The Maternal in Creative Work

Intergenerational Discussions on
Motherhood and Art 1st Edition Elena
Marchevska
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-maternal-in-creative-work-intergenerational-discus
sions-on-motherhood-and-art-1st-edition-elena-marchevska/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Current Streams in American Art Education 1st Edition

Elena Polyudova

https://ebookmeta.com/product/current-streams-in-american-art-
education-1st-edition-elena-polyudova/

Even More Cbt Art Activities 100 Illustrated Handouts

for Creative Therapeutic Work Jennifer Guest

https://ebookmeta.com/product/even-more-cbt-art-
activities-100-illustrated-handouts-for-creative-therapeutic-
work-jennifer-guest/

Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and

Culture

https://ebookmeta.com/product/trauma-and-motherhood-in-
contemporary-literature-and-culture/

In The Margins On The Pleasures Of Reading and Writing

1st Edition Elena Ferrante

https://ebookmeta.com/product/in-the-margins-on-the-pleasures-of-
reading-and-writing-1st-edition-elena-ferrante/
Muses Mistresses and Mates Creative Collaborations in
Literature Art and Life 1st Edition Izabella Penier

https://ebookmeta.com/product/muses-mistresses-and-mates-
creative-collaborations-in-literature-art-and-life-1st-edition-
izabella-penier/

Motherhood on ice the mating gap and why women freeze

their eggs 1st Edition Marcia C Inhorn

https://ebookmeta.com/product/motherhood-on-ice-the-mating-gap-
and-why-women-freeze-their-eggs-1st-edition-marcia-c-inhorn/

Language Thought Art and Existence Creative Nonfictions

1st Edition R. Mwanaka

https://ebookmeta.com/product/language-thought-art-and-existence-
creative-nonfictions-1st-edition-r-mwanaka/

The Skilled Communicator in Social Work The Art and

Science of Communication in Practice 1st Edition Karen
Healy

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-skilled-communicator-in-social-
work-the-art-and-science-of-communication-in-practice-1st-
edition-karen-healy/

Education and Intergenerational Social Mobility in

Europe and the United States 1st Edition Richard Breen
(Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/education-and-intergenerational-
social-mobility-in-europe-and-the-united-states-1st-edition-
richard-breen-editor/
The Maternal in Creative Work

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity
and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural
workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the
relation between maternity, generation and creativity.
This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice
which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience,
and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge
traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the
major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new
ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice.
Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th
and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative
projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the
experiences of women and men who take on maternal identities through many
forms of kinship and social mothering.
The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary
students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will
have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and
psychoanalysis.

Elena Marchevska, PhD, is a practitioner, academic and researcher interested

in new historical discontinuities that have emerged in post-­capitalist and post-­
socialist transition. She is researching and writing extensively on the issues of
belonging, displacement, the maternal and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic
work explores the relationship between the maternal, borders and stories that
emerge from living in transition. She is an Associate Professor in Performance
Studies at London South Bank University.

Valerie Walkerdine, PhD, is an artist, academic and researcher bringing artistic

and cultural practice together with cultural and social theory and research.
Her work on the maternal focuses on issues of inter-­generational transmission,
expressing that work through installation, performance and practice-­ based
work with de-­industrialised communities. Her research and writing reflect
these concerns and also focus on psychosocial aspects of intergenerational
transmission in relation to class and gender. She is editor of the journal
Subjectivity (Palgrave). She is Distinguished Research Professor in the School of
Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales.
Interdisciplinary Research in Motherhood

The Maternal in Creative Work

Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art
Edited by Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine

Intersections of Mothering
Feminist Accounts
Edited by Carole Zufferey and Fiona Buchanan

https://www.routledge.com/Interdisciplinary-Research-in-Motherhood/
book-series/IRM
The Maternal in
Creative Work
Intergenerational Discussions
on Motherhood and Art

Edited by Elena Marchevska

and Valerie Walkerdine
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Elena Marchevska and Valerie
Walkerdine; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-8153-8169-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-­1-­351-­20984-­7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To my mother, Taska, and my daughters, Angelina
and Marina
Contents

List of figures and plates x

List of contributorsxii
Foreword by Lisa Baraitserxx
Preamble by Valerie Walkerdinexxiv

1 Maternal art practice: an emerging field of artistic

enquiry into motherhood, care and time 1
ELENA MARCHEVSKA

PART I
Intergenerational maternal discussions11

2 Feminist intergenerational inheritance: a conversation 13

NATALIE LOVELESS AND MARY KELLY

3 Maternal Metaphors I and II: a labour of motherlove 26

MYREL CHERNICK AND JENNIE KLEIN

4 A cord that is never done away with: an aesthetic

ontology of the pre-­birth scene with Francesca
Woodman and Bracha L. Ettinger 36
TINA KINSELLA

5 Prisms of mourning: gender, justice and hope: Carrie

Mae Weems’s Colored People, 1989–1990 49
ANDREA LISS

6 The Mothernists 59
DEIRDRE M. DONOGHUE AND LISE HALLER BAGGESEN
viii Contents
7 A.M.M.A.A. – The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia 72
RUCHIKA WASON SINGH

PART II
Encountering the maternal in artistic practice81

8 Blueprint for a ghost 83

ELEANOR BOWEN AND LAURA GONZÁLEZ

9 Maternal time travel: epistolary praxis as

intergenerational care work 97
RACHEL EPP BULLER

10 A mother’s work: a mother/daughter, seamstress/fibre

artist’s merging practice and politics 111
ARAM HAN SIFUENTES ABOUT YOUNGHYE HAN

11 The mother artist in the age of performance reproduction 121

ELIZABETH PHILPS

12 Returning to ourselves: Medea/Mothers’ Clothes and

Patience one decade on 130
LENA ŠIMIĆ AND EMILY UNDERWOOD-­L EE

13 Unravelling family fictions: Stories We Tell, Daughter Rite

and My Life Without Me 138
LIZZIE THYNNE

PART III
Maternal future: Interrupting the field151

14 One for Sorrow: the collaborative work of mother and

not-­yet-­mother 153
ALISON O’NEILL AND JO PAUL

15 Identity through injury: contemporary adoption and

the unfit working class mother 163
SALLY SALES

16 The motherhood imperative: fertility, feminism, art 174

MIRIAM SCHAER
 Contents ix
17 Drawing as a creative exploration of ‘circumstantial
childlessness’ 184
LOIS TONKIN

18 Becoming ordinary: making homosexuality more

palatable on TV 193
LULU LE VAY

Afterwords: mothering the future204

IRINA ARISTARKHOVA

Index210
Figures and plates

Figures
2.1 Nightcleaners, 1975, 16 mm, black and white film still. 14
3.1 Maternal Metaphors the Rochester Contemporary, May 2004.
Clockwise from left: Aura Rosenberg, Judy Glantzman,
Marion Wilson. 27
3.2 Maternal Metaphors II, Trisolini Gallery, October 2006. Maeve
Morgan Phoa watching Myrel Chernick’s Mommy Mommy,
1992.29
3.3 Maternal Metaphors II, Ohio University Art Gallery,
October 2006. Gail Rebhan’s Baby, black and white photos,
1987–88.31
5.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, Family Pictures and Stories,
1978–1984, vintage silver gelatin print with text, dimensions vary. 52
5.2 Carrie Mae Weems, Van and Vera, Family Pictures and Stories,
1978–1984, vintage silver gelatin print with text, dimensions vary. 52
5.3 Carrie Mae Weems, Alice, Family Pictures and Stories, 1978–
1984, vintage silver gelatin print with text, dimensions vary. 53
5.4 Carrie Mae Weems, Alice in the Bed, Family Pictures and Stories,
1978–1984, vintage silver gelatin print with text, dimensions vary. 53
5.5 Carrie Mae Weems, Black Man Holding Watermelon, Ain’t
Jokin’, vintage silver gelatin print, 1987–1988, dimensions vary. 54
7.1 CHING CHING CHENG, Letting Go Series, still image, 2017. 77
7.2 Miharu Hatori at work during the Inaugural A.M.M.A.A.
Artist Residency 2017. 78
8.1 Things I have never told you (first fragment). 86
8.2 I have marked.92
8.3 Grandmother (lacuna). 93
8.4 Things I have never told you (fourth fragment). 95
10.1 A Mend: A Collection of Scraps from Local Seamstresses and Tailors
(Chicago), 2011–2013, jean scraps and gold denim thread,
14 × 10 × 4 ft. 113
10.2 Nara Sitting, 2016,Younghye Han, pencil on paper,
24 × 16 inches. 115
 Figures and Plates xi
13.1 Sarah Polley directs Michael Polley, Stories We Tell (2012). 145
14.1 One for Sorrow, video installation, 2015, Still 1¸ https://vimeo.
com/153248784.159
14.2 One for Sorrow, video installation, 2015, Still 2¸ https://vimeo.
com/153248784.160
14.3 One for Sorrow, video installation, 2015, Still 3, https://vimeo.
com/153248784.160
16.1 Ida and Tabitha, #40 Digital C print, 10 × 8, 2014. 179
16.2 Shroud#2, Monoprint over Digital C print, 34 × 29, 2016. 181
17.1 Gina’s drawing. 186
17.2 Lynn’s drawing. 187
17.3 Julia’s drawing. 189

Plates
2.1 Post-­Partum Document, Introduction, 1973, detail.
2.2 The Practical Past, 2018, Mitchell Innes & Nash, New York.
5.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled, Colored People, 2009–2010, 42
inkjet prints, dimensions vary.
5.2 Carrie Mae Weems, Blue Black Boy, Colored People, 1989–
1990, triptych of three toned gelatin silver prints with
Prestype and frame, dimensions vary.
5.3 Carrie Mae Weems, Moody Blue Girl, Colored People,
1989–1990, triptych of three toned gelatin silver prints
with Prestype and frame, dimensions vary.
6.1 The Mothernist Manifesto.
7.1 Open hour of discussion during the first A.M.M.A.A. Art
Workshop 2018 (left to right: Ruchika Wason Singh, Ritu
Kamath, Shruti Gupta Chandra, Merlyn Moli and Kavita Nayar).
8.1 Grandmother (fold).
8.2 Grandmother (figure).
10.1 Roses, 1983,Younghye Han, ink on mulberry paper,
26 × 36 inches.
10.2 Thomas Kong’s collages at Kim’s Corner Food, 2015.
13.1 Real and fake home movies, Stories We Tell (2012), Still 1.
13.2 Real and fake home movies, Stories We Tell (2012), Still 2.
16.1 The Presence of Their Absence, #32 Digital C print, 14 × 11, 2015.
Contributors

Irina Aristarkhova is the author of Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contempo-

rary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2020) and Hospitality of the Matrix: Phi-
losophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012, Russian
translation 2017) and Associate Professor of Art and Design, History of Art
and Women’s Studies at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, Uni-
versity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to moving to the United States, she
led a Cyberarts Research Initiative at the National University of Singapore
and taught at Lasalle College of the Arts. Her writing has been translated
into Romanian, German, Chinese, Dutch, Serbian, Slovenian, Portuguese
and Greek.
Lisa Baraitser is Professor in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University
of London and a psychotherapist in independent practice. She is author of
the award-­winning monograph Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption
(2009) and, most recently, Enduring Time (2017).
Eleanor Bowen is a visual artist and writer with a studio practice in London.
She is an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London and holds
a practice-­led PhD in which she explored aspects of drawing practice. Pub-
lications include Performance Research 11:3 ‘Lexicon’ (2006), 13:2 ‘On Cho-
reography’ (2008) and 20:3 ‘On Ruins and Ruination’ (2015). Co-­devised
and performed texts, with Dr Laura Gonzalez, include ‘Mothers, Daugh-
ters and Cryptophores’ (2015); Motherhood and Creative Practice: Mater-
nal Structures in Creative Work, London South Bank University and ‘The
object as witness’ (2015), Material Culture in Action: Practices of making,
collecting and re-­enacting art and design, Glasgow School of Art. Much of
her current practice operates in text/image clusters reflecting the way that,
in earlier drawing practice, accumulated perspectives were juxtaposed and
layered. Working between text and image is similarly a means of addressing
multiple perspectives, drawing on and reading other histories, other voices.
This expansion of her visual practice is evidenced in the practice of para-
text (written/performed), most recently ‘Drawing the Borderline’ (2017) in
Theatre and Performance Design, London/New York: Routledge.
 Contributors xiii
Myrel Chernick is an artist and writer living in New York City. She has
exhibited her text-based multimedia installations and videotapes nationally
and internationally at venues such as Artists Space, PS I and the Whitney
Museum at Equitable Center in New York, the List Gallery at MIT, Plug-
In and Videopool galleries in Winnipeg, Canada, and the International Cul-
tural Center in Antwerp, Belgium. She developed and curated the exhibit
Maternal Metaphors, presented at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center
in 2004. An expanded version, co-curated with Jennie Klein, was shown at
Ohio University in 2006. Their comprehensive anthology The M Word: Real
Mothers in Contemporary Art was published in 2011 by Demeter Press. Cher-
nick has been the recipient of National Endowment and New York State
Artist fellowships and has lectured widely on her work as both artist and
curator. She is currently developing a site-specific multimedia installation as
well as writing and illustrating a hybrid novel set in Paris in the mid 1980s.
Deirdre M. Donoghue (1971, Finland) is a visual and performance artist;
doula; founding director of the international m/other voices foundation for
art, research, theory, dialogue and community involvement; and a mother of
two children. She is co-­organizer of The Mothernists (Rotterdam, 2015) and
The Mothernists 2: Who Cares for the 21st Century (Copenhagen, 2017).
Deirdre is currently working on two new performance pieces on care, lis-
tening and healing, ‘The Matrixial Regeneration Project’ and ‘The Almende
Manifesto’, and a theatre piece, ‘Mattering Bodies’, exploring the form and
the materiality of the (theatre) space and the role/s of the performer/s and
the audience member/s as co-­performers and co-­creators. She is a PhD
candidate at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, where
her project looks at the social and political relations and imaginaries pro-
duced and proposed by the artworks and artistic processes of mother-­artists.
Most recent publications: ‘Entre Nous: Moments, Holes and Stuff ’ in Love-
less, Natalie S. (ed.) New Maternalisms Redux, University of Alberta Depart-
ment of Art and Design (2018) and ‘In Search of The Maternal: Towards
Microchimeric Bodies and Maternal Relational Aesth-­Ethics’ in Epp Buller,
Rachel and Reeves, Charles (eds.) Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design and Mater-
nity, Demeter Press (2018).
Rachel Epp Buller, PhD, is a feminist art historian printmaker book artist
professor and mother of three whose art and scholarship often speak to these
intersections. Her writings on art and the maternal include Reconciling Art and
Mothering (Ashgate/Routledge) and the forthcoming Inappropriate Bodies: Art,
Design, and Maternity (Demeter). Her current creative work explores letter-­
writing as a radical act of care and listening across time. Her curatorial pro-
jects often involve collaboration, across disciplines and across countries. She
is a Fulbright fellow, a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for
Art (US), a regional coordinator of the international Feminist Art Project and
current Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (US).
xiv Contributors
Laura González is an artist, writer and an Professor at the Royal Conserva-
toire of Scotland at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is also faculty
at Transart Institute. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s
footsteps with her camera, she teaches art and psychoanalysis at various insti-
tutions in Europe and the United States and creates performances for gal-
leries and festivals. She has written on the seductive qualities of Philippe
Stack’s Juicy Salif (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She co-­edited a col-
lection of essays titled Madness,Women and the Power of Art (Inter-­disciplinary
Press, 2013) to which she contributed a work written with Eleanor Bowen.
She has written a monograph entitled ‘Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces’
(Cambridge Scholars, 2016). She is an Ashtanga and Pranayama yoga teacher
at various studios in Glasgow, and she has performed with professional dance
companies, including Michael Clark, Barrowland Ballet and Scottish Dance
Theatre. Together with Penny Chivas, she co-­directed @TheGlasgowJam, a
multidisciplinary arts organisation, from 2015 to 2018. Her work explores
knowledge and the body of the hysteric through text, voice, dance perfor-
mance and video. She is currently writing on translating Freud’s case histo-
ries into performance.
Lise Haller Baggesen (1969) left her native Denmark in 1992 to study paint-
ing at the AKI in Enschede and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, before
relocating to Chicago with her family in 2008. She completed her MA in
visual and critical studies at SAIC in 2013, with a SAIC VCS Fellowship
Award. She is a recipient of Prins Bernhard’s Prize (2000) and the Royal
Award for Modern Painting (2003), a nominee for The Joan Mitchell Foun-
dation’s Emerging Artist Grant (2015) and a 2017 resident at Banff Centre
for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada.
She exhibits internationally, including Threewalls, 6018 North, Jane
Addams Hull House Museum, Poetry Foundation and MCA, Chicago (IL);
EFA and A.I.R. Gallery (NY); The Suburban and The Poor Farm (WI); The
Contemporary Austin (TX); Overgaden (DK); Württembergischer Kunst-
verein (D); MoMu Antwerpen (B) and Théatre de la Ville de Paris and Le
Confort Moderne, Poitiers (F).
She is the author of Mothernism (2014), and co-­organizer of The Moth-
ernists in Rotterdam (2015) and The Mothernists 2: Who Cares for the
21st Century in Copenhagen (2017).
Upcoming projects include the femi-­futurist sci-­fi extravaganza HATO-
RADE RETROGRADE: The Musical, co-­produced with SoEx (CA), to
premiere in San Francisco in 2019.
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fibre, social practice and performance artist who
works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her
work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques,
to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become
a place for empowerment, subversion and protest. Her work has been
 Contributors xv
exhibited at the Jane Addams Hull-­House Museum (Chicago, IL), Chicago
Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO),
Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), Wing Luke Museum of the Asian
Pacific American Experience (Seattle, WA), Chung Young Yang Embroidery
Museum (Seoul, South Korea) and the Design Museum (London, UK). She
earned her BA in art and Latin American studies from the University of
California, Berkeley, and her MFA in fibre and material studies from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an adjunct assistant
professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mary Kelly is known for project-­based work that addresses questions of sexual-
ity, identity and memory in the form of large-­scale narrative installations. Her
exhibitions include retrospectives at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Whit-
worth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw,
as well as representation in the Whitney Biennial (1992 and 2004), the Bien-
nale of Sydney (1982 and 2008) and Documenta 12. Publications include
Post-­Partum Document (1983), Imaging Desire (1996), Rereading Post-­Partum
Document (1999) and Dialogue (2011). She was a recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 2015. She served as full-­time faculty at the Whitney Independ-
ent Study Program, 1989–1996. From 1996–2017, Kelly was Distinguished
Professor of Art at the School of the Arts and Architecture, University of
California, Los Angeles, where she founded the Interdisciplinary Studio Area.
Currently, she is Judge Widney Professor at the Roski School of Art and
Design, University of Southern California.
Tina Kinsella, PhD, is Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s
Studies in Trinity College Dublin and Fellow at the Graduate School of
Creative Arts and Design (GradCAM). She is Lecturer in Visual Culture for
the BA art programme and the MA in art and research collaboration at the
Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design, Dublin. Her research is interdis-
ciplinary, collaborative and curatorial, drawing on critical theory, psychoa-
nalysis, philosophy and contemporary art practice to explore intersections
between subjectivity, aesthetics, ethics and politics. She collaborated with
the artist Jesse Jones for Tremble, which premiered at 57th Venice Biennale
and will be shown at the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao in 2019. Encompass-
ing book chapters, art catalogue essays and journal articles, she has published
with Demeter Press, Performance Research Journal, Irish Journal of Anthropol-
ogy, Ireland, at Venice for the 57th Venice Biennale 2016 and at the Istanbul
Biennial 2015.
Jennie Klein, is an art historian who writes on contemporary art, performance
art and the intersection of gender and visual culture. She received her PhD
from the University of Southern California in 1998. She is presently com-
pleting two book projects. The first, Responding to Site, co-edited with Dr.
Natalie Loveless and under contract with Intellect Press, is an edited collec-
tion on the work of the artist Marilyn Arsem. It will be available in spring
xvi Contributors
2020.The second, Assuming the Ecosexual Position, under contract with the
University of Minnesota Press, is a compilation of the work and writing
of Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens and will be available in spring
2021. Dr. Klein has published in PAJ, Frontiers, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Femi-
nist Studies, N. Paradoxa, ArtPulse, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Genders and
Afterimage.
Dr. Andrea Liss’s engagement with feminist art, gender encounters and the
maternal embraces writing, research, teaching, curating and community col-
laboration. Her book Feminist Art and the Maternal (University of Minnesota
Press, 2009) is critically noted as a pioneering book in the fields of maternal
studies and visual culture. Dr. Liss is passionate about new forms of knowl-
edge that arise when thinking through the maternal as lived experience
and as critical discourse where love and compassion are the founding ethics
of cultural politics. Her current projects are concerned with maternal eth-
ics, intergenerational memories, mourning and social justice. Recent projects
include the essay “Lenka Clayton’s Maternal Economy: The Performance of
Wonder and Respect” Performance Research Journal, June 2017 and “Maternal
Aesthetics: The Surprise of the Real,” a guest curated issue of Studies in the
Maternal issue 5(1) 2014 and the exhibition Reel Mothers: Film, Video Art
and the Maternal at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, 2010. Dr.
Liss is also the author of Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and
the Holocaust (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Dr. Liss is Full Professor
Emerita of Contemporary Visual Culture and Cultural Theory in the School
of Arts at California State University San Marcos and is a recipient of a Ful-
bright Scholar Award.
Lulu Le Vay, PhD, is an experienced writer, author and educator. She is also
a professional DJ and music consultant who performs regularly at exclusive
music events across the UK and overseas.
Natalie Loveless is an associate professor in the history of art, design and visual
culture at the University of Alberta, where she also directs the Research-­
Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. Her recent book with Duke
University Press, Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-­Creation,
examines debates surrounding research-­creation and its institutionalization,
paying particular attention to what it means – and why it matters – to make
and teach art research-­creationally in the North American university today.
She recently completed New Maternalisms, a project bringing together art
practice, theory and curation, and an interdisciplinary collaborative project
on global vaccination called Immune Nations that culminated with an exhi-
bition at the United Nations in Geneva. Loveless currently co-­leads Specu-
lative Energy Futures, a multi-­year project that is part of the Just Powers
initiative (justpowers.ca) and is working on a new manuscript tentatively
titled Sensing the Anthropocene.
 Contributors xvii
Elena Marchevska, PhD, is a practitioner, academic and researcher inter-
ested in new historical discontinuities that have emerged in post-­capitalist
and post-­socialist transition. She is researching and writing extensively on
the issues of belonging, displacement, the maternal and intergenerational
trauma. Her artistic work explores the relationship between the maternal,
borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. She is an Associate
Professor in performance studies at London South Bank University.
Alison O’Neill has a BA in fine art from Falmouth College of Arts (2001) and
an MA in feminist theory and practice in the visual arts from the University
of Leeds (2003). She works with video and drawing using autobiographical
narratives as a starting point to explore her own maternal subjectivity. Ali-
son’s work has been exhibited and screened widely, including Nightingale
Cinema, Chicago (2018); Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh (2018);
Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh (2018); Brood Film festival (2016) and Project
AfterBirth (2015). Her work was shortlisted for the Sketch Drawing Prize
(2017) and the Birth Rites Collection Prize (2017).
Jo Paul is a London-­based artist, theatre designer, arts facilitator and creative
coach. She completed an MA in scenography at Trinity Laban Conserva-
toire, London in 2003.
As an artist, Jo’s work examines individual and group status
and explores the oscillating tension between human connection and dis-
connection. She often combines her work with a knowledge of costume
design, and the work, which is mostly 3D, is often fabric or thread based. Jo
has worked in the arts sector, designing, teaching and coaching for theatre
and dance companies across the United Kingdom for many years. She has
been a coach since 2009, and she takes joy in watching the people she works
with creatively grow.
Elizabeth Philps, PhD, is an artist/academic currently exploring the maternal
through Live Art walking practices. GPS Embroidery is an ongoing project,
funded by the Arts Council. Other presentations and exhibitions of practice
include artist’s pages in The Live Art Development Agency’s Study Room
Guide on Walking (2016), Study Room Guide on the Maternal (2017),
Embodied Cartographies at Bath Fringe (2017) and Triarchy Press’s Ways to
Wander (2015).
She is an editor of the 2018 edition of the magazine of the Women’s Art
Library at Goldsmiths University and has been an active member of the
editorial board for the interdisciplinary Journal of Mother Studies since 2015.
With a background in contemporary theatre, Elizabeth is Subject Leader of
the BA in drama and performance at BIPA.
Sally Sales, PhD, has worked in the field of adoption as both a practitioner
and as an academic researcher. She is currently a visiting research fellow at
University of West of England, undertaking a project on adoption, kinship
and class. Her most recent publications are Adoption, Family and the Paradox of
Origins: A Foucauldian History (2012) and ‘Contested attachments: rethinking
xviii Contributors
adoptive kinship in the era of open adoption’ (Child and Family Social Work,
March 2013). She is also a psychoanalyst in private practice and chair of SW
training for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Miriam Schaer (www.miriamschaer.com) is an artist and educator based in
Brooklyn, New York. She exhibits extensively, has taught book structures
and printmaking at several universities and art centres in the United States
and abroad and is a frequent speaker at conferences devoted to education
and the arts. Her most recent book is The Presence of Their Absence.
Lena Šimić is Reader in Drama at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire,
UK. Originally from Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lena identifies herself as a mother
of four boys, transnational performance practitioner, pedagogue and scholar.
She is a co-­organizer of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at
Home, an art activist initiative in her family home in Liverpool, UK. Lena
has presented her arts practice and research in a variety of academic jour-
nals and in various arts venues and festivals in the United Kingdom and
internationally.
Lizzie Thynne is Reader in Film at Sussex University. She is a film-­maker, and
her work has been widely shown on television and in galleries, exhibitions
and festivals. Her recent feature documentaries include On the Border, 2012
(on her Finnish mother’s history, JMP Screenworks 4) and Brighton: Sym-
phony of A City (Brighton Festival live cinema commission with composer
Ed Hughes, 2016). Her work has often focussed on gender and cultural pro-
duction, including the work of surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and
her stepsister/lover/collaborator, Marcel Moore, on whom she has published
widely. Her film Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun contextualized
major exhibitions of the artists’ work, including at the Jeu de Paume, Paris
and the Centre Virreina de la Imatge, Barcelona. She is currently working on
a major film and book project on the documentary film pioneer, Jill Craigie,
funded by the AHRC.
Lois Tonkin, PhD, is a lecturer in the theories and skills of counselling and psy-
chology, and in qualitative research methods at the University of Canterbury
Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has previously worked for some 30 years in the
field of loss and grief, as a counsellor, educator and writer with a particu-
lar focus on the grief associated with non-­death losses. Her research inter-
ests are in the sociology of reproduction and qualitative research methods.
She is currently engaged in a study of how women who engage in oocyte
cryopreservation (‘egg freezing’) for social reasons conceptualise their fro-
zen oocytes, which uses the same participant-­produced drawing research
method as is described in her chapter. Her collection of the narratives of 36
circumstantially childless women titled Motherhood Missed; Stories from Women
Who Are Childless by Circumstance was published in 2018.
Emily Underwood-­Lee is a research fellow at the George Ewart Evans Cen-
tre for Storytelling (GEECS) at the University of South Wales (USW). Her
research interests include the performance of autobiographical stories by
 Contributors xix
women practitioners in the contexts of illness, health and motherhood. Emi-
ly’s interest in the maternal developed from her own experience of mother-
ing daughters. She has shared her work in a variety of contexts, including
academic journals, hospitals and arts venues. Together, Lena and Emily have
been collaborating on their ‘Performance and the Maternal’ project since
2015 and have published a number of outputs, including the ‘On the Mater-
nal’ (2017) special issue of Performance Research journal and Live Art and
Motherhood: Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal (2016).
They are currently working on a co-­authored monograph titled Performance
and the Maternal: Staging Feminist Journeys Through Motherhood (forthcoming
2021).
Valerie Walkerdine PhD is an artist, academic and researcher bringing artistic
and cultural practice together with cultural and social theory and research.
Her work on the maternal focuses on issues of inter-­generational transmis-
sion, expressing that work through installation, performance and practice-­
based work with de-­industrialised communities. Her research and writing
reflects these concerns and also focuses on psychosocial aspects of intergen-
erational transmission in relation to class and gender. She is editor of the
journal Subjectivity (Palgrave). She is Distinguished Research Professor in the
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales.
Ruchika Wason Singh is a visual artist, academician and independent researcher
based in Delhi, India. She holds degrees in BFA, painting (1997) and MFA,
painting (1999) from College of Art, New Delhi, and a PhD (2008) as a UGC
Junior Research Fellow from University of Delhi. She has exhibited at Herit-
age Space (Hanoi), Beaney House of Art & Knowledge (Kent),Tokyo Metro-
politan Art Museum (Tokyo) and Carrousel du Louvre, amongst others.
In 2016, she initiated the ongoing research project A.M.M.A.A. – The
Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia. Her areas of research in writing
and art making are gender and the embodiment of motherhood, and illness
as expression in medical humanities. Her writings have been published in
Demeter Press, Journal of Motherhood Initiative, Visual Studies and the blog of
the Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University. She is the Director
of Critical Dialogues Art Space and a member of the editorial board, The
Journal of Mother Studies.
Foreword
Lisa Baraitser

This unique and timely volume, The Maternal in Creative Work, returns us to
the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation
and creativity. It asks us to think deeply about the potentialities for mother-
hood to open up new ways of doing, thinking and being, for conceptualizing
motherhood, that is, as a creative and communicative practice. By bringing the
maternal into representation through arts-­based practices, a recursive loop is
established whereby maternity is produced, even as it is represented, and inter-
generation becomes temporally reciprocal, the act of creativity passing back to
the mother her renewed subjectivity.The mother-­artist, through a displacement
or entanglement of the creative act that involves both ‘child’ and ‘artwork’,
brings creativity, generation and intergeneration into view, even as such creative
practices produce maternity itself. The practice of motherhood, then, can make
for a different kind of making, one imbued with an ethical concern for the
other, for sure, but also with loss, hate, trauma, dependency, vulnerability and
ambivalence, the stuff, that is, of psychosexual life.
One of the aims of The Maternal in Creative Work is to hold open endless vari-
ability within an expanded notion of a practice of mothering, without denying
or diminishing the effects of structural conditions that shape, foster, maintain,
support and recognize some versions of mothering and not others. Endless var-
iability can only flourish in conditions that allow such flourishing to take hold.
In Hortense Spillers’s seminal paper, ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if
Sigmund Freud’s Wife Were Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race’ (Spillers,
1996),1 she draws on the Black American tradition of the ‘dozens’ – a game of
exchanging insults – to offer a figuration for extending the realm of possibility
of what can be known, that she also links with the maternal. She writes:

Among all the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud’s wife were
your mother is someone who understands the dozens, the intricate ver-
boseness of America’s inner city. The big mouth brag, as much a sort of
art form as a strategy of insult, the dozens takes the assaulted home to the
backbone by ‘talking about’ his mama and daddy.
(Spillers, 1996: 733)
 Foreword xxi
In the game of the ‘dozens’, to insult one’s ‘mama and daddy’ takes the
assaulted ‘home to the backbone’ in a particular way, as it ‘always changes the
topic’; hence, it takes us to a new place. The words and imagery conjured by
insults about one’s mother both wound, she states, and operate as form of
democracy, as anyone can play and be played, though it is ‘not always pleasant’
for all involved. It is this wounding openness, this openness to wounding and
being wounded that is also the ‘game of living’ that she ties in with the mater-
nal. She wonders if the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus was playing around with
the question of what is created out of ‘no thing’ when he made up the title to
the melody he was playing, on the spot, calling it ‘All the Things You Could Be
by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Were Your Mother’, a title that Spillers then
borrows for her chapter, adding ‘Psychoanalysis and Race’. The addition offsets
not just patriarchy a.k.a. Mingus (if Freud’s wife were your mother, then Freud
could be, or then again could not be, your father), but that other form of other-
ing, that of race:

Responding to his own question-­‘What does it mean?’ that he poses to

himself on the recording, he follows along the lines of his own cryptic
signature, ‘Nothing. It means nothing.’ And what he proceeds to perform
on the cut is certainly no thing we know. But that really is the point to
extend the realm of possibility for what might be known, and, not unlike
the dozens, we will not easily decide if it is fun.
(Ibid, 733)

What Spillers draws our attention to, then, is that creativity, variability, flourish-
ing, the extension of the realm of possibility for what might be known, requires
proceeding from a place of ‘no thing we know’, a place that is sutured to both
the mother and to the racialised notion of blackness, Fanon’s ‘zone of nonbe-
ing’ (1967, 2).2 Joy James calls this unacknowledged place the Black Matrix, the
captive maternal figure who is forgotten or othered by Western theory, or what
she calls ‘Womb Theory’3 (James, 2016). From these two formulations of the
maternal we come to understand that the maternal is a shadow that contains a
myriad of other shadows, and yet out of the shadows come possibilities for gen-
erativity through rupture and resistance that might entail ‘playing’ with insult,
and that are not always ‘fun’. This volume attests to precisely these possibilities
and their agonies.
When I first starting working in maternal studies, around a decade ago, many
of the reference points for thinking about artistic representations of birth and
motherhood came from my own mother’s generation, including Mary Kelly,
Nancy Spero, Monica Sjoo, Catherine Elwes, Judy Chicago and Kiki Smith,
as well as the rediscovery of work by the painters Paula Modersohn-­Becker,
Mary Cassatt and later Alice Neel. In the theoretical realm, Griselda Pollock
was central to keeping this work visible and motherhood viable as a subject for
art practice. I think it would be fair to say that we are now in a significantly
xxii Foreword
different place – in the midst of a renewed engagement with the notion of
the ‘mother-­artist’, one that, as Irina Aristarkhova says in the afterword to this
volume, can push the multiple experiences of (non)mothering into a ‘heter-
oglossia’. A ‘mother-­artist’ pushes ‘the maternal’ into a wide set of associations
with technologies, bodies, care, labour, ethics, relationality, temporality, affect,
psychosexuality. The maternal emerges as a dense layering of lived experience,
identity, individual history and desire; of intersecting material, social, political
and scientific relations; of forms of labour and dimensions of care; of theoreti-
cal questions and structural dimensions in the human and posthuman domains.
The mother-­artist becomes the name for the possibility of a relation that can
manage the tension of both connectedness and separation, and between the past
and the future, the creation, that is, of a border space, or more accurately, a ‘bor-
derlink’, as Bracha Ettinger would have it,4 that links as it separates. A mater-
nal subject, for instance, is never divorced from a political generation (both a
political era and a part in the generation of the political). ‘She’ is a figure for
the capacity to hold in mind the absolute specificity of human life, and that
life’s political potential that is always already collective, impossibly linked and
interlinked. In this sense we can think of the maternal as a performative act of
remembrance – the remembrance of the co-­emergence of subjectivity within
the context of the constant need to remember feminist histories, and histories
of feminisms, to think and re-­think sexual politics, even as ‘she’ reproduces
unknown futures.
In much of the creative practice discussed in the pages of this volume, we are
moved from profit to project, we are asked to dwell in the time of the project
where project is precisely marked out as distinct from profit: the aspect of expe-
rience that resists commodification and that refuses to be involved simply in
exchange.This evokes maternal time – the time of maintaining, staying, waiting,
delaying, repeating and recalling, time that no longer flows as such but is sus-
pended, withdrawn, if you will, from neoliberal time, neither slow, nor frantic,
but time that is simply endured. Such time is the time of care – whether such
care extends to one we come to claim and name as our ‘child’, at whatever stage
of life that might be, or the time it takes to remain attached to anachronistic
ideas of political change and hope in an era in which hope has worn thin, or
the time it takes to take care of time itself in an historical moment in which
the future appears foreclosed and the present empty of qualities whilst being
simultaneously totally qualified as the time of work. The distinction between
project and profit is an evocation of such suspended time that is associated with
the hidden time of reproduction.
At the end of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, she writes:

Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no
such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. No lack, only desir-
ing machines. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration. When
all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no
 Foreword xxiii
children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that
we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing.
But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know.
I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its
ongoing song.5

Notes
1 Hortense J. Spillers. ‘“All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was
Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Race’, Critical Inquiry,Vol. 22 (1996), pp. 710–734.
2 Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York:
Grove Press, 1967).
3 Joy James. ‘The Womb of Western Theory:Trauma,Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal’,
Carceral Notebooks, 12 (Part III: Carceral Logic Today, 2016), pp. 253–296. www.thecar
ceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf).
4 Bracha L. Ettinger. ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), The Matrixial Borderspace
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
5 Maggie Nelson. The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 143.
Preamble
Valerie Walkerdine

The maternal is central to each and every one of our lives; whether or not we
are or have been mothers, each of us was born to a mother, and the maternal in
all its forms enters our lives in many ways.
In the 1970s, Mary Kelly first exhibited work relating to the birth of her son
at the height of second wave feminism. It caused a sensation and a furore. Not
only were the visual arts confronting the politics of the female artist, but those
artists were confronting the centrality of the maternal in bold, new ways.
By 2015, when we organised a conference on the maternal in artistic prac-
tice, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that issues of the feminine and
maternal had been around now for several decades and thus that things would
have got easier for artist-­mothers and for making artwork around the maternal.
Yet, at that conference, speaker after speaker recounted just how difficult it
was to work on the maternal in art schools still, how much opposition artists
were facing to the kind of work they were trying to make.Yet the conference
was brimming over with excitement and enthusiasm, with paper after paper,
discussion after discussion and hundreds of participants making a diverse and
wonderful array of different kinds of work.
It was as though there was both an incredibly strong vein of work already
existing but also a burning longing or desire for this work to be more strongly
seen and recognised and for the fire that burned in the excitement of those
heady days to be taken seriously.
Over the course of the days, we discussed topics as diverse as childlessness,
speaking to the maternal from the past, in the memory, embodied in the artist,
to work undertaken with and around children, that acknowledged the pres-
ence of children and childcare through metaphors such as ‘prams in hall’, to
the maternal as a structure, a way of engaging with the affective transmission
between bodies in which the possibility of the body that is neither one nor two
makes possible the liminal entry points into that which passes and has passed
between bodies, what Bracha Ettinger (2000) has called ‘art as the transport-­
station of trauma’.
So let us turn to that transport-­station – the ephemeral, liminal space in
which the past enters the present, unannounced and often unrecognised.
 Preamble xxv
And that space entails not only conversations with actual mothers but with
the maternal in all its forms, including children who never were. In what
Ettinger calls the matrixial space, even the vaguest of embodiments can pass
through the thin membranes that separate the generations. We are caught so
that we do not even need to remember a ghost for it to cross that membrane –
it is that which associates itself with the co-­emergence of bodies, of the trans-
port across boundaries, whether marked by generation or geography. It is this
wider sense of the maternal that marks its central role that Ettinger maps out.
That sense should not be confused with the maternal body or even the femi-
nine body per se.Yet the centrality of bodies as routes to the passageways across
generations is crucial. But it is art that, for Ettinger, has a special place because
of its ability to work with the affective, that which can barely be spoken but
which is nevertheless communicated. The chapters in this volume amply dis-
play and convey the power of art in this respect. As when Eleanor Bowen and
Laura González talk to ghosts, when Miriam Schaer creates dolls that are not
her children, when Lois Tonkin talks to women who imagined children they
never had, when Rachel Epp Buller and Aram Han Sifuentes talk of links to
past mothers and when Francesca Woodman, Bracha Ettinger and Tina Kinsella
talk of the pre-­birth scene.
We are in the underworld, where the spirits communicate with us, whisper-
ing to the ears that exist across all the surfaces of our skin.We feel them and yet
we may not even be able to bear their loud whispering. I remember well that
whispering signalled as madness by a man I once interviewed who presented
so coherently and the wife so strangely that I no longer knew what to think
until I understood from the young daughter, who could hardly announce it
directly, that the mother, the so mad-­seeming mother, had been abused by
the so rational-­seeming father (Walkerdine, 1986). The mothers that form the
bridge to the next generation with their backs as Cherrie Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldua (1981/2015) so movingly announced all those years ago, the moth-
ers who, if we are lucky, we may get to care for in their old age, almost as if
they become our children, or we perhaps fear that we resemble too much. The
spaces replete with the droning of connection, almost as unbearable as radio
static, a connection that is, in its way, almost impossible to think – and yet
deeply fertile with its possibilities for an understanding well outside the logos
or episteme.
So, if we are to announce the maternal in art, it must surely signal the possi-
bility of a hugely expanded field of knowing otherwise. A field of co-­knowing,
of ephemeral knowing held in common and telegraphically relayed across the
skin and viscera of generations. It is the possibilities that this presents that, for
me, are signalled by the present volume that begins to show just what brilliant,
diverse and yet profound and connected work is possible, will be possible and
indeed must be possible, not only for the echoes of the past but also for the
possibilities of the future.
xxvi Preamble
References
Ettinger, B. (2000) ‘Art as the Transport-­Station of Trauma’, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger:
Artworking 1985–1999, Gent: Ludion, pp. 91–115.
Moraga, C. and Anzaldúa, G. (eds.). (2015 [1981]) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color, (4th ed.), New York: SUNY.
Walkerdine, V. (1986) ‘Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy’, in Burgin, V., Donald, J.
and Kaplan, C. (eds.), Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen.
1 Maternal art practice
An emerging field of artistic
enquiry into motherhood, care
and time
Elena Marchevska

Defining/being defined by maternal

In 2007 I gave birth to my first child in a run-­down state hospital in Eastern
Europe. It was a swelteringly hot summer day and she arrived in the early hours of
the morning. In the haze of delivering a child into this world, many things passed
me by. However, I still remember clearly that as soon as she was handed to me, my
name disappeared, and everybody started to call me the ‘mother’. It is a common
practice in the area where I come from: you are referred as ‘mother’ even by closest
family members. Suddenly there are no other parts of your identity that matter except
your biological function – mother of a newborn child. At first, I almost didn’t notice
this sudden change; it might have been the tiredness and confusion that come with
early motherhood. But then I was reawakened by one of my dearest friends, who was
going through multiple rounds of IVF treatment at the time. She was the only one to
call me by my first name and that sounded both familiar, comforting and incredibly
respectful. Also, it reminded me that both of us were defined by our (in)ability to deal
with and uphold the traditional patriarchal assumptions concerning motherhood and
mothering. Our thinking and personal understanding of the maternal was pushed
back, silenced, unimportant. The world, at that moment, needed me to be just simply
a ‘mother’.
As my co-­editor Valerie Walkerdine notes in the preamble to this book, the
maternal is central to each and every one of our lives; whether we are/aren’t
or have/haven’t been mothers, the maternal in all its forms enters our lives in
many ways. This has been argued by feminist scholars since the ’60s, as elabo-
rated by Trebilcot, who claims that

mothering is central for every woman in patriarchy, whether or not we

bear or care for children, and that an understanding of mothering, both
as it exists in patriarchy and as it might exist (if at all) in women-­centred
communities, is central to feminist theorizing. I realized that, whether or
not one is a mother, mothering is a necessary focus for work in feminist
theory.
(1984: vii)
2 Elena Marchevska
As Walkerdine and Trebilcot astutely observe, even when women decide to
make choices about their lives and their reproductive activities, that decision
seems to be brought back to their attention on numerous occasions and in
many different ways throughout their adult lives. Women may want to mother
and have children but may not be able to for various medical or personal rea-
sons. Women are still paying the ‘motherhood tax’ and are being reprimanded
because at job interviews and in promotion situations, panels assume they might
become mothers and have (multiple) children.Women don’t want to have chil-
dren. Women want to leave their role as mother and consequently their chil-
dren. There are many ways that women relate to the maternal, although in
mainstream culture there is still a big assumption that women should have
children and there is only one ‘proper way’ to make and execute that decision.
As Rebecca Solnit notes, the ‘mother’ question that women receive is a ‘closed’
question,

[a] question to which there is only one right answer, at least as far as the
interrogator is concerned. These are questions that push you into the herd
or nip at you for diverging from it, questions that contain their own answer
and whose aim is enforcement and punishment.
(2017: 5)

Questions that can never be answered in the right way, questions that can
only be answered with open questions – as Solnit inquires: ‘Would you ask a
man that?’ (2017: 5).

Maternal art argument

This edited collection explores, challenges and critiques various modes and
forms of art practice which deal with the maternal. We invited artists, theorists
and cultural workers to discuss their approach to what Sarah Ruddick (1989)
calls ‘maternal thinking’, a unity of reflection, judgment and emotion about
motherhood. The collection also addresses what Ruddick has always contested,
that there is a profound need for sustained political and intellectual effort before
maternal thinking can be heard and acknowledged in the public domain. So,
ultimately, this edited collection seeks to understand how art allows practition-
ers to reimagine the processes that solidify the mother as metaphor and trope
in culture. Maternal art practice is an encompassing term that I use to describe
a set of art practices which explore, reflect and critique the dominant cultural
notion of motherhood and the role of ‘the mother’ in contemporary art prac-
tice. I believe that maternal art practice is opening up new territories where
artists can productively contribute to a wider set of political and philosophical
discussions on care, labour and time. I have been inspired and empowered to
use this term through dialogue with numerous practitioners and thinkers who
have explored the intersections between art and the maternal over the last two
decades (Liss, 2009; Chernick and Klein, 2011; Epp Buller, 2012; Loveless, 2016;
 Maternal art practice 3
Donoghue, 2013; Bright, 2013; Irvin, 2016; Šimić and Underwood-­Lee, 2017).
As argued by Rachel Epp Buller, the maternal perspective is certainly lacking in
mainstream art education, and examples of work that engage with the political
and conceptual weight of the maternal are rarely present, even in feminist art
and art history classes (2016). In her monumental work Of Woman Born: Mother-
hood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich asserts that feminist mother-
ing seeks to reclaim power for mothers, to imagine and implement a mode of
mothering that mitigates the many ways that patriarchal motherhood, both
discursively and materially, regulates and restrains mothers and their mother-
ing. She posits that it is the institution of motherhood that feminists should
challenge and change and not the experience of mothering itself. Regrettably,
mainstream art education still fails to grasp this important distinction between
the institution and the experience of mothering. Even more, we often see how
motherhood as institution is used to challenge any attempts to explore non-­
biological maternal subjectivities in art.1
With this collection, I want to propose that maternal art practice genuinely
and profoundly embodies maternal thinking. The collection reflects on two
decades of sustained (though sometimes in appearance sporadic) international,
intergenerational dialogue between artists, academics and philosophers that
draw on Ruddick’s ‘maternal thinking’ proposition and extends it in multiple
directions. This territory was explored in depth for the first time theoretically
by Andrea Liss’s ‘Feminist art and the maternal’, where she extended maternal
thinking into ‘thinking (m)otherwise’. This concept was certainly formative for
an emerging generation of young artists across the world, as is clearly visible
from some of the contributions in this book. Liss not only validates the mater-
nal as a mode of thinking and creating within feminist art practice but com-
prehensively brings to the forefront less-­known (or perhaps hidden) artwork by
feminist artists who use their practice to analyse how motherhood has been and
is perceived and pictured.
Therefore, this collection brings together some of the major projects and
contributions to the field of maternal art from the last two decades and reflects
too on influences and possible new directions in the field. As editor, I want
to propose a shift from discussions about motherhood and art, to discussions
about maternal art as field of study.This shift is partially based on Lisa Baraitser’s
observation that ‘the mother’ is the impossible subject par excellence. As Barait-
ser argues, ‘the mother’ is always caught in the gap between and is both ideal-
ized and denigrated in contemporary culture. Part object, part subject within
Western philosophy, ‘the mother’, Baraitser asserts, in some sense is everywhere:
‘our culture saturated with her image and yet she remains a shadowy figure
who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account
for her’ (2008: 4). Baraitser also acknowledges, in her seminal work Maternal
Encounters:The Ethics of Interruption, that by using anecdotal theory and feminist
autobiographical writing, she is capable of discussing (her own) encounter with
maternal subjectivity and of keeping the maternal experience in sight. This
creative, messy written witnessing strategy, as Baraitser suggests, is something
4 Elena Marchevska
that many women use to allow maternal subjectivity to emerge in the work and
form/materialise as a maternal creative practice. For me, the encounter with
the maternal through art is something that allows an interruption of the wider
cultural discourse on ‘motherhood’. The messiness of maternal art is something
that allows art practitioners to explore every aspect of maternity and reclaim
the importance of the mundane and usually overlooked moments of maternal
experience. In many examples of maternal art practice we see a form of mater-
nal subjectivity emerging, as Baraitser (2008: 4) argues, characterized by physi-
cal viscosity,2 heightened sentience,3 a renewed awareness of objects,4 of artists’
own emotional range and emotional points of weakness,5 an engagement with
the built environment,6 a renewed temporal awareness where the present is
elongated and the past and the future no longer felt to be so tangible7 and a
renewed sense of oneself as a speaking subject.8 Maternal art practice by default
deals with what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘sweaty concept’, a concept that ‘comes
out of a bodily experience that is difficult, one that is “trying” and where the
aim is to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty’ (2014). This collection
acknowledges the difficulty of talking about maternal art practice and there-
fore celebrates the movement of artists who consciously claim back, investigate,
question and deconstruct maternal subjectivity. With their practice, the artists
and contributors to this book realign and reclaim a space in the wider discourse
of art history, left unfilled and unacknowledged for a very long time.

The maternal mode of thinking: intergenerational

collaboration as mode of existence
As elaborated previously, the main aim of this edited collection is to present
and foster examples of intergenerational dialogue on the maternal and art.
Most of the contributors use art examples to explore various perspectives on
the maternal. The collection builds on Jacqueline Rose’s question: ‘what does
thinking about mothers do to thinking?’ (1996: 413). The aim of the collec-
tion is to look beyond biological motherhood and present experiences that
explore creatively encounters with infertility, medical intervention, adoption
and fostering, queer mothering and childlessness by choice or not. With this,
I want to acknowledge that the structuring of the collection was impacted
by previous feminist scholarship on concepts surrounding the maternal. As
O’Barr et al. argue, the greatest impact of feminist scholarship on concepts
of mothering

has been to divest them of their biological or moral agency, univocally

expressed, outside of time and history, and to demonstrate the impor-
tance of understanding mothering within a dynamic, interactive context
of social, political, historical and sexual factors, multicultured, multiracial,
and multivoiced.
(1990: 3)
 Maternal art practice 5
Therefore, the collection also brings contributions that explore the creative
embodiment of intergenerational trauma and the complex territory of mother-­
daughter relationships and maternal ambivalence. The book also addresses the
silence imposed upon the maternal in the Western art tradition. It considers the
articulation of multiple maternal subjectivities and offers the possibility of the-
orising women’s voices out of the silence to which they have been consigned
by a philosophical and artistic tradition that privileges male creativity over
female reproduction. The maternal mode of thinking and creating art which
I propose is deeply informed by intergenerational dialogue between artists con-
cerned with working through/towards maternal subjectivities. As Šimić and
Underwood-­Lee assert: ‘As feminist artist/mothers we are standing beside our
feminist (grand) mothers’ (2016: 7). There is also an emergence of an unprec-
edented collaborative ethos and dialogue in maternal art practices, which this
collection modestly acknowledges and addresses. Many chapters (to be precise,
seven) were co-­written or emerged in ideological/conceptual collaboration
with our foremothers in spirit. Many of the co-­authored chapters speak directly
to the potential of sharing this practice as a mode of existing. Many of the artists
and academics featured here came together physically as well, to discuss mater-
nal art practice during various local and international events and gatherings.9
Co-­authorship also allows liberalisation of the author’s voice, the eradication
of the ‘one who knows everything’. It disseminates knowledge and allows dif-
ferent subjectivities to engage in a messy dialogue about maternal experience.
Rich and Arcana suggested early in their work on motherhood that women’s
bonding is a potential solution to the oppressive nature of motherhood as an
institution. The hope is that this collection will nurture a fertile ground for
future discussions about how we analyse and speak about maternal subjectivi-
ties within art practice and education.
The collection also attempts to offer an overview of important art exhibi-
tions and projects that have shaped the field in the last two decades.
I have tried to capture a maternal mode of artistic work which is deeply
informed by intergenerational dialogue between practitioners on mater-
nal subjectivity. This approach is informed by Paula McCloskey’s proposition
on art-­encounter as a formative element of maternal art practice (based on
her first encounter with Louise Bourgeois’s art while being a single mother
herself) (2013). The collection therefore emphasises the need to reclaim and
acknowledge intergenerational influence and to discuss these intergenerational
art-­encounters as modes of subjective transformation. The intergenerational
dialogue therefore is an integral part of all three parts of the book. Furthermore,
each section attempts to represent a different generation of academics and art-
ists and to reflect on how their art and curatorial practice informed each other.
The first section, Intergenerational maternal subjectivities, reflects on
practices since the early ’70s and major exhibitions/artworks about the mater-
nal created since that period.The section serves as a bridge between artistic and
academic contributions on maternal art and reflects on projects that define the
6 Elena Marchevska
field. It starts with a dialogue between Mary Kelly and Natalie Loveless, which
productively explores Kelly’s influence on generations of young artists who
explore the maternal through art. Mary Kelly is one of the most important
figures in feminist art, due to the range and depth of her artistic projects as well
as the insight and acuity of her writing. The interview looks into her practice,
which analyses the maternal as a socially and affectively produced category.The
second chapter is a dialogic encountering between Jennie Klein and Myrel
Chernick on their collaboration for the exhibitions Maternal Metaphors and
Maternal Metaphors II. An important interruption in the art-­historical canon,
these exhibitions gathered artwork that addressed the psychic, material, socio-
cultural, metaphorical and ideological aspects of motherhood and the maternal
in contemporary Western culture. This is followed by Tina Kinsella’s theoretical
elaboration of maternal femininity that arises from Bracha Ettinger’s artistic
process. She uses this to explore Woodman’s Self-­portrait at 13 and re-­evaluate
the contribution that the pre-­birth scene makes to maternal ontological con-
stitution. Andrea Liss looks into the work of multimedia artist Carrie Mae
Weems and her exquisite portraits of children and young adults in the Colored
People series, 1989–1990. She argues that these portraits echo the urgent call
for intersubjective caring, critical awareness and thoughtful action called for by
Black Lives Matter and The Mothers of the Movement. This is followed by a
creative dialogue about The Mothernists, the lovingly co-­parented brainchild of
Deirdre M. Donoghue and Lise Haller Baggesen. Conceived in spring 2014,
this important project was born out of the necessity to bring together maternal
ethics and aesthetics with the Venn diagram of artistic and academic research.
The section concludes with a reflection by artist and activist Ruchika Wason
Singh on the project A.M.M.A.A., a platform for motherhood and maternal
studies in contemporary Asian art discourse.
The second section, Encountering the maternal in artistic practice,
looks at how the major theoretical and artistic events elaborated in the first
section have informed current practice and thinking around maternal art. This
section starts with a performative writing contribution by Eleanor Bowen and
Laura González exploring the maternal figure through their experience as
daughters and in relation to their artistic practice. This is followed by Rachel
Epp Buller’s reflection on her current creative practice, which examines letter-­
writing as an act of care. This contribution, taking an experimental hybrid
format between critical essay, literary narrative and letter exchange, foregrounds
maternal subjectivity in relation to care and time. Aram Han Sifuentes brings
back the intergenerational to this section and talks about her work inspired by
her mother’s artistic practice in South Korea, and how this changed when she
emigrated to the United States and became a seamstress at a local dry-­cleaning
business. Elizabeth Philps discusses the performative turn in maternal art work
and elaborates on the live performance documentation of a long-­distance walk
she did to her mother’s house, carrying her baby on her back, and reflects on
the ways in which we can navigate a performance identity as a mother. Contin-
uing the exploration of performance, Lena Šimić and Emily Underwood-­Lee
respond to each other’s solo performances, which were made as they negotiated
 Maternal art practice 7
their identity as ‘new mothers’, struggling with the immediacy of the needs of
young children and their desires to assert their own sense of self within their
new roles.This section concludes in a true interdisciplinary spirit with a chapter
by Lizzie Thynne, comparing the film work of Sarah Polley, and Michelle Cit-
ron in order to explore the ways in which it has become possible to reimagine
the mother in women’s cinema and specifically to represent her desire.
The last section, Maternal future: interrupting the field, gives space to
issues arising from concerns about maternal art practice in relation to the body,
fragile identity and the difficulty of articulating the maternal outside of patri-
archal institutions. The section starts with an attentive dialogue between Alison
O’Neill and Jo Paul about their collaborative experience; one is a mother and
the other is a non-­mother or a ‘not-­yet-­mother’. Focusing on the disenfran-
chised grief of being childless not by choice, and how this connects to the
experience and alienation of young motherhood, this chapter illustrates how
both circumstances fall outside of the maternal ideal. Sally Sales elaborates on
the cultural context around the ‘unfit mother’, and her chapter explores how a
certain category of mother, who has been judged to be sufficiently unfit, lead-
ing to the enforced permanent removal of her children through adoption. It
explores the way in which this has entered the narratives of adoption through
a change in adoption practices in the contemporary era. This is followed by an
astute chapter by Miriam Schaer that examines two extremes of motherhood –
society’s bias against childless women, and what she calls ‘reverse mothering’.
This is aptly followed by Lois Tonkin’s study about experiences of circumstan-
tial childlessness, and how women utilised the drawing method to articulate an
aspect of this experience in visually powerful ways.The section comes to a close
with a chapter by Lulu Le Vay exploring queer straightness and how depiction
of same-­sex partnerships and the creation of family through surrogacy both
challenge and reproduce heteronormativity.
The book ends with a provocation by the theorist Irina Aristarkhova that
brings us to current discussions about connections between mothering and the
future as mediated, especially, by bioethics and law.

***

As my pre-­school age daughters play with their dollies, I listen how they mother them. Is
that my voice? Is that how they imagine and relive our relationship? How do we teach
maternal?

***

I look at a drawing of me on a Mother’s Day card. My head oversized, my glasses domi-

nating my face, detailed patterns of my wrinkles and moles. Maternal etched in my mirror
reflection. Shaped and marked by interrupted nights, missed meetings, passed invitations.
Motherload.

***
8 Elena Marchevska
As they grow older, they voice the forthcoming maternal concerns: Do I need a man to
have children? Do I have to give birth? Do I need to have children? Can the planet
take more people? And, I leave my opinions and knowledge aside and I listen. Maybe
they know better, these children, young men and women, that need to take over.We don’t
need a mother (nor father) figure on the pedestal, we need lived knowledge and dreams,
imagining of a mutual future.

Maternal proposition
This collection is a response to major shifts in practice and theory around the
maternal which are created by fluidity and impermanency – of living condi-
tions, of employment, of female rights, of ecological uncertainties. By including
both theoretical perspectives and the writing of art practitioners, the collection
aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer a unique interdis-
ciplinary perspective on the maternal art field. So, if you arrived here because
you are searching for answers and it appears that there is no art practice about
the maternal, I hope this will ground your experience and allow you to recon-
nect with artwork that unapologetically questions and celebrates maternal sub-
jectivities.There are multiple entry points into this field, and it is becoming very
clear that the maternal perspective is a missing link into the way we encounter
our fellow humans, our society and finally our planet.The book is interdiscipli-
nary by nature, precisely because these problems are not discipline specific. It is
difficult to follow a chronological, longitudinal history of maternal art practice,
because many of these projects are left hidden, are not properly archived or dis-
seminated. So, read these offerings as propositions to a different future, where
the discursive and social regulations of maternal bodies are diffused and reim-
agined. And follow your journey through the maternal conundrum attentively
and in dialogue with others. With hope that this collection will become an
invaluable resource for young art practitioners and students, I invite you to keep
challenging, questioning and realigning the maternal through your practice.

Notes
1 As an example, during the recent one-­day event Oxytocin: Mothering the World, co-­
organised by Birthrites Collection and Procreate Project in May 2019, the keynote
speaker Del LaGrace Volcano (genderqueer artist, performer and activist), was challenged
and attacked on the basis of their talk on parenting of non-­binary children and Queer
Family Constellations. This also highlights how the maternal is at the forefront of discus-
sions about trans activism.The biological essentialist approach to the maternal appeared to
be heavily used by TERF (trans-­exclusionary radical feminist) activists in the audience.
2 See Dobkin Jess. ‘Lactation Station’, 2006–2016.
3 See Clayton Lenka’s piece. ‘The Distance I Can Be from My Son’, 2013.
4 See Broda Ana Casas. ‘Kinderwunsch’ series, 2014
5 See Furse Anna. ‘Glass Body’, 2006 or Bobby Baker ‘Drawing on a Mother’s Experience’,
1998.
6 See Qualmann Clare. ‘Perambulator’, 2014.
7 See Annu Matthew Palakunnathu. ‘Re-­Generation’ project, 2010
8 See Thompson Selina. ‘Salt’, 2017.
9 It is important to note the intellectual/academic collaboration and the actual embod-
ied, messy conversation emerging during various events. This entire book was conceived
 Maternal art practice 9
during the Motherhood and Creative Practice: Maternal Structures in Creative Work conference,
which I co-­organised with Valerie Walkerdine in 2015. But other important recent gath-
erings include the Gender Generation conference, A.M.M.A.A. a platform, Mothernist I
and II gatherings, Oxytocin I and II, New Maternalism events and exhibitions, the Cultural
ReProducers series of events and the Artist Parent Index, among many others.

References
Ahmed, S. (2014) Sweaty Concepts, 22 February. Available from: https://feministkilljoys.
com/2014/02/22/sweaty-­concepts/
Baker, B. (1988) Drawing on a Mother’s Experience. Performance. Filmed by Deborah May at
Jacksons Lane Arts Centre, London, September 2000.
Baraitser, L. (2008) Maternal Encounters:The Ethics of Interruption, London: Routledge.
Bright, S. (2013) Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood, London: Art/Books.
Broda, A. C. (2014) Kinderwunsch, Madrid: La Fabrica.
Buller, R. E. (2016) Reconciling Art and Mothering, Abington: Routledge.
Chernick, M and Klein, J. (2011) The M-­Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, Bradford,
ON: Demeter Press.
Clayton, L. (2013) The Distance I Can Be From My Son. Video Series. Available from: http://
www.lenkaclayton.com/the-­distance-­i-­can-­be-­from-­my-­son
Dobkin, J. (2006) Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar: A Performance Art Work, Toronto, ON: V
Tape.
Donoghue, D. M. (2013) m/Other voice project. Available from: About -- m / other voices.
https://www.mothervoices.org
Furse, A. (2006) GLASS BODY: Reflecting on Becoming Transparent, Chelsea and Westminster
Hospital, 3/9/2006 -­4/1/2007. [Performance]
Irvin, S. (2016) The Artist Parent Index database. Available from: http://www.artistparentindex.
com/
Liss, A. (2009) Feminist Art and the Maternal, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Loveless, N. (2016) New Maternalisms: Curator’s Essay, Edmonton, AB: FAB Gallery.
McCloskey, P. (2013) Art, Maternal and Matrixial Encounters, unpublished PhD thesis, Uni-
versity of Sheffield.
O’Barr, J. F., Pope, D. and Wyer, M. (1990) Ties That Bind: Essays on Mothering and Patriarchy,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
Palakunnathu, A. (20120) Re-­Generation project,Video. Available from: https://www.annumat
thew.com/gallery/regeneration/
Qualmann Clare (2014) Perambulator. Performance, London: Lewisham Art House. Available
from: http://www.clarequalmann.co.uk/Perambulator.html
Rich A. (1977) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, London:Virago.
Rose, J. (1996) ‘Of Knowledge and Mothers: On the Work of Christopher Bollas’, Gender
and Psychoanalysis,Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 411–428.
Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking:Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Šimić, L. and Underwood-­Lee, E. (2016) Live Art and Motherhood: Study Room Guide on Live
Art and the Maternal, London: Live Art Development Agency.
Šimić, L and Underwood-­Lee, E. (2017) ‘Manifesto for Maternal Performance (Art) 2016!’
Performance Research,Vol. 22, pp. 131–139.
Solnit, R. (2017) The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms, Chicago, IL: Haymarket
Books.
Thompson, S. (2017) Salt, London: Faber & Faber.
Trebilcot, J. (1984) Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld.
Part I

Intergenerational maternal
discussions
2 Feminist intergenerational
inheritance
A conversation
Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly

This interview was conducted in person at Kelly’s studio in Los Angeles, Cali-
fornia, in February of 2018 and has been edited for length and clarity. Mary
Kelly is one of the most important figures in feminist art, due to the range and
depth of her artistic projects as well as the insight and acuity of her writing. Her
first ‘breakout’ work, Post-­Partum Document (1973–1979), was a conceptual and
research-­based art installation that tracked and analyzed Kelly’s first six years of
motherhood through a psychoanalytic developmental lens. It took the form of
found object and text panels paired with psychoanalytically informed reflection
(139 pieces in total). A feminist response to both minimalist and conceptual art,
the work analyzed the maternal as a socially and affectively produced category.
In the decades since, Kelly has developed a wide range of works addressing war,
genocide, gender and race-­based violence, history and collective action. This
interview discusses the political context surrounding Kelly’s early work (both
scholarly and artistic), linking this to the artist’s most recent installation, On the
Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Period of Time (2014). In between,
it covers her thoughts on the education of the artist and feminist consciousness
raising as a political strategy, and looks back at the context of the late 1960s and
early 1970s as a site of political potential for feminism today.

NATALIE LOVELESS: Mary, thank you for taking the time to do this interview. It is
such a thrill. I don’t know if I told you this when we first met in Santa Cruz
for the Complicated Labors exhibition,1 but your 1981 essay ‘Re-­viewing
Modernist Criticism’ was the very first thing I ever encountered of yours.
I came across it on the bookshelf of a friend, in the edited volume Art after
Modernism. I devoured the essay and then followed up on your work, which
is how I discovered Post-­Partum Document (see Plate 2.1 in the colour plate
section). . . . which led me to learn about conceptual art, minimalist art,
feminist art and then, of all things, I found myself picking up Lacan’s Ecrits
and reading the Mirror Stage essay! All of this outside of any formal educa-
tional context; just completely on my own, curious and following a thread
that started with your essay. I honestly think that if it weren’t for those steps,
I never would have ended up going on the journey that I did: going to art
school, then doing a PhD and getting a job teaching contemporary art and
14 Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly

Figure 2.1 Nightcleaners, 1975, 16 mm, black and white film still

theory. I mean, it is of course never one thing that sets one on a path. But at
the same time, there are specific moments that one remembers as signifi-
cant, and, for me, this is one of them. I’d love to hear about when you wrote
it, and why you wrote it – how the essay came about.
MARY KELLY: Well, it was at the end of the ’70s, and, if we take the context of
art, and conceptual practices in England at the time, there were two camps.
One centred on art and language, and perhaps the shorthand would be to
say that this camp was engaged with Wittgenstein, and then there was the
other camp, which included Victor Burgin and myself. We were probably
the only visual artists involved, because it was mostly filmmakers – Laura
Mulvey and Peter Wollen, and film theorists like Claire Johnston and Paul
Willemen. This is because the practice that seemed to be most radical to
us at the time, given our theoretical interests (which mostly came from
France – semiotics and structuralist theories of the ’60s), was emerging in
film and photography.
   I was always a bit of an anomaly in that camp because I didn’t use pho-
tography, but I did start out in film. I made a film called Antepartum before
I started Post-­Partum Document. Anyway, being involved with the film cul-
ture, my friends were engaged in work around Screen. And then when Mark
Nash, who was interested in art, became the editor of Screen, we used to
 Feminist intergenerational inheritance 15
talk a lot about how the concept of the ‘work of art’ was misunderstood by
all the French theorists – ranging from Bellour to Lyotard and Kristeva –
it, the artwork, was assumed under the guise of la peinture. The work of art
was something that you could take in a at glance, right? And so the idea of
a more expanded field, something time-­based, ambitious and as engaging
as a film, was really not being considered. It is around this time that I talked
to Tim Clark about publishing the first version of his work on Olympia,
and then Peter Wollen wanted to write another response to it, and Victor
Burgin wrote his essay on photography, and Griselda wrote her influential
piece on Van Gogh, and then I wrote ‘Re-­Viewing Modernist Criticism’,
and it all happened in a very short period of time, but it had a big impact.2
After this we saw the beginning of ‘the new art history’, which had a simi-
lar kind of a project.
   So that was the way ‘Re-­viewing Modernist Criticism’ started. And the
last section of the article (on exhibition and system) is really unfinished
business. A lot of people have told me they’ve taken up that idea, and
they’ve tried to run with it – the idea that the object of the critical dis-
course would be more appropriately directed to the exhibition than the
individual work. I was borrowing from Stephen Heath’s theory about film
and system. But my article made more use of Foucault than it did psycho-
analytic theory. I found a non-­subjective theory of the subject more useful
in addressing the question of who’s speaking, and for whom, about the
institution, and the fractures within that discourse, right?
   Borrowing from Foucault, I said that the artist may be the subject of the
exhibition statement, but he/she is not the author of the formulation. And
so, the curatorial voice, you know – what is that? I was arguing for us to
look at it as a material practice as well as an institutional discourse. What
kind of architecture frames the exhibition? How is each object displayed?
In a course called Exhibition and System, I really finished what I started in
that article, which was to take students to one exhibition and to do a very,
very close reading over a whole term.
NATALIE LOVELESS: That sounds pedagogically amazing. This ‘unfinished’ aspect
of the essay has been really influential for me, especially as a curator. For the
New Maternalisms exhibitions that I began working on in 2010, works were
not chosen as autonomous but for how they would work together (and
with the space) to bring attention to the question of the feminist maternal
in the form of an exhibitionary event.3 Your essay (and later writings)4 set the
stage for my development in ways that I totally internalised.What you were
arguing for with your conception of a diegetic installation practice and the
practice of reading a work of art really called to me.
  Later I found myself moving away from conceptual art practices and
towards performance art and then interdisciplinary pedagogical theory and
practice (with my dissertation), and for a while it seemed like I was far away
from what initially inspired me in your work. Until I became pregnant,
my last year in my PhD, and then suddenly Post-­Partum Document had a
16 Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly
whole new meaning. The funny thing is, by that time I had forgotten how
much I had internalised, and rediscovering the depth of your influence in
the years since – how much you, through your art and theory, influenced
me – has been wonderful, humbling and gratifying. I am incredibly grate-
ful. It is an inheritance, a feminist conceptual and political art inheritance,
that I feel in deeply material ways.Would you consider writing a follow-­up
essay?
MARY KELLY: I’m so glad you found it useful. I knew there was more work to
be done and I did have notes for a follow-­up essay. Writing requires time,
though, as you know, and I felt that I needed to focus on my artwork. In
terms of pedagogy, at the centre of that argument, in ‘Re-­Viewing Mod-
ernist Criticism’, is the unanswered question of how one actually approaches
the individual work of art. While, to address the complexity of this, I think
I needed Foucault to look at the exhibition as a system, it wasn’t sufficient to
deal with the individual works that were included. It was my feeling, and it
still is – and primary to that way that I teach – that you need semiotics in
order to talk about what I call the ‘material signifying reality’ of the visual
text. What I’ve devised over the years is a kind of mix of say, Schapiro talk-
ing about the extended non-­mimetic conditions of the work, everything
outside of and up to the frame, and calling this the phenomenological
effect of the signifying system, which is physical, and somatic, and then
looking at the other side of that initial encounter with the work, consider-
ing the internalisation of simultaneity-­in-­time that an exhibition gener-
ates, and acknowledging that received knowledge about art within this
institutional discourse – certain things that define disciplines, for example,
painting as a central paradigm, this ideological baggage as I sometimes call
it – is already in place.5
  So, you have these two things to consider. In the very first instance
there’s something physical, somatic and determined by the primacy of the
body in relation to a specific object. And then you have something so vast
and so different, which is what you’re bringing to it. So, it takes time to under-
stand how those come together, and then to talk about it. In a classroom
context, when we finish with the non-­mimetic, as it were, it’s taken at least
an hour and we’re only up to the frame, right? Because there are all the
signifying elements such as lighting, and where the frame ends, or if it’s an
installation, then the spectator is included, all of those sorts of things.
  I know it sounds very schematic, but I’ve found over the years that
it really works for students learning how to look at work to insist that
(in critique sessions) the artist doesn’t speak. The artist has made a visual
proposition, and it’s our ethical responsibility to acknowledge it as not us,
to acknowledge its difference. We have to be in what Agamben calls that
medial position, neither performing or enacting, for the ethical possibility
to emerge. Hold back on projections. Maybe it’s not what you want it to
be, but you’ll never know what it is unless you suspend judgment in favour
of anticipation and just encounter the object!
 Feminist intergenerational inheritance 17
   So eventually, when we move on to the internal signifying system of the
work, I can then say, if it’s a painting, and we’ve gone over the significance
of having a frame or not, now we’re looking at the brushstroke. Taking the
linguistic model of the signifier as the smallest acoustic unit, as Saussure
would say, we look at the smallest visual unit combined with a concept to
produce a sign. So, you have a brush stroke, and either it has impasto, or it
doesn’t. And the colour that’s mixed on it is either subtractive or maybe
it’s primary. And it’s a round or it’s a flat brush. Every single one of those
signifiers attaches to a specific concept almost immediately. If you look at
everything too quickly, then you’re going to miss the fact that it is speak-
ing to you, right? I mean, I think it’s as literal as a child learning to read
a book, and you’re learning to look at a thing as if it is actually speaking.
And you say, ‘Ah. Impasto on the brush stroke.’You know? For the artist, it
is absolutely impossible with the impasto to go towards realism. Because in
order to do that, you have to use more medium, and less colour, so you can
model in relief. With impasto, your attention is drawn to the signifier in
itself, and towards a different kind of pleasure. And then you can see if that
adds up with what else is in the picture, I mean, in terms of shape and line
and texture as well as the relation of foreground, middle ground and back-
ground. And then there is the question of what kind of signs are privileged,
because it’s not likely that the work will privilege the iconic, the symbolic,
the indexical, all in the very same proportion. Say it privileges the indexical
sign, well, then we’re into the trace, a mark that has an existential relation
to the thing that made it. And this can happen in a way that’s obvious, like
the artist’s hand, evidenced in the stroke, or more complexly in a found
object that suggests the context where it was found. So, after Schapiro and
Saussure and Peirce, I go to Barthes’s notion of system and syntagm, which
is a bit like lexicon and syntax in the sentence, but applied to larger semi-
otic structures, and I say let’s see how the parts are put together. It’s a way
of organising the visual language. And it gets more complex as you look
at time-­based work – a film, or a performance, which I love to decipher
because the body, used as medium, is a signifying system: does the artist
wear clothes? Do they make eye contact? All those things!
  Then finally, as way of summarising what really has been a collective
process of analysis, I consider how the two rhetorical figures, metaphor and
metonymy, that Lacan privileges in ‘The Agency of the Letter’, function
in this specific artwork. Because every work, no matter how it’s organ-
ised, is going to be metaphorical in some sense. It’s going to have an ‘a-­
ha’ moment – or a thwarted ‘a-­ha’ moment – as its endgame. So how it
privileges this displacement of meaning, or how quickly or how slowly
it reaches the ‘a-­ha’ moment, is very important. It’s like a Venn diagram,
bringing together dissimilar or similar things to produce a new system of
meaning. Of course, this kind of close reading that we do in the critique
is always in some sense incomplete. The object is (or objects are) also in
a situation . . . a context . . . this is where the analysis of exhibition and
18 Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly
system would come in, and even that’s not the end of the story! Because
of my emphasis on the ethically non-­projective viewer, we haven’t talked
about what’s going on there from the point of view of psychoanalysis, what
you’re bringing to it subjectively. That’s also interesting, but it’s a different
project. What you find in the psychoanalytic interrogation is that, as Lacan
says, it doesn’t help you to interpret the art object, but, rather, the art object
tells you something about the unconscious.
   I just want to say one more thing about how I’ve now come to think
about this critique method in relation to feminism and the maternal. One
of the primary tenets of the feminist movement was that we didn’t speak
for others, as it were. I was very disposed to wanting a system that really
acknowledged that and let the artist speak, but the problem is, in the art
school, making the artist speak seems always to be this structure of putting
them in the hot seat and making them defend what they did, then people
criticising it and saying, ‘Why didn’t you do this or that?’ So, it didn’t seem
to be giving them a voice, in a way. Because they made the work, the
proposition –
NATALIE LOVELESS: – and that was the voice! –
MARY KELLY: Yes! We have to look, and understand this looking as a form of lis-
tening to the artist, through the work. So, I think that’s how I came around to
thinking that this was a better way of doing things. At first, I wouldn’t have
self-­consciously called it feminism, it just kind of naturally came out of
that thinking, from the movement. And it was not a conventional approach
then. It was something kind of specific to my teaching, and I think it was
just the way that those conditions overlapped in my life at that moment in
time. When I went to teach at Cal Arts in 1987, Michael Asher was giving
his very famous critique sessions that went on for eight hours or more,
with the artist in the hot seat, right? And I did my version. Then students
started making a joke out it – his being the ‘phallocentric mode’ versus
mine, the ‘concentric mode’. And that was when I first started to think self-­
consciously about it: ‘Oh yeah. Okay, concentricity – you know, that’s how
Michèle Montrelay talks about a different kind of psychic organisation of
the drives for the woman in relation to castration’. So, I thought, ‘it kind of
makes sense that there’s a way of working that is not phallocentric’. And as
far as the connection of concentricity to the maternal, I wouldn’t think of
this in the idealised sense (that women would be more likely to empathise
with the other). I think of it perhaps more as Montrelay does, having this
initial kind of connection to the maternal body – she calls it an ‘anxious
proximity’ – that’s difficult to sever. Sublimating the pleasure of having the
first object is essential, but there’s also something that, in combination with
the socialisation of the girl, or the woman, introduces a potential for empa-
thy. It’s certainly not a guarantee, no. But it’s a way of negotiating one’s
psychic economy as a woman.
  Anyway, the most important thing, I think, was this practice of listen-
ing in the women’s movement, in the consciousness-­raising groups early
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
than as something antecedent to the first progress towards
systematic knowledge.

The information thus collected by the unsystematic writers is of

various kinds; and relates to the economical and medicinal uses of
plants, their habits, mode of cultivation, and many other
circumstances: it frequently includes some description; but this is
always extremely imperfect, because the essential conditions of
description had not been discovered. Of works composed of
materials so heterogeneous, it can be of little use to produce
specimens; but I may quote a few words from Theophrastus, which
may serve to connect him with the future history of the science, as
bearing upon one of the many problems respecting the identification
of ancient and modern plants. It has been made a question whether
the following description does not refer to the potato. 12 He is
speaking of the differences of roots: “Some roots,” he says, “are still
different from those which have been described; as that of the
arachidna 13 plant: for this bears fruit underground as well as above:
the fleshy part sends one thick root deep into the ground, but the
others, which bear the fruit, are more slender 363 and higher up, and
ramified. It loves a sandy soil, and has no leaf whatever.”
12 Theoph. i. 11.

13 Most probably the Arachnis hypogæa, or ground-nut.

~Correction to text in the 3rd edition.~

The books of Aristotle and Theophrastus soon took the place of

the Book of Nature in the attention of the degenerate philosophers
who succeeded them. A story is told by Strabo 14 concerning the fate
of the works of these great naturalists. In the case of the wars and
changes which occurred among the successors of Alexander, the
heirs of Theophrastus tried to secure to themselves his books, and
those of his master, by burying them in the ground. There the
manuscripts suffered much from damp and worms; till Apollonicon, a
book-collector of those days, purchased them, and attempted, in his
own way, to supply what time had obliterated. When Sylla marched
the Roman troops into Athens, he took possession of the library of
Apollonicon; and the works which it contained were soon circulated
among the learned of Rome and Alexandria, who were thus enabled
to Aristotelize 15 on botany as on other subjects.
14 Strabo, lib. xiii. c. i. § 54.

15 Ἀριστοτλίζειν.

The library collected by the Attalic kings of Pergamus, and the

Alexandrian Museum, founded and supported by the Ptolemies of
Egypt, rather fostered the commentatorial spirit than promoted the
increase of any real knowledge of nature. The Romans, in this as in
other subjects, were practical, not speculative. They had, in the
times of their national vigor, several writers on agriculture, who were
highly esteemed; but no author, till we come to Pliny, who dwells on
the mere knowledge of plants. And even in Pliny, it is easy to
perceive that we have before us a writer who extracted his
information principally from books. This remarkable man, 16 in the
middle of a public and active life, of campaigns and voyages,
contrived to accumulate, by reading and study, an extraordinary
store of knowledge of all kinds. So unwilling was he to have his
reading and note-making interrupted, that, even before day-break in
winter, and from his litter as he travelled, he was wont to dictate to
his amanuensis, who was obliged to preserve his hand from the
numbness which the cold occasioned, by the use of gloves. 17
 16 Sprengel, i. 163.

17 Plin. Jun. Epist. 3, 5.

It has been ingeniously observed, that we may find traces in the

botanical part of his Natural History, of the errors which this hurried
and broken habit of study produced; and that he appears frequently
to have had books read to him and to have heard them amiss. 18
Thus, 364 among several other instances, Theophrastus having said
that the plane-tree is in Italy rare, 19 Pliny, misled by the similarity of
the Greek word (spanian, rare), says that the tree occurs in Italy and
Spain. 20 His work has, with great propriety, been called the
Encyclopædia of Antiquity; and, in truth, there are few portions of the
learning of the times to which it does not refer. Of the thirty-seven
Books of which it consists, no less than sixteen (from the twelfth to
the twenty-seventh) relate to plants. The information which is
collected in these books, is of the most miscellaneous kind; and the
author admits, with little distinction, truth and error, useful knowledge
and absurd fables. The declamatory style, and the comprehensive
and lofty tone of thought which we have already spoken of as
characteristic of the Roman writers, are peculiarly observable in him.
The manner of his death is well known: it was occasioned by the
eruption of Vesuvius, a.d. 79, to which, in his curiosity, he ventured
so near as to be suffocated.
18 Sprengel, i. 163.

19Theoph. iv. 7. Ἔν μὲν γὰρ τῷ Ἀδρίᾳ πλάτανον οὐ φασὶν εἶναι

πλῆν περὶ το Διομήδους ἱερόν, σ π α ν ί α ν δὲ καὶ ἐν Ἰταλίᾳ πάσῃ

20 Plin. Nat. Hist. xii. 3. Et alias (platanos) fuisse in Italia, ac

nominatim Hispania, apud auctores invenitur.
 Pliny’s work acquired an almost unlimited authority, as one of the
standards of botanical knowledge, in the middle ages; but even more
than his, that of his contemporary, Pedanius Dioscorides, of
Anazarbus in Cilicia. This work, written in Greek, is held by the best
judges 21 to offer no evidence that the author observed for himself.
Yet he says expressly in his Preface, that his love of natural history,
and his military life, have led him into many countries, in which he
has had opportunity to become acquainted with the nature of herbs
and trees. 22 He speaks of six hundred plants, but often indicates
only their names and properties, giving no description by which they
can be identified. The main cause of his great reputation in
subsequent times was, that he says much of the medicinal virtues of
vegetables.
21 Mirbel, 510.

22 Sprengel, i. 136.

We come now to the ages of darkness and lethargy, when the

habit of original thought seems to die away, as the talent of original
observation had done before. Commentators and mystics succeed to
the philosophical naturalists of better times. And though a new race,
altogether distinct in blood and character from the Greek,
appropriates to itself the stores of Grecian learning, this movement
does not, as might be expected, break the chains of literary slavery.
The Arabs 365 bring, to the cultivation of the science of the Greeks,
their own oriental habit of submission, their oriental love of wonder;
and thus, while they swell the herd of commentators and mystics,
they produce no philosopher.

Yet the Arabs discharged an important function in the history of

human knowledge, 23 by preserving, and transmitting to more
enlightened times, the intellectual treasures of antiquity. The
unhappy dissensions which took place in the Christian church had
scattered these treasures over the East, at a period much
antecedent to the rise of the Saracen power. In the fifth century, the
adherents of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, were declared
heretical by the Council of Ephesus (a.d. 431), and driven into exile.
In this manner, many of the most learned and ingenious men of the
Christian world were removed to the Euphrates, where they formed
the Chaldean church, erected the celebrated Nestorian school of
Edessa, and gave rise to many offsets from this in various regions.
Already, in the fifth century, Hibas, Cumas, and Probus, translated
the writings of Aristotle into Syriac. But the learned Nestorians paid
an especial attention to the art of medicine, and were the most
zealous students of the works of the Greek physicians. At
Djondisabor, in Khusistan, they became an ostensible medical
school, who distributed academical honors as the result of public
disputations. The califs of Bagdad heard of the fame and the wisdom
of the doctors of Djondisabor, summoned some of them to Bagdad,
and took measures for the foundation of a school of learning in that
city. The value of the skill, the learning, and the virtues of the
Nestorians, was so strongly felt, that they were allowed by the
Mohammedans the free exercise of the Christian religion, and
intrusted with the conduct of the studies of those of the Moslemin,
whose education was most cared for. The affinity of the Syriac and
Arabic languages made the task of instruction more easy. The
Nestorians translated the works of the ancients out of the former into
the latter language: hence there are still found Arabic manuscripts of
Dioscorides, with Syriac words in the margin. Pliny and Aristotle
likewise assumed an Arabic dress; and were, as well as Dioscorides,
the foundation of instruction in all the Arabian academies; of which a
great number were established throughout the Saracen empire, from
Bokhara in the remotest east, to Marocco and Cordova in the west.
After some time, the Mohammedans themselves began to translate
and 366 extract from their Syriac sources; and at length to write
works of their own. And thus arose vast libraries, such as that of
Cordova, which contained 250,000 volumes.
23 Sprengel, i. 203.

The Nestorians are stated 24 to have first established among the

Arabs those collections of medicinal substances (Apothecæ), from
which our term Apothecary is taken; and to have written books
(Dispensatoria) containing systematic instructions for the
employment of these medicaments; a word which long continued to
be implied in the same sense, and which we also retain, though in a
modified application (Dispensary).
24 Sprengel, i. 205.

The directors of these collections were supposed to be intimately

acquainted with plants; and yet, in truth, the knowledge of plants
owed but little to them; for the Arabic Dioscorides was the source
and standard of their knowledge. The flourishing commerce of the
Arabians, their numerous and distant journeys, made them, no
doubt, practically acquainted with the productions of lands unknown
to the Greeks and Romans. Their Nestorian teachers had
established Christianity even as far as China and Malabar; and their
travellers mention 25 the camphor of Sumatra, the aloe-wood of
Socotra near Java, the tea of China. But they never learned the art
of converting their practical into speculative knowledge. They treat of
plants only in so far as their use in medicine is concerned, 26 and
followed Dioscorides in the description, and even in the order of the
plants, except when they arrange them according to the Arabic
alphabet. With little clearness of view, they often mistake what they
read: 27 thus when Dioscorides says that ligusticon grows on the
Apennine, a mountain not far from the Alps; Avicenna, misled by a
resemblance of the Arabic letters, quotes him as saying that the
plant grows on Akabis, a mountain near Egypt.
25 Sprengel, i. 206.

26 Ib. i. 207.

27 Ib. i. 211.

It is of little use to enumerate such writers. One of the most noted

of them was Mesuë, physician of the Calif of Kahirah. His work,
which was translated into Latin at a later period, was entitled, On
Simple Medicines; a title which was common to many medical
treatises, from the time of Galen in the second century. Indeed, of
this opposition of simple and compound medicines, we still have
traces in our language: 367

He would ope his leathern scrip,

And show me simples of a thousand names,
Telling their strange and vigorous faculties.
Milton, Comus.

Where the subject of our history is so entirely at a stand, it is

unprofitable to dwell on a list of names. The Arabians, small as their
science was, were able to instruct the Christians. Their writings were
translated by learned Europeans, for instance Michael Scot, and
Constantine of Africa, a Carthaginian who had lived forty years
among the Saracens 28 and who died a.d. 1087. Among his works, is
a Treatise, De Gradibus, which contains the Arabian medicinal lore.
In the thirteenth century occur Encyclopædias, as that of Albertus
Magnus, and of Vincent of Beauvais; but these contain no natural
history except traditions and fables. Even the ancient writers were
altogether perverted and disfigured. The Dioscorides of the middle
ages varied materially from ours. 29 Monks, merchants, and
adventurers travelled far, but knowledge was little increased. Simon
of Genoa, 30 a writer on plants in the fourteenth century, boasts that
he perambulated the East in order to collect plants. “Yet in his Clavis
Sanationis,” says a modern botanical writer, 31 “we discover no trace
of an acquaintance with nature. He merely compares the Greek,
Arabic, and Latin names of plants, and gives their medicinal effect
after his predecessors:”—so little true is it, that the use of the senses
alone necessarily leads to real knowledge.
28 Sprengel, i. 230.

29 Ib. i. 239.

30 Ib. i. 241.

31 Ib. ib.

Though the growing activity of thought in Europe, and the revived

acquaintance with the authors of Greece in their genuine form, were
gradually dispelling the intellectual clouds of the middle ages, yet
during the fifteenth century, botany makes no approach to a scientific
form. The greater part of the literature of this subject consisted of
Herbals, all of which were formed on the same plan, and appeared
under titles such as Hortus, or Ortus Sanitatis. There are, for
example, three 32 such German Herbals, with woodcuts, which date
about 1490. But an important peculiarity in these works is that they
contain some indigenous species placed side by side with the old
ones. In 1516, The Grete Herbal was published in England, also with
woodcuts. It contains an account of more than four hundred
vegetables, and their 368 products; of which one hundred and fifty
are English, and are no way distinguished from the exotics by the
mode in which they are inserted in the work.
32 Augsburg, 1488. Mainz, 1491. Lubec, 1492.

We shall see, in the next chapter, that when the intellect of Europe
began really to apply itself to the observation of nature, the progress
towards genuine science soon began to be visible, in this as in other
subjects; but before this tendency could operate freely, the history of
botany was destined to show, in another instance, how much more
grateful to man, even when roused to intelligence and activity, is the
study of tradition than the study of nature. When the scholars of
Europe had become acquainted with the genuine works of the
ancients in the original languages, the pleasure and admiration
which they felt, led them to the most zealous endeavors to illustrate
and apply what they read. They fell into the error of supposing that
the plants described by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, must be
those which grew in their own fields. And thus Ruellius, 33 a French
physician, who only travelled in the environs of Paris and Picardy,
imagined that he found there the plants of Italy and Greece. The
originators of genuine botany in Germany, Brunfels and Tragus
(Bock), committed the same mistake; and hence arose the
misapplication of classical names to many genera. The labors of
many other learned men took the same direction, of treating the
ancient writers as if they alone were the sources of knowledge and
truth.
33 De Natura Stirpium, 1536.
 But the philosophical spirit of Europe was already too vigorous to
allow this superstitious erudition to exercise a lasting sway.
Leonicenus, who taught at Ferrara till he was almost a hundred
years old, and died in 1524, 34 disputed, with great freedom, the
authority of the Arabian writers, and even of Pliny. He saw, and
showed by many examples, how little Pliny himself knew of nature,
and how many errors he had made or transmitted. The same
independence of thought with regard to other ancient writers, was
manifested by other scholars. Yet the power of ancient authority
melted away but gradually. Thus Antonius Brassavola, who
established on the banks of the Po the first botanical garden of
modern times, published in 1536, his Examen omnium Simplicium
Medicamentorum; and, as Cuvier says, 35 though he studied plants in
nature, his book (written in the 369 Platonic form of dialogue), has
still the character of a commentary on the ancients.
34 Sprengel, i. 252.

35 Hist. des Sc. Nat. partie ii. 169.

The Germans appear to have been the first to liberate themselves

from this thraldom, and to publish works founded mainly on actual
observation. The first of the botanists who had this great merit is
Otho Brunfels of Mentz, whose work, Herbarum Vivæ Icones,
appeared in 1530. It consists of two volumes in folio, with wood-cuts;
and in 1532, a German edition was published. The plants which it
contains are given without any arrangement, and thus he belongs to
the period of unsystematic knowledge. Yet the progress towards the
formation of a system manifested itself so immediately in the series
of German botanists to which he belongs, that we might with almost
equal propriety transfer him to the history of that progress; to which
we now proceed.
 CHAPTER III.

Formation of a System of Arrangement of Plants.

Sect. 1.—Prelude to the Epoch of Cæsalpinus.

T HE arrangement of plants in the earliest works was either

arbitrary, or according to their use, or some other extraneous
circumstance, as in Pliny. This and the division of vegetables by
Dioscorides into aromatic, alimentary, medicinal, vinous, is, as will
be easily seen, a merely casual distribution. The Arabian writers, and
those of the middle ages, showed still more clearly their insensibility
to the nature of system, by adopting an alphabetical arrangement;
which was employed also in the Herbals of the sixteenth century.
Brunfels, as we have said, adopted no principle of order; nor did his
successor, Fuchs. Yet the latter writer urged his countrymen to put
aside their Arabian and barbarous Latin doctors, and to observe the
vegetable kingdom for themselves; and he himself set the example
of doing this, examined plants with zeal and accuracy, and made
above fifteen hundred drawings of them. 36
36 His Historia Stirpium was published at Basil in 1542.

370 The difficulty of representing plants in any useful way by

means of drawings, is greater, perhaps, than it at first appears. So
long as no distinction was made of the importance of different organs
of the plant, a picture representing merely the obvious general
appearance and larger parts, was of comparatively small value.
Hence we are not to wonder at the slighting manner in which Pliny
speaks of such records. “Those who gave such pictures of plants,”
he says, “Crateuas, Dionysius, Metrodorus, have shown nothing
clearly, except the difficulty of their undertaking. A picture may be
mistaken, and is changed and disfigured by copyists; and, without
these imperfections, it is not enough to represent the plant in one
state, since it has four different aspects in the four seasons of the
year.”

The diffusion of the habit of exact drawing, especially among the

countrymen of Albert Durer and Lucas Cranach, and the invention of
wood-cuts and copper-plates, remedied some of these defects.
Moreover, the conviction gradually arose in men’s minds that the
structure of the flower and the fruit are the most important
circumstances in fixing the identity of the plant. Theophrastus speaks
with precision of the organs which he describes, but these are
principally the leaves, roots, and stems. Fuchs uses the term apices
for the anthers, and gluma for the blossom of grasses, thus showing
that he had noticed these parts as generally present.

In the next writer whom we have to mention, we find some traces

of a perception of the real resemblances of plants beginning to
appear. It is impossible to explain the progress of such views without
assuming in the reader some acquaintance with plants; but a very
few words may suffice to convey the requisite notions. Even in plants
which most commonly come in our way, we may perceive instances
of the resemblances of which we speak. Thus, Mint, Marjoram, Basil,
Sage, Lavender, Thyme, Dead-nettle, and many other plants, have a
tubular flower, of which the mouth is divided into two lips; hence they
are formed into a family, and termed Labiatæ. Again, the Stock, the
Wall-flower, the Mustard, the Cress, the Lady-smock, the Shepherd’s
purse, have, among other similarities, their blossoms with four petals
arranged crosswise; these are all of the order Cruciferæ. Other
flowers, apparently more complex, still resemble each other, as
Daisy. Marigold, Aster, and Chamomile; these belong to the order
Compositæ. And though the members of each such family may differ
widely in their larger parts, their stems and leaves, the close study of
nature leads the botanist irresistibly to consider their resemblances
as 371 occupying a far more important place than their differences. It
is the general establishment of this conviction and its consequences
which we have now to follow.

The first writer in whom we find the traces of an arrangement

depending upon these natural resemblances, is Hieronymus Tragus,
(Jerom Bock,) a laborious German botanist, who, in 1551, published
a herbal. In this work, several of the species included in those
natural families to which we have alluded, 37 as for instance the
Labiatæ, the Cruciferæ, the Compositæ, are for the most part
brought together; and thus, although with many mistakes as to such
connexions, a new principle of order is introduced into the subject.
37 Sprengel, i. 270.

In pursuing the development of such principles of natural order, it

is necessary to recollect that the principles lead to an assemblage of
divisions and groups, successively subordinate, the lower to the
higher, like the brigades, regiments, and companies of an army, or
the provinces, towns, and parishes of a kingdom. Species are
included in Genera, Genera in Families or Orders, and orders in
Classes. The perception that there is some connexion among the
species of plants, was the first essential step; the detection of
different marks and characters which should give, on the one hand,
limited groups, on the other, comprehensive divisions, were other
highly important parts of this advance. To point out every successive
movement in this progress would be a task of extreme difficulty, but
we may note, as the most prominent portions of it, the establishment
of the groups which immediately include Species, that is, the
formation of Genera; and the invention of a method which should
distribute into consistent and distinct divisions the whole vegetable
kingdom, that is, the construction of a System.

To the second of these two steps we have no difficulty in assigning

its proper author. It belongs to Cæsalpinus, and marks the first great
epoch of this science. It is less easy to state to what botanist is due
the establishment of Genera; yet we may justly assign the greater
part of the merit of this invention, as is usually done, to Conrad
Gessner of Zurich. This eminent naturalist, after publishing his great
work on animals, died 38 of the plague in 1565, at the age of forty-
nine, while he was preparing to publish a History of Plants, a sequel
to his History of Animals. The fate of the work thus left 372 unfinished
was remarkable. It fell into the hands of his pupil, Gaspard Wolf, who
was to have published it, but wanting leisure for the office, sold it to
Joachim Camerarius, a physician and botanist of Nuremberg, who
made use of the engravings prepared by Gessner, in an Epitome
which he published in 1586. The text of Gessner’s work, after
passing through various hands, was published in 1754 under the title
of Gessneri Opera Botanica per duo Sæcula desiderata, &c., but is
very incomplete.
38 Cuvier, Leçons sur l’Hist. des Sciences Naturelles, partie ii. p.
193.

The imperfect state in which Gessner left his botanical labors,

makes it necessary to seek the evidence of his peculiar views in
scattered passages of his correspondence and other works. One of
his great merits was, that he saw the peculiar importance of the
flower and fruit as affording the characters by which the affinities of
plants were to be detected; and that he urged this view upon his
contemporaries. His plates present to us, by the side of each plant,
its flower and its fruit, carefully engraved. And in his communications
with his botanical correspondents, he repeatedly insists on these
parts. Thus 39 in 1565 he writes to Zuinger concerning some foreign
plants which the latter possessed: “Tell me if your plants have fruit
and flower, as well as stalk and leaves, for those are of much the
greater consequence. By these three marks,—flower, fruit, and seed,
—I find that Saxifraga and Consolida Regalis are related to Aconite.”
These characters, derived from the fructification (as the assemblage
of flower and fruit is called), are the means by which genera are
established, and hence, by the best botanists, Gessner is declared
to be the inventor of genera. 40
39 Epistolæ, fol. 113 a; see also fol. 65 b.

40 Haller, Biblio Botanica, i. 284. Methodi Botanicæ rationem

primus pervidit;—dari nempe et genera quæ plures species
comprehenderent et classes quæ multa genera. Varias etiam
classes naturales expressit. Characterem in flore inque semine
posuit, &c.—Rauwolfio Socio Epist. Wolf, p. 39.
Linnæus, Genera Plantarum, Pref. xiii. “A fructificatione plantas
distinguere in genera, infinitæ sapientiæ placuisse, detexit
posterior ætas, et quidem primus, sæculi sui ornamentum,
Conradus Gessnerus, uti patet ex Epistolis ejus postremis, et
Tabulis per Carmerarium editis.”
Cuvier says (Hist. des Sc. Nat. 2e pe, p. 193), after speaking to
the same effect, “Il fit voir encore que toutes les plantes qui ont
des fleurs et des fruits semblables se ressemblent par leurs
propriétés, et que quand on rapproche ces plantes on obtient
ainsi une classification naturelle.” I do not know if he here refers to
any particular passages of Gessner’s work.
 373 The labors of Gessner in botany, both on account of the
unfinished state in which he left the application of his principles, and
on account of the absence of any principles manifestly applicable to
the whole extent of the vegetable kingdom, can only be considered
as a prelude to the epoch in which those defects were supplied. To
that epoch we now proceed.

Sect. 2.—Epoch of Cæsalpinus.—Formation of a System of

Arrangement.

If any one were disposed to question whether Natural History truly

belongs to the domain of Inductive Science;—whether it is to be
prosecuted by the same methods, and requires the same
endowments of mind as those which lead to the successful
cultivation of the Physical Sciences,—the circumstances under
which Botany has made its advance appear fitted to remove such
doubts. The first decided step in this study was merely the
construction of a classification of its subjects. We shall, I trust, be
able to show that such a classification includes, in reality, the
establishment of one general principle, and leads to more. But
without here dwelling on this point, it is worth notice that the person
to whom we owe this classification, Andreas Cæsalpinus of Arezzo,
was one of the most philosophical men of his time, profoundly skilled
in the Aristotelian lore which was then esteemed, yet gifted with
courage and sagacity which enabled him to weigh the value of the
Peripatetic doctrines, to reject what seemed error, and to look
onwards to a better philosophy. “How are we to understand,” he
inquires, “that we must proceed from universals to particulars (as
Aristotle directs), when particulars are better known?” 41 Yet he treats
the Master with deference, and, as has been observed, 42 we see in
his great botanical work deep traces of the best features of the
Aristotelian school, logic and method; and, indeed, in this work he
frequently refers to his Quæstiones Peripateticæ. His book, entitled
De Plantis libri xvi. appeared at Florence in 1583. The aspect under
which his task presented itself to his mind appears to me to possess
so much interest, that I will transcribe a few of his reflections. After
speaking of the splendid multiplicity of the productions of nature, and
the confusion which has hitherto prevailed among writers on plants,
374 the growing treasures of the botanical world; he adds, 43 “In this
immense multitude of plants, I see that want which is most felt in any
other unordered crowd: if such an assemblage be not arranged into
brigades like an army, all must be tumult and fluctuation. And this
accordingly happens in the treatment of plants: for the mind is
overwhelmed by the confused accumulation of things, and thus arise
endless mistake and angry altercation.” He then states his general
view, which, as we shall see, was adopted by his successors. “Since
all science consists in the collection of similar, and the distinction of
dissimilar things, and since the consequence of this is a distribution
into genera and species, which are to be natural classes governed
by real differences, I have attempted to execute this task in the
whole range of plants;—ut si quid pro ingenii mei tenuitate in
hujusmodi studio profecerim, ad communem utilitatem proferam.”
We see here how clearly he claims for himself the credit of being the
first to execute this task of arrangement.
41 Quæstiones Peripateticæ, (1569,) lib. i. quæst. i.

42 Cuvier, p. 198.

43 Dedicatio, a 2.
 After certain preparatory speculations, he says, 44 “Let us now
endeavor to mark the kinds of plants by essential circumstances in
the fructification.” He then observes, “In the constitution of organs
three things are mainly important—the number, the position, the
figure.” And he then proceeds to exemplify this: “Some have under
one flower, one seed, as Amygdala, or one seed-receptacle, as
Rosa; or two seeds, as Ferularia, or two seed-receptacles, as
Nasturtium; or three, as the Tithymalum kind have three seeds, the
Bulbaceæ three receptacles; or four, as Marrubium, four seeds,
Siler four receptacles; or more, as Cicoraceæ, and Acanaceæ have
more seeds, Pinus, more receptacles.”
44 Lib. i. c. 13, 14.

It will be observed that we have here ten classes made out by

means of number alone, added to the consideration of whether the
seed is alone in its covering, as in a cherry, or contained in a
receptacle with several others, as in a berry, pod, or capsule.
Several of these divisions are, however, further subdivided according
to other circumstances, and especially according as the vital part of
the seed, which he called the heart (cor 45 ), is situated in the upper or
lower part of the seed. As our object here is only to indicate the
principle of the method of Cæsalpinus, I need not further dwell on
the details, and still less on the defects by which it is disfigured, as,
for instance, the retention of the old distinction of Trees, Shrubs, and
Herbs.
45 Corculum, of Linnæus.

375 To some persons it may appear that this arbitrary distribution

of the vegetable kingdom, according to the number of parts of a
particular kind, cannot deserve to be spoken of as a great discovery.
And if, indeed, the distribution had been arbitrary, this would have
been true; the real merit of this and of every other system is, that
while it is artificial in its form, it is natural in its results. The plants
which are associated by the arrangement of Cæsalpinus, are those
which have the closest resemblances in the most essential points.
Thus, as Linnæus says, though the first in attempting to form natural
orders, he observed as many as the most successful of later writers.
Thus his Legumina 46 correspond to the natural order Leguminosæ;
his genus Ferulaceum 47 to the Umbellatæ; his Bulbaceæ 48 to
Liliaceæ; his Anthemides 49 to the Compositæ; in like manner, the
Boragineæ are brought together, 50 and the Labiatæ. That such
assemblages are produced by the application of his principles, is a
sufficient evidence that they have their foundation in the general
laws of the vegetable world. If this had not been the case, the mere
application of number or figure alone as a standard of arrangement,
would have produced only intolerable anomalies. If, for instance,
Cæsalpinus had arranged plants by the number of flowers on the
same stalk, he would have separated individuals of the same
species; if he had distributed them according to the number of
leaflets which compose the leaves, he would have had to place far
asunder different species of the same genus. Or, as he himself
says, 51 “If we make one genus of those which have a round root, as
Rapum, Aristolochia, Cyclaminus, Aton, we shall separate from this
genus those which most agree with it, as Napum and Raphanum,
which resemble Rapum, and the long Aristolochia, which resembles
the round; while we shall join the most remote kinds, for the nature of
Cyclaminus and Rapum is altogether diverse in all other respects. Or
if we attend to the differences of stalk, so as to make one genus of
those which have a naked stalk, as the Junci, Cæpe, Aphacæ, along
with Cicoraceæ, Violæ, we shall still connect the most unlike things,