The theater of motherhood

Abstract

The basic premise of this article is that despite the many representations of mothers in the history of art, the maternal image has almost invariably been presented in the status of object, i.e., a reflection of the value system, interests, and perspective of the patriarchal culture, and not of the mother herself. This study examines the construction of the maternal ideal in western, particularly Israeli, culture, and suggests the turning point over the past twenty years as contemporary artist-mothers (mama’artists) have undermined this ideal. To avoid the traditional structure into which the mother has been relegated, the article adopts the matricentric perspective of Canadian scholar Andrea O’Reilly, who places the mother at the center of feminist discourse. With the understanding that the category mother intersects with, but is distinct from, the category woman, art scholarship must formulate more valid narratives. This paper has two goals. One is to examine how matricentric research can contribute to analysis of the work of artist-mothers. The second is to identify the tools in art that enable expression of the political-maternal subjectivity. The methodology proceeds from these goals, and includes the voice of the artist, her personal story, and her perspective as she creates an imagined art world. These were obtained by studio meetings with the artist, personal interviews, and a gender analysis of the art. The video series under study was created between 2005 and 2015 by Mali De-Kalo, an Israeli mother-artist. The research revealed an original, thought-provoking, and ironic artistic reaction with dramatic theater-of-the-absurd elements that reflect her critique of the mechanisms of construction and replication of the social order and its expectations of the Israeli mother. De-Kalo represents a new spirit in Israeli art –a contemporary artist in courageous defiance of the social norm that casts the mother as object; she depicts in her art a political-maternal subject who exposes and opposes patriarchal power in the social and artistic realms.