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MILKSTAINED, a Web-Cast Performance by M.A.M.A., as Part of L.A.
Freewaves's "All Over the Map"
LOS ANGELES - Milkstained, a live event combined with pre-recorded video
will be broadcasted live on the world wide web using video and audio
streaming technology on Sunday, September 13 at 5:00 p.m. PST. This
event can also be viewed at the Electronic Cafe International, 1649 18th
Street (half a block north of Olympic) in Santa Monica. Milkstained
addresses the contradictory cultural meanings that surround breast milk and
breastfeeding. This event/performance by M.A.M.A., a newly formed
collaborative group of women artists (Athena Kanaris, Lisa Mann, Deborah
Oliver, LIsa Schoyer, and Karen Schwenkmeyer), is part of a larger project
that deconstructs what it means to be a mother and active artist.
Images of an infant nuzzling and caressing the mother's breast, pinching it
and running his flat hand over the raised nipple; not simply feeding, but
playing, fondling, laughing at it. At the same time, the mother's voice is given
primacy through the interior monologue, so that the viewer is not allowed to
imagine that she is the passive recipient of Oedipal caresses.
In a culture in which every sensuous bodily relationship is cast into the mold
of genital sex and every intense emotional and erotic relation is cast as
romantic love, these images might create discomfort. There is a trend of
thought in which breast-feeding is felt to smell too much of the sexual, to be
too close to incest, too close to the animal, to be indecent. (In recent years,
women breast-feeding in public have been threatened, asked to leave stores,
and arrested for public indecency.)
Has there ever been a love scene played between mother and child, in the
history of drama, literature, or cinema? Have we ever been allowed to see the
child feeding at the breast, or a mother pumping milk for her infant, in a
context that is not medical or anthropological? Or, for example, as part of a
love story?
Milkstained is punctuated by sounds and images of spilling, pouring,
dripping, a sense of fantastic abundance, the release of bodily fluids as in
the sexual act, the tension and feeling of disorder produced by the sound of
liquids overrunning their containers. These play with a cultural pattern of
metaphor associating a femininity that is subversive to the symbolic system
with liquids: blood, milk, tears.
In this culture, the relationship of mother and child which is passionate one
that requires constant touching, caresses, soft words, a total absorption of
each in the other has no representation (except for a history of religious
imagery which has idealized and disguised it). Milkstained posits an erotic
relation, divinely beautiful, as evidence of bodily pleasure that does not
conform to the sexual, and an emotional relation that cannot be explained
within phallocentric modes of thought.
Co-sponsored by the Electronic Cafe International, Milkstained is part of the
programming for L.A. Freewaves' "All Over the Map", a citywide festival of
experimental, documentary, animation and new media works by artists,
activists, and mediamakers, from September 8 to October 4. The innovative
format of the 1998 festival features premiere screenings at MOCA, thematic
video bus tours, video programs broadcast on cable TV, and an online
exhibition at the L.A. Freewaves' website <www.freewaves.org>, as well as
installation and performances in art and community spaces throughout
Southern California.
The live web-cast can be found on <www.ecafe.com>, linked with
<www.freewaves.org>. Tickets for the Electronic Cafe International
performance are $6.00 for adults, $4.00 for strudents (with I.D.) and senior
citizens, and free for children under 12. For directions call (310) 828-8732.
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