the market. Her performance and video-based art practice are her
means of making sense of her own personal experiences and giving voice to the
troubled politics of her country and women’s and mothers’ struggles. She
believes in the power of art not only to help her heal her personal wounds, but to
“make people think about more important things than fashion, TV, etc.”
70
Given that Diaz funds her own practice, admitting that she does not apply
for grant funding, and that she does receive very minimal fees when her videos
are included in gallery and museum exhibitions, she works with what is readily
available to create her videos. She purchased a video camera when she
immigrated to the United States and taught herself how to shoot and edit her
own movies. This device has allowed her to work within her home and in the
nearby surroundings, much like Idemitsu, to accommodate her role as a mother
and as an artist. Despite the lack of financial support for her work, Diaz has been
included in a number of international exhibitions including Elles Art Action

69
http://www.twoaddthree.org
70
Maria Adela Diaz, interview with author, February 20, 2010.
55
Feministe at the Centre Pompidou in June 2009. While generating an
international art audience through such exhibitions, Diaz’s practice has also
inspired many artists and students in Latin America and is accessible to the
mainstream public through inclusion on such websites as YouTube via Diaz’s
personal account.
While reception of Diaz’s work has generally focused on her critical,
poignant treatment of female identity and the mother/child relationship, in 2007
an anonymous individual accused Diaz of sexual harassment due to the
presentation of her daughter’s nude body in the 2005 video, La Carga. Much like
the criticism faced by photographer Sally Mann in the portrayal of her children’s
nude bodies in her 1992 collection Immediate Family, this accusation and police
investigation of Diaz, her daughter, her practice, and her role as a mother
reflected a gross misunderstanding of her maternal and artistic position. Diaz
explained, “Only in America,” referencing the United States’ social conservatism
in terms of sexuality and representations of the body. The irony, of course, is that
the United States media is saturated with hyper-sexualized images and
advertising to sell products and promote American capitalism.
While Diaz was not found guilty for these charges, she and her daughter
were frightened and disturbed by this experience. Her daughter now expresses
grave concern and self-consciousness when Diaz includes her in her
performances and videos. What was nothing but natural and completely free
from sexual-readings to Diaz as a mother was sorely misunderstood by a public
audience, reflecting the often misunderstood relationship of mother to child. As
made clear by this story, the inclusion of a critical, public maternal voice is
56
essential in providing clarity and better understanding of the maternal
experience.
For this reason, the audience for these practices is intended to be neither
solely the art world nor solely mothers. While of course these performances may
appeal to artists, particularly fellow performance and video practitioners, as well
as to mothers and women, these practices are also interested in connecting with
students and members of the general public that comes into contact with their
work. It is crucial to note that these artists are not defined solely by maternity, as
society is inclined to do whereupon a woman becomes a mother and it
becomes her master status.
71
While their practices may include works that deal directly with maternity,
motherhood, domestic labor, and child-rearing, they do not singularly focus on
the maternal within their practice. A cultural producer from any creative field is
doubtless influenced by her or his personal experiences, thus it is of no surprise
that artists as mothers have been inspired to reflect on this experience in their
practice (despite pressure to conceal this identity in the art world). This, however,
does not suggest that motherhood and maternal art are their singular character
and focus, as society would like to suggest whereupon a woman becomes a
mother.
This is essential, as women are often pigeonholed into the label of
“mother” upon having children, with little consideration and critical attention

