Tag: gender roles

Mona Hatoum

Home

1999

“Home consists of a long table covered with gleaming metal kitchen appliances. The table has a polished wooden top and heavy metal legs on wheels. The industrial connotations of the table are offset by the domestic kitchen utensils on its surface, including graters, scissors, a colander, a whisk, a ladle, salad servers, a sieve, a pasta maker, presses and a heart-shaped pastry cutter. Wires snake through the installation, connected to each utensil with crocodile clips. The wires conduct electrical currents to the objects periodically illuminating small light bulbs positioned beneath the sieve and colander and inside an upright grater. The current is controlled by a software programme that alters the frequency and intensity of the lights. Speakers amplify the crackling sound of electricity coursing through the wires and the metal objects. The sculpture is set back behind a barrier of thin horizontal steel wires that separates the viewer from the potentially lethal current.

Hatoum appropriates objects related to the domestic kitchen, traditionally a feminine domain, and gives them a menacing, uncanny edge. The work’s title expresses an ironic, ambivalent relationship to the safe, nurturing environment that the word home implies. The artist has explained, ‘I called it Home, because I see it as a work that shatters notions of the wholesomeness of the home environment, the household, and the domain where the feminine resides. Having always had an ambiguous relationship with notions of home, family, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation, I often like to introduce a physical or psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.’ (quoted in ‘Mona Hatoum interviewed by Jo Glencross’, in Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance, p.68) Home evokes the small scale anguish of domestic drudgery and the claustrophobia of gender roles. Hatoum has commented, ‘I see kitchen utensils as exotic objects, and I often don’t know what their proper use is. I respond to them as beautiful objects. Being raised in a culture where women have to be taught the art of cooking as part of the process of being primed for marriage, I had an antagonistic attitude to all of that’ (quoted in Domestic Disturbance, p.65).”

—Tate

THE KITCHEN

Robin Weltsch

The soft skin of a kitchen pink
Is openers, strainers, blenders
Is cups, pots and hot ovens
Is boxes, cans and glass packages
Is faucets and nippled knobs
A toaster, juicer and waffler
All pink skinned
How would you like your eggs done
this morning?

– Robin Weltsch

Mona Hatoum, Home, 1999

Summary

Home consists of a long table covered with gleaming metal kitchen appliances. The table has a polished wooden top and heavy metal legs on wheels. The industrial connotations of the table are offset by the domestic kitchen utensils on its surface, including graters, scissors, a colander, a whisk, a ladle, salad servers, a sieve, a pasta maker, presses and a heart-shaped pastry cutter. Wires snake through the installation, connected to each utensil with crocodile clips. The wires conduct electrical currents to the objects periodically illuminating small light bulbs positioned beneath the sieve and colander and inside an upright grater. The current is controlled by a software programme that alters the frequency and intensity of the lights. Speakers amplify the crackling sound of electricity coursing through the wires and the metal objects. The sculpture is set back behind a barrier of thin horizontal steel wires that separates the viewer from the potentially lethal current.

Hatoum appropriates objects related to the domestic kitchen, traditionally a feminine domain, and gives them a menacing, uncanny edge. The work’s title expresses an ironic, ambivalent relationship to the safe, nurturing environment that the word home implies. The artist has explained, ‘I called it Home, because I see it as a work that shatters notions of the wholesomeness of the home environment, the household, and the domain where the feminine resides. Having always had an ambiguous relationship with notions of home, family, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation, I often like to introduce a physical or psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.’ (quoted in ‘Mona Hatoum interviewed by Jo Glencross’, in Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance, p.68) Home evokes the small scale anguish of domestic drudgery and the claustrophobia of gender roles. Hatoum has commented, ‘I see kitchen utensils as exotic objects, and I often don’t know what their proper use is. I respond to them as beautiful objects. Being raised in a culture where women have to be taught the art of cooking as part of the process of being primed for marriage, I had an antagonistic attitude to all of that’ (quoted in Domestic Disturbance, p.65).

Earlier works by Hatoum in Tate’s Collection also suggest an underlying threat in the domestic environment. Incommunicado, 1993 (Tate T06988) is a baby’s cot with sharp wires replacing the mattress. Divan Bed, 1996 (Tate T07277) reproduces a daybed in hard tread-plate steel. The handles of Untitled (Wheelchair), 1998 (Tate T07497) are sharpened blades. In each case an object that should offer comfort is made inhospitable, even potentially violent. Like Home, these works suggest a host of suppressed hostility in the relationship between caregiver and receiver.

Hatoum’s experience of home is complicated by the fact that by the age of twenty-three she had been twice dispossessed. She was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents exiled from their homeland. In 1975 during a visit to London, Hatoum heard that war had broken out in Lebanon. Prevented from returning to Beirut she remained in the UK. London continues to be her base, but Hatoum thinks of herself as a nomad and her work as an artist has allowed her to lead a peripatetic life, traveling the world for residencies and exhibitions. This sculpture was originally commissioned for a show at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. It was produced in an edition of three; Tate owns the second in the edition.

Home is an early version of an installation that formed part of a major display of Hatoum’s work in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in 2000. The work in the exhibition, entitled Homebound, 2000 (Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York), reproduced the structure of Homeon a larger scale, with electrical cables connecting entire suites of furniture. In both works, as Sheena Wagstaff has pointed out, electricity runs through the wires like blood coursing through veins and arteries. This makes it possible to read the domestic objects as bodily organs, and the installations as a whole as symbolic representations of the human body (see Wagstaff, ‘Uncharted Territory: New Perspectives in the Art of Mona Hatoum’, Mona Hatoum, Tate Britain, p.31). 

—Tate

Source: tate.org.uk

“Vicky Hodgett, Susan Frazier and Robin Weltsch’s Nurturant Kitchen featured “Eggs to Breasts”, a pink kitchen with walls covered in breasts, evokes woman as a feeder in the heart of the house. Woman feeds with her kitchen, feeds children with her breasts and feeds man with her body. Culturally propagated stereotypes of womanhood are obsessively repeated in the kitchen – the colour pink and breasts.
Rather than celebrating these feminine attributes, a claustrophobic and surrealist cavern is created, reminiscent of Bourgeois’s grotesque, anthropomorphic body parts, and Yayoi Kusama’s repetitive dot works, which symbolised her decent into madness. The approximation of eggs and breasts also suggest a woman’s reproductive capabilities and thus her primary function, as well as a shortened evolutionary path – from egg (a foetus) to breast (a mother).”

Source: thepastelproject.com

Cock and Cunt Play, Judy Chicago, first performed at Womanhouse in 1972.

“Cock and Cunt is a skit in three short acts, in which two women dressed identically in black leotards with oversized, pink vinyl genitalia perform with deliberate, awkward, puppet-like movements. It begins with one student, dressed as the ‘cunt’, asking in a high-pitched, halting voice if the other, dressed at the ‘cock’, will help her do the dishes. Shocked, the ‘cock’ refuses, claiming his phallus exempts him from doing dishes. The play continues with the ‘cock’ mounting the ‘cunt’ while he declares the superiority of his sex organ, which is ‘long and hard and straight…like a gun or a missile’, and accuses the ‘cunt’ of threatening to castrate him by asking him to participate in household chores and please her sexually. The performance ends with the ‘cock’ beating the ‘cunt’ to death with his phallus.”

Source: judychicago.com

Socially, [patriarchy] is the cultural deceit of the system promising men authority, control, and power but denying these at almost every level of his life or, at most, paying off in very small coin. The most glaring exception of this, of course, lies in men’s domination of women and the power relations of the family.

Orr, 1993, 245

Often feminist activists affirm this logic when we should be constantly naming these acts as expressions of perverted power relations, general lack of control of one’s actions, emotional powerlessness, extreme irrationality, and in many cases, outright insanity. Passive male absorption of sexist ideology enables men to falsely interpret this disturbed behavior positively. As long as men are brainwashed to equate violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no motivation to change.

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.

—Bell Hooks