Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul
-Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself [30], 1st ed)
Having a child forced me to grow up…to become an adult. It was a path lighted by doubt.
When I was first pregnant, living in Brooklyn, I could sense a change in the many subtle public and private exchanges with friends and strangers alike. There is a self-exile in the discovery that you are pregnant—all your friends are still in bars, seeing themselves as the center and source of meaning. You are quietly setting yourself apart, adjusting to a new center—a sacrifice to something unknown and unfolding. There is both alienation and a new kind of anchoring.
What does it mean to be an artist and then suddenly a mother and artist? I’m talking about a woman’s experience here—as we literally embody it. We are seen, differently—sometimes radically so–her life is over, she had so much potential, but she’s no longer one of us, no longer committed. A woman is catapulted into a new set of public expectations and assumptions. She will have to prove that she is really an artist. Will she leave the scene for play dates and housewifery?
Of course, there are great models we look to—Elizabeth Murray, who lived downtown with her kids. In her obit, Roberta Smith writes, “The birth of her son, Dakota, in 1969, also firmed her ambitions. She proceeded to dismantle and rebuild her art, replacing acrylic paint with oil paint — which she called “another kind of life form.”[1] There is Mary Kelly who transformed the birth of her child into a Freudian art project. Or Ida Applebroog who “in 1969, living in San Diego and raising four children… retreated every night to the bathtub for a hot soak in peace. She brought her sketchbooks with her and proceeded to create a series of 150 delicate pen-and-ink renderings of her vagina. (She prefers the term, though technically the subject is her vulva.) A year earlier, she had been hospitalized for depression, and she now considers her “Vagina Drawings” to be the map of her recovery, the reconnection to her self and to her artistic life.”[2]
Do we even know which male artists have kids? Has it had any effect on their careers? Will we ever move from motherhood to parenthood, a symmetrical model of two parents in equal commitment? This is the hopeful work to be done by the current generation.
To bear and have a child is to see differently, as when something serious happens in the world, a life-threatening illness or a war. But this is an astonishingly beautiful kind of seriousness. It is the center of meaning, the continuation of the species, biological destiny. The art world can feel counterfeit in comparison, somewhere between Dante’s eighth-circle-flatterers and Vampire of the Vanities. Or high school! Privileged people from good private schools spreading official avant-garde culture to the rich and bored. Small, cold glasses of white wine among earnest works claiming political impact or clever ones that refer to themselves or like works. This stands in relief to the churning reality of one’s animal body and the continuity of time that suddenly stretches behind and before you in blood lines and threads of DNA.
You feel your feet press into the earth, attuned to your ancestral line, re-rhythmed to a double heartbeat, yourself awash in body fluids and doubt.
I got pregnant in the late 1980s. I remember announcing my pregnancy to my Marxist-feminist male mentor who looked at me as if I were an alien—both betrayal and fear in his eyes. I must admit that it stung. As I tried to make sense of his response, I came to the conclusion that he was seeing a woman’s body—my body–as a realm of the unknown, uncharted, dark, mysterious. In a word, he was horrified. My body had become flesh. It was inconvenient. Was it possible that my Marxist-feminist mentor was othering me? Was it possible that an enlightened contemporary thinker could possibly still see a woman’s body as a dark mysterious island—how totally ancient! How dark ages! The subtle but implicit message was, “You are no longer one of us. You have essentialized your identity as a woman. As a body.” Of course, among the many ironies here is that he had essentialized himself.
It became clear that there were really only two roads to art world survival: to either wholly ignore one’s pregnancy, body, and subsequent child– to not skip a beat; or to structure this into some kind of theoretical employment, subservient to masculine standards of cultural value (e.g., Mary Kelly).
What is striking is that neither of these choices is on the pregnant woman’s terms, but rather a strategy for seamlessly fitting into a structure that is already set and is inherently masculine. My hope is that millennial artists—this generation—will have comfortably replaced motherhood with parenthood and, in so doing, create a new model where artists rather than women-artists have kids.
For my part, I chose the first path–to ignore and separate. I did an international installation in the ninth month of pregnancy (note from doctor with permission to fly) and subsequent public piece with baby in snuggly. I lived in my Brooklyn studio and set the alarm for 3 am to get a solid four hours of painting in before the baby woke—a routine possibly as taxing as cross-fit! There was a sense of the fight—a resistance to overcome. I became much more organized and efficient in my work habits. In art school, we were in the studio sixteen hours a day. But much of it was drinking and smoking and talking about the meaning of life. I can honestly say that during these days, I could do in four hours what might have taken twelve to sixteen in less disciplined times.
Still, a kind of meaning gap persisted. At times, the studio work seemed to reside on the surface of things as compared to the deep-rooted truth of creating, bearing, sheltering what seemed existence itself. This rich area might be explored by a young artist. It’s interesting that love and death have always been staples of art and literature. And yet birth—love’s material evidence–that stands in such profound symmetry with death, has remained hidden and undeclared. I suspect this is because it has always been the realm of women, in the silent margins. I’m hopeful that this generation will live it differently.
-Paula Crawford
[1] New York Times, Roberta Smith, August 13, 2007, Elizabeth Murray, 66, Artist of Vivid Forms, Dies
[2] Art in America, Jaye Hirsch, June 1, 2012, Ida Applebroog
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This post is part of the (Pro)Create Anthology, a collection of narratives about the intersection of professional studio practice and parenting.