71
Master status is a concept developed by sociologist Everett Hughes in the 1940s
through his studies of race in American society. The term describes the social position
that is the primary identifying characteristic of an individual. Master status can be
ascribed or achieved, and overshadows all other social positions, thus shaping a person’s
identity and life experience.
57
given to not only that identity but to the myriad of other identities that define a
woman. Just because an artist bears a child and assumes the role of a mother,
this does not inevitably make her a “mother-artist.” Yes, she is both a mother and
an artist, but she does not automatically then incorporate experiences of the
maternal within her artistic practice. And if and when she does engage the two,
as the artists discussed in this thesis have done, that does not come to be the
only subject or theme about which she will work, nor does it suggest that that
subject matter is somehow too personal, too emotional, too nostalgic, or too
sentimental to be engaged on a more critical, intellectual level. As much as
motherhood, when assumed, is a profound and life-long identity, it is one part of
a complex conglomerate of experiences and characteristics that come to
define a woman and come to influence an artist’s practice.
58
CONCLUSION
Feminist maternal performance art of the 1960s and 70s and today
provide an expanded understanding of artistic voice and cultural politics. By
breaking away from the prescriptive roles and demands of mother/artist/woman
and paving new ground for future generations of artists, not only as mothers, the
artists discussed in this thesis challenge, critique, and create new territory for
artistic production. Through performance art, artists are able to conflate the roles
of subject and object, performer and creator, a coalescence reflective of the
blending of identities of (among many) woman, mother, artist that these feminist
maternal performance artists must juggle daily. A complex balancing act and
commentary on this very intricacy is at the core of these feminist maternal
performance practices:
I believe that feminine artistic production takes place by means
of a complicated process involving conquering and reclaiming,
appropriating and formulating, as well as forgetting and subverting.
In the works of those female artists who are concerned with the
women’s movement, one finds artistic tradition as well as a break with it.
It is good - in two respects - that no formal criteria for “feminist art” can
be definitively laid down. It enables us to reject categorically the notion
of artistic norms, and it prevents renewal of the calcified aesthetics
debates, this time under the guise of the feminist “approach.”
72
What makes each of the works discussed throughout this thesis critical in the face
of little to no attention or reception in the art world is the artists’ thoughtful and
careful commentary and critique on not only the status and social construction
of motherhood, but of ties to broader notions of labor and the ability to expand
public discourse. Similarly, these artists have found ways to challenge the

72
Silvia Bovenschen, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury,
New York: Feminist Press, 1981) 41.
59
traditional art market, creating new modes in which to be supported by their
practice.
It is essential to note that there are many other performance artists whose
work has at one time or another addressed the maternal experience, subverted
domesticity, and challenged the public to think critically about the role of
motherhood in society. Jess Dobkin’s The Lactation Station (2006) invited
audiences to sample breast milk from six lactating women, including herself,
challenging the taboo placed on breastfeeding publicly, and acknowledging
that the majority of people on earth at one time or another depended solely on
a mother’s milk for nourishment despite being unable to remember its taste.
Bobby Baker is also know for her provocative performance pieces, particularly
involving food and the public preparation and consumption of food with
metaphors and references to the nuclear family and the maternal experience.
There is fruitful and productive terrain for a critical theoretical discourse on
feminist maternal performance art and its impact on not only experiences of the
maternal, but on the social, political, cultural, and institutional structures that
shape this identity.
And most importantly, beyond carving out space for and generating a
critical and serious maternal discourse in the art world and within the public
domain, these artists have inspired and created material and subject for other
contemporary artists. This art is not just for mothers. While it may speak to and
inspire other women and artists as mothers, and while it may pave crucial roads
in providing space for mothers not only to practice in the art world but to
incorporate their maternal experiences within that practice, the influence and
60
impact of the artists within this thesis can be found in the artistic practice of those
who do not deal directly with the maternal.
Guy Ben-Ner, an Israeli video artist known for his do-it-yourself, at-home
videos featuring his children and wife, is an example of a contemporary artist
who has conflated his roles as artist and father and incorporated them
successfully into a critical artistic practice. Ben-Ner, as a stay-at-home father,
addresses the ambivalence, contradiction, and challenges inherent to
balancing life as both artist and father, a struggle traditionally faced by women
as primary caretakers. Ben-Ner’s piece, Stealing Beauty (2008) in Ikea furniture
stores, models the performance of domestic roles of husband/wife,
father/mother/children, played out within the walls of Ikea furniture stores in
Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv. The overly scripted, clearly performed and
directed video, inserted with Guy’s directives as the performance unfolds, draws
a clear correlation between the performance of family roles as made obvious by
Lena Simic, Léa Lublin, Elzbieta Jablonska, and Mako Idemitsu. The script revolves
around discussions of private property, with the father (Ben-Ner) defining private
property as the right to exclude others. Notions of access, inclusion versus
exclusion, public versus private as related to society’s demand for and valuation
of the domestic nuclear family is cleverly and pointedly played out. Much like
the exclusion faced by mothers as artists in the art world, Ben-Ner makes
commentary on our society’s demand for boundaries of the public versus
private. The irony, of course, is that the video was filmed in numerous Ikeas both
in the United States and abroad, with the public streaming in and out of the
frame, invading and complicating the separation of the private nuclear family
61
from the view of the public audience (Figure 15).

