Monster Moms and phantom pains, recent paintings by Tala Madani. By Elaine Tam.

Tala Madani’s pithy look at Shit Moms and Mother Figures is dark, slippery and dead refreshing. While her older work may have explored male maladies, these recent paintings are replete with psychoanalytic ideas of femme gravitas. The handful in focus here — Mother Figure (2018), Shit Mom (Quads) (2019), The Womb (2019) and Untitled (2020) — bear Madani’s sparing palette which, as the artist professes, alternate between swarthy Watchmen comic shades and kindergarten pastels. Providing us with healthy helpings of maternal compassion, they are, as ever, lightly dusted with mirth. 

 To pursue the notion of the Perfect Mom is a fool’s errand. While a mother is an inexhaustible piece of wanton magic; she is partial, piecemeal, part fact and part fabulation. She takes on different roles, amorphous, she is always just what she needs to be. Thirty years later, two into therapy, her children will speak of her as the Abandoning Mother, the Controlling Mother, the Overprotective Mother — whatever guise befits the ailment. These are well-burnished scapegoat variations on the Shit Mom; to borrow a little rhyme from the remote memory of my Master’s paper, this is a matter of monster moms, phantom pains and blame games. You see, glib titular accusations easily glide off the tongue. The head-bobbling therapist praises the breakthrough, the introspection... Not Daddy-issues, Mommy ones. 

Tala Madani. Shit Mom (Quads), 2019. Oil on linen. 182.9 x 182.9 x 3.2 cm. Photography: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

‘I don't have to delineate the female figure in these works as it's covered in excrement. It subverts the idealisation of the virgin mother, which is so present in art.’ (Madani, 2019)

She is sanguine and sessile. It's past midnight when she wakes, and duly returns to her body: a re-composition of shit daubs, a provisional mass, loosely held together. Horror mounting, she notes the white-noise of paraesthesia gripping her hapless limbs, one of which is shot through by a baby’s mindless gait. A poorly distributed mess, Shit Mom is not the majestic reclining nude art history has showered with adoration, but an exhausted carcass supine. 

Feast on her, by silver spoonfuls. She is Bracha Ettinger’s ‘Ready-made mother-monster’, a notional comfort to fill the void. The Norwegian playwright, and lauded progressive of his time, Henrik Ibsen knew this well. Suicide-mother Hedda (Hedda Gabler, 1891), and runaway-mother Nora (A Doll’s House, 1879) may have been figments of dramatic creation, but by and large they also revealed the underbelly of motherhood. Hedda and Nora were illusion-shattering martyrs caught up in dangerous idealisations, as well as unsung models of female courage. 

‘I wouldn't have made this series if I hadn't become a mother myself, and the work plays on an idea of the anti-heroic mother—the shit mother perhaps — and notions of dependency on a mother who lets you down.’ (Madani, 2019)

 The dark croaks, but the night itself is thin and quiet, a touch saturnine. An ominous quadrangle rises like a monolith, insinuates a door. Stood agape like heaven’s portal, or a bypass for extra-terrestrial abduction, it smacks sweetly of untold drama. Madani’s painting is choked with light; a room beyond emits the cascades of lustrous milk-blues and bruised plums which form a floating stage, a crime scene of delicious messiness. Quadruplets — burbling, babbling and smeared with Shit Mom — engage in matricidal, cannibalistic play. Tenderness and violence are the mainstays of the mother-child bond. The year is 2014, when Julia Kristeva writes that maternal passion ‘suffers’ and ‘endures’. 

Tala Madani. Untitled, 2020. Oil on linen. 61 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

It stirs things up in a circular, cyclonic fashion. Chopper blades, rotary, whip around. The air, cut finely so many a time, is a cascading waterfall of ribbons. Coppola’s iconic opening to Apocalypse Now is the metronomic quality of a pirouetting ceiling fan, a scene which gently draws us into its own temporality, and counterposes the ultra-violences all around. Coppola’s fan issues forth a delirious deep assignment, announcing the start of a spiral descent, one ever-approaching the unknowable heart of darkness. 

 Untitled (2020) opens onto a room of flesh. Tickled pink, it blushes a diffused light which appears to emanate from within. This painting immediately recalls Madani’s unforgettable animation The Womb (2019). A work of gut-wrenching jocoseriosity, its protagonist is a foetus onlooking a film chronicling world affairs, which is projected onto the uterine wall. Watching, as it does, these scenes of tremendous hardship and violence, it eventually summons a gun to shoot at the images, committing its own foeticide in the process.

Tala Madani. The Womb (still), 2019. Single channel colour animation. 3 min 26 sec. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Precious few details in Untitled expressively anchor it, make it familiar. The oppressive mechanism mid-flight, and its stern stem firmly lodged overhead, casts an ominous shadow over a pigeon-toed figure who, as though caught between simple domestic undertakings, has just walked into this cataclysm. Shit Mom, our anti-heroine, and well-worn but un-officiated archetype, is coming apart in flecks and shreds. Smudges violently carry parts of her body to the edge of the canvas, sweeping her someplace out of frame. The fear is thickly palpable, despite how small a suggestion of a silhouette makes her. Despite all her travails, fighting disintegration, she transforms every modicum of love into strength; her grip on the baby being wrenched from her arms is desperate, but resolute.

 Shit (Mom) hits the fan. While Shit Mom is becoming a blur of frenzied streaks, Madani, herself a mother, is likewise becoming-child: she is finger painting with faecal matter. ‘By speaking the echolalia and the language of her child... each mother in her own way undertakes the Proustian search for "lost time”.’ (Kristeva, 2014)

Tala Madani. Mother Figure, 2018. Oil on linen. 139.7 x 111.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York. 

I arrive now to this last painting, the earliest of the works discussed here. It yawns a dark, scant, wireframe plane. A diaper-clad, rosy-bellied baby stands, arms outstretched, coordination dumb, reaching into the projector light, grasping at a female representation. No longer enveloped in shit, her head tilted in coy modesty, she wears a docile expression; the very genericism her perfected compassion likens her to ubiquitous depictions of the Virgin. She, after whom the painting is named, is our own holy ghost, the Mother Figure. ‘A phantasm […] erected on a psychic and somatic reality as fragile as it is indelible: maternal reliance.’ (Kristeva, 2014)

 Projection — both the psychoanalytic phenomenon and the technology, from which the former takes its name — transfers and displaces images/imagos held within. Might we therefore liken it to an apparition sighting? A spectre is whisked up by light and shadow; it escapes death, resists representation, inhabits speech, stalks Europe, clings to the cultural, dwells in memoriam (this is how it avoids obsolescence, how it persists). Most importantly, it exceeds human time. The Mother Figure is a work of intergenerational haunting as Madani’s projector, a recurring motif, implies. 

The Mother Figure is ever-present, yet rarely apparent. Elusive to the brink of hallucinatory vision, she is always-already dead and yet still very much alive. A stunning example of her is the presence that plagues Beckett’s Molloy (1951), driving him to half a novel’s torturous misadventure to seek her out. Hell-bent on communing with her, her very memory inspires him to hobble and bicycle at sordid lengths — a journey expressed by a single, indefatigable paragraph set over eighty pages — on one stiff and one stiffening leg.

Years earlier, I sat in an empty university canteen at some off-peak time in the afternoon to discuss my paper on ‘Mommy issues’. Incidentally, our beloved lecturer — a philosopher and my then-supervisor — had just returned from his period of leave, seeing to affairs concerning his recently deceased mother. When he, by experience, affirmed that the loss of a mother always constitutes a ‘major psychic shift’, my back straightened with respect to the significance of it all. About this meeting I remember nothing else.

Whether by faintest of recollections, or deepest of longings, it is in this way that she is immortal. Much like the Monster Mother, the Mother-Ideal belongs to us... as the hope of absolution, the wish for restoration. Reaching out, however, we might forever be surprised to find her an inch short of our grasp.

References

 Das, Jareh. ‘Tala Madani: “I Don't Make a Conscious Decision to Subvert the Gaze”.’ Ocula Magazine. September 6, 2019. Accessed January 28, 2021. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/tala-madani/. 

Ettinger, Bracha. (M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting. Studies in the Maternal. 2010; 2(1), pp.1—24. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.150

Kristeva, Julia. Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 2014; 62(1), pp. 69—85. DOI:10.1177/0003065114522129