July 2016 / The Let Down Reflex: Part III

In our July column we are pleased to continue with the curatorial team behind 'The Let Down Reflex' Amber Berson from Montreal and Juliana Driever from New York.  
Over the three month period of May, June and July, Berson and Driever have been bringing us a monthly column on parenting in the arts, with contributions by artists: Dillon de Give, Home Affairs (Arzu Ozkal, Claudia Costa Pederson, and Nanette Yannuzzi), Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), Lise Haller Baggesen, LoVid, and Shane Aslan Selzer, with an additional text from EFA Project space administrators Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik.
In this last column of the series we feature LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) and Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik from EFA Project Space.
Each of the contributions over this three month period have been taking shape in a series of interviews on revisionist approaches to accommodations and policies on the participation of families and parents in the arts and culture.
 

Home Affairs, And Everything Else, 2016, (installation view) Image courtesy of the EFA Project Space

Amber Berson is a writer, curator, and PhD student who conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on the subject of artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated The Let Down Reflex (2016); TrailMix (2014); *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (2013); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013); and The Wild Bush Residency (2012–14). She is a member of the Montréal-based Critical Administrative Practices Reading Group; sits on the editorial committee of .dpi, a feminist journal of digital art and culture; and is the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. Her writing has been published in Breach Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Esse, Fuse Magazine and the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies. She is a mother to a toddler named Paloma.

Juliana Driever is a curator and writer. Her work strives to create equity for art and ideas that exist beyond a perceived mainstream. She is primarily concerned with public space, site-specificity, and participation, and has worked on a variety of related exhibition, programming, editorial, and writing projects. Recent curatorial work includes The Let Down Reflex (2016, with Amber Berson, EFA Project Space, New York, NY), Socially Acceptable (2015, Residency Unlimited/InCube Arts), Art in Odd Places 2014: FREE (with Dylan Gauthier, New York, NY), and About, With & For (2013, Boston Center for the Arts). Her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs, and has been featured online with A Blade of Grass Foundation and Bad at Sports, and in the print volume Service Media: Is it ‘Public Art’ or Art in Public Space? She is a mother to a seven year-old named Jackson.

To read the editorial written by Berson and Driever please see here.

The Let Down Reflex - PART III
By Amber Berson and Juliana Driever

IV.
LOVID
(Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus)

LoVid, still from Kids at a Noise Show, 2016. Image courtesy of the artists.

Tell us about your experience creating a new work for this show, considering the topic was not necessarily within your regular practice.
When we were first invited to participate in the show, we had a hard time reflecting on the challenges of being artist-parents. This was because we primarily feel very grateful for all the art-world professionals (administrators, curators, installers, artists) who have been incredibly accommodating of us and our family in numerous situations. We felt that this is something we would like to explore more and that could contribute to the exhibition. 
We have a very specific perspective because when our older daughters were younger we toured extensively for many years as a family across the US and Europe. We performed in a wide range of venues from punk squats to major cultural institutions. And we had our kids with us all along the way.
In the video, 'Kids at Noise Show', we wanted to not only capture our very personal relationships with these places and individuals, but also the notion that the art-world is a complex cosmos not only defined by elite galleries and major capitals. 'Kids at a Noise Show' is a montage of family photos, old handmade flyers and posters, and a stellar collection of interviews from curators, art administrators, and artists that we have worked with in the past. Some are parents and some are not; we tried to capture their individual perspectives on this issue rather than impose our own. We've also tried to include some crude and frankly embarrassing moments, because life is not always photogenic.

Tell us about an extremely positive art world experience since becoming a parent. What types of things have helped you?
We've often said that it has been easier for us to be parents in the art-world than artists in the parenting world. This is largely because we never lived in neighborhoods where a lot of other artists live. Through our kids' friends, we mainly meet parents who not only have little knowledge of contemporary art but have even less of a clue about the work, life, and priorities of an artist. Because of this, whenever we have met art-world parents, we have always been very excited for ourselves and for our kids to meet someone else with shared experiences.
One memorable example of this was when we performed at Media Archeology in Houston, a festival organized by Aurora Picture Show. We met our good friends Andrea Grover (founder of Aurora) and Carlos Lama who have two girls about the same age as ours. They were all about 4 and 2 at the time. We had a great time and it felt like a big relief to be with people who had a similar lifestyle. In addition to the Grover-Lama family there were other families involved in the festival and running the venues we played at, local artists and cultural organizers, all with