Breastfeeding a baby gives a new definition to the term that formerly meant disappointment, the moment when, after the baby's hungrily dry sucked for a minute or so, the milk glands respond and engorge the breast with milk that will make the child's breath smell like vanilla ice cream. With the oncoming sluice you can see that baby's eyes grow wide as she sucks for all she's worth to keep up with the rush. There's the rapid tiny whimpering gulps as the baby struggles to maintain her suction or receive the tiny geysers of milk in the face. The mother feels an acute wave of pins and needles with the let down, and the baby's sucking soon relieves the ache and itch of engorgement. Together, mother and child learn to ride the wave which eventually becomes more subtle, although sometimes it takes intense study and commitment to nurture the cycle.
This sort of let down is not something that happens in the Pippoliti Rist installation at the MOMA, even though the films are projected from protrusions in the walls that resemble both nipples and the noses of jets. I'm sure if I'd looked more carefully I'd have seen a few of the young ones who were rolling around in the pupil inside the upholstered blue iris start gnawing their fists when the giant breast appears on the screen, bobbing under an erect nipple. The installation delivers an invitation to intimacy that I found refreshing, as the sign at the front asks people to please remove their shoes before standing on the white rug or sitting on the iris, and to please make friends during their visit. I like the work's trippy love-in undercurrent, though my favorite part wasn't the psychedelic tulip field but the stretch when a man walks barefoot through shallow water.
Coming close to the let down of milk, pretensions and barriers between strangers is the let down of the kind of laughter which I heard from my son while he watched Der Lauf Der Dinge by Peter Fishli and David Weiss, part of the Vik Muniz curated Rebus, indicating he'd became engorged with the artists' comic and mechanical genius. I haven't heard those belly laughs in a while, and when I hear them I had to wonder why I haven't devoted my life to creating the conditions under which they occur, how do you garden for laughs, I wonder, where do you get the seeds?
Maybe cultivating that laugh is as hard as gardening under a snowfall, as hard as forcing grace, but my how the babies bring down the milk.
3 comments:
Probably one of the most intense and accurate reviews of art (and nursing) I've read.
Thanks. I guess I miss the bond of nursing, and I'm hoping to generate some prolactin through the writing.
When I read your post I wondered if you were a nursing mother -- that would have made you younger than I imagined. But now I see, that like me, you sometimes remember, physically remember, that mammal bond.
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