Much like playing house, a game wherein children first learn to perform
and act out roles as mother and father, housewife and husband, Ben-Ner
positions his own family in the world of play wherein Ikea acts as their toy house.
Ikea, a hub of capitalism and a stage for America’s (and Europe’s) middle-class
fantasies, acts also as the stage for the performance of family values, which
include father as master and private property as a goal for which to strive. As
described in the exhibition catalog for Thursday the Twelfth at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art of Ben-Ner:
Themes of isolation, obsession, entrapment, and escape are
explored hand-in-hand with the artist's investigation of the fertile
role of adventure, play, and make-believe in the creative process –
not to mention the routines of daily life.
Fig. 15 Guy Ben-Ner, Stealing Beauty, 2008. Courtesy of Postmasters, New York.
62
The pessimist, or perhaps the realist, cannot help but wonder if Ben-Ner
would be as renowned and respected if he were a woman given the still glaring
sexism and inequity in the art world. Fathers who are heavily involved in their
children’s lives are acknowledged with honorary status, whereas for women, this
is still assumed to be a natural role. Men are overly praised and applauded for
their involvement, whereas women receive little acknowledgement for their work
as parents. As described by artist Emily Chen in an issue of the journal
M/E/A/N/I/N/G titled “Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie”:
I do know that when women walk around with a baby, they often
look like harried mothers with the hectic burden of childcare. When
men do, they look like they are adorably accessorized.
73
While the exhibition catalog of Ben-Ner cites 1960s and 1970s
performance art as his influences, the list of artists includes all male names: Vito
Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and Dennis Oppenheim. Given Ben-Ner’s choice to
work at home after the birth of his daughter, “incorporating his family into his
artistic practice, mining his own experiences for material, and exploring his
anxieties about the competition between work and father,” it is more
appropriate to think about the feminist performance artists of the 1960s and
1970s as discussed in Chapter 1 who had to juggle similar struggles, challenges
and contradictions to those faced by Ben-Ner.
Ben-Ner has found a way to balance his roles as artist and father
by creating video works that star his own children. In doing so, he
implies, as critic Richard O Jones put it, that parenting can contribute
to artistic creation as much as artistic creation can contribute to

73
Emily Chen, “On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie,” in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of
Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, ed. Susan Bee and Mira Schor (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000), 279.
63
creative parenting.
74
Unfortunately, the museum and its curators did not make this correlation
between the women discussed in this thesis and Ben-Ner’s artistic process and
practice.
Feminist maternal performance art continues to be a critical
consideration in artistic practice, for maternity and motherhood are not
“conditions to be solved.” Women will continue to assume the role of mother,
thus this experience and identity must constantly be engaged, questioned, and
brought into public discourse so as to challenge the social, political, and cultural
structures that shape, determine, and govern what is defined as the normative
maternal experience. As described by Joan Issac:
As mothers, as daughters, as artists, but most of all as women we
all have a stake in displacing the bio-maternal determinism that
lies hidden in the seemingly benign representations of maternity.
Women artists have always worked in a Catch-22 situation and the
catch is maternity - an ‘original’ division of labor: women have babies:
men create art.
75
These feminist maternal performance artists challenge this blanket dichotomy
and claim a space for the maternal within the public domain. Certain artistic
and maternal concerns transcend chronology.
In today’s world and suffering economy, artists cannot depend on the
market for valuation and success. What may seem on the surface to be a
problem, however, offers amazing opportunity for artists to work outside the
pressures and demands of the market, as the artists within this thesis have done in

74
Susan Cross, Thursday the Twelfth (North Adams, MA: Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2009).
75
Issak, 140.
64
order to challenge and confront their exclusion as mothers. Performance art, a
methodology and practice without commodity or object, the do-it-yourself,
made-at-home video, material used by these artists as mothers, are all now
important venues to consider for current practicing artists. With the downturn of
the national and international economies, the DIY movement is bigger than ever
on all fronts. What better time for the art world? The practices of these artists who
have turned against the market that excluded them for their roles as mothers
can be reexamined as critical tools during a shift in the art world and public
economy, while simultaneously offering an expanded understanding of artistic
voice and cultural politics.
65
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acker, Suzanne. “On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie.” In M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An
Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, 252-287. Edited by
Susan Bee and Mira Schor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Bovenschen, Silvia. Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview. Old
Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1981.
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” October 110 (Fall 2004).
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002.
Buckley, Sandra, ed. Broken Silences: Voices of Japanese Feminism. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997.
Butler, Cornelia and Lisa Gabrielle Marks, eds. WACK! : Art and the Feminist
Revolution. Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art 2007.
Chernick, Myrel. Maternal Metaphors: Artists/Mother/Artwork. United States:
Rochester Contemporary, 2004.
Chicago, Judy. Beyond the Flower. New York: Penguin Group, 1996.
Chicago, Judy and Miriam Schapiro. Womanhouse. Valencia, CA: Feminist Art
Program, California Institute for the Arts, 1972.
Dougherty, Cecilia. “Stories from a generation: Early video at the LA Woman’s
Building.” Afterimage I, no. 26 (Jul/Aug 1998).
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Gaulke, Cheri. “Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Women’s Building.”
High Performance Magazine. Fall/Winter 1980.
Goldman, Paula. Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of
Women. Novato, California: New World Library, 2006.
Hall, Douglas and Sally Jo Fifer, eds. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to
Video Art. New York: Apertune, 1990.
Hanisch, Carol. "The Personal is Political.” In Feminist Revolution: Redsockings of
the Women’s Liberation Movement, 204-205. Edited by Kathie Sarachild.
New York: Random House, 1978.
Idemitsu, Mako. http://www.makoidemitsu.com (accessed October 1, 2009).
66
Issak, Jo Anna. “Mothers of Invention.” In Feminism and Contemporary Art: The
Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, 139-155. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Kelly, Mary. Post-Partum Document. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Krajweski, Marek. “Elzbieta Jablonska.” In New Phenomena in Polish Art After
2000. Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2007.
Kwon, Miwon. "In Appreciation of Invisible Work: Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the
Maintenance of the 'White Cube'." Documents, no. 10 (Fall 1997): 15-18.
Lippard, Lucy. From the Center : Feminist Essays on Women's Art. New York:
Dutton, 1976.
Lippard, Lucy. Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists. Ridgefield, Connecticut:
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1971.
Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009.
Muchnic, Suzanne. “Artists Take a Political Step.” Los Angeles Times. August 30,
1978, M5.
Nochlin, Linda and Maura Reilly. Global Feminisms: New Directions in
Contemporary Art. London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007. Nochlin, Linda.
“Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” In Women, Art and
Power and Other Essays, 147-158. Boulder: Westview Press, 1988.
Phelan, Peggy. “The Ontology of Performance.” In Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.
Pollock, Griselda. “Histories.” In Social Process/ Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly
1970-1975. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art
and Design, 1997.
Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1989. Simic, Lena. Maternal Matters and Other Sisters.
Liverpool: The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, 2009.
Simic, Lena. “On Interregnum: Being Childfree, Maternity Leave and
Maintenance Art.” Studies in the Maternal E-Journal (August 2009).
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “Maintenance Art.” In Conservation and Maintenance
of Contemporary Public Art. London: Archetype, 2002.
67
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “On Maintenance and Sanitation Art.” In Dialogues in
Public Art: Interviews, 295-322. Edited by Tom Finkelpearl. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000.
West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society
1, no. 2 (June 1987): 125-151.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Now. Not now. And now: Toward a feminist critical envisioning of social practice

PDF

The kinesthetic citizen: Dance and critical art practices

PDF

Performing the collective

PDF

The multivalent platforms of alternative art publications as agents of authentic cultural change

PDF

Collaborative art practice in the public sphere: The death of the artist?

PDF

Victory Gardens 2007+: making art as if the environment matters

PDF

Four women, four public art projects, four decades: exploring socially conscious public art and social change

PDF

Allen Ruppersberg: Art on the edge of visibility, 1968–1972

PDF

Reflections on contemporary art and the rhetoric of community

PDF

"Necessity knows no law": artist-run spaces & the spatial politics of Tijuana's public domain

PDF

Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice

PDF

Art as a political tool: the early feminist production of Mónica Mayer, 1976–1984

PDF

A new eros: sexuality in women's art before the feminist art movement

PDF

Ritual, nourishment, and caregiving: the performances of Barbara T. Smith and Linda Montano

PDF

Sites of production: An examination of Jeremy Deller's It is what it is: Conversations about Iraq

PDF

Contemporary art and "post-black" identity politics

PDF

ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

PDF

Community engaged art: no longer a form of resistance?

PDF

Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement

PDF

Embodiment of text after conceptualism: Language and video in Fast trip, long drop (1993) and Cornered (1988)

Asset Metadata

Creator Cart, Ashley Weeks (author)

Core Title (M)other work: feminist maternal performance art

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/06/2010

Defense Date 04/01/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s and 70s art,contemporary,feminist art,intergenerational comparative analysis,Labor,maintenance art,maternal,Motherhood,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,Public domain,public practice,public sphere,video art,Work

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Stakenas, Carol (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Liss, Andrea (committee member)

Creator Email ashley.w.cart@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2975

Unique identifier UC1285387

Identifier etd-Cart-3510 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-308927 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2975 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cart-3510.pdf

Dmrecord 308927

Document Type Thesis

Rights Cart, Ashley Weeks

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu