A recent article on The Guardian, sensibly titled 'Don't tell women how to give birth' , has reminded me of another powerful piece by Karen Finley on an experience that, as a woman and as a mother, has changed me forever. An experience that has all too often been de-sexualised and sanitized by being regarded from a coldly clinical standpoint.
TODAY, MOTHERS-TO-be are expected to attain the 'perfect birth'. The expectant mother is made to feel that she is responsible for this, her baby's first experience of the world. The reality is that so much happens in the pregnancy and birth process that is beyond anyone's control - no matter how aware, responsible, and healthy a woman is. Nevertheless, if a woman has one glass of wine or one cup of coffee during pregnancy then she is made to feel that she is ruining her child's health. She must deny herself totally and give everything to the child. And if she has a C-section, she is made to feel that somehow she didn't do her best. I think this is a backlash, a punitive response to the fact that women increasingly have been putting off childbirth in favor of their careers.
And pregnant women today are given extensive instructions and coaching geared toward allowing them to give birth without expressing pain. There are relaxation exercises, Lamaze techniques, yoga, meditation. The idea of being serene and relaxed during childbirth is absurd to me. Labor was the most excruciating, painful experience my body has ever gone through. I had a natural childbirth and I broke my tailbone pushing my nine-pound daughter out of the birth canal. The idea that pain should not be expressed during childbirth is a cultural misogyny, a way of trying to control women's emotions.
After giving birth, I wanted to push the image of childbirth in my art. I realized that there aren't many images of childbirth in this culture. There are plenty of magazines where you can see a woman's pussy, of course, but you're are not going to see a baby coming out of it. I wanted to do a piece that would expose the sexuality of childbirth, and that would confront viewers with the P-U-S-S-Y - that would say, 'This is what it can do'. I wanted something that would be visceral and vivid, like Frida Kahlo's childbirth paintings, but I wanted it to be a real picture, and I wanted it to be big.
My good friend Dr. Virginia Reath, a gynecologist, had found some photos of childbirth. She gave me three of them and I blew them up to 4 x 6 feet. They were graphic images of a baby's head crowning and emerging from the mother's vagina.
I hung the photos side by side in a room at the SFAI, near the 'Moral History' installation. I stuck 'Post-Its' with relaxation instructions ('Pretend you are floating on a cloud'. 'Picture yourself on the beach with your favourite beach towel'. 'Stay relaxed. This is for your baby'.) all over the photos. I found these instructions so paternal, so patronizing, and under that, I felt there was fear: fear of the female expressing her emotions.
This installation, 'The Relaxation Room', also included a video of me squirting breast milk onto black velvet. I am in my studio, and I take my 40D milk-laden breasts out of my smock and lactate on to the velvet in an abstract pattern. It's hysterical. It is my response to Jackson's Pollock's film I am Nature.
Karen Finley, from A Different Kind of Intimacy, pp. 187-89.
Image: Frida Kahlo, My Birth.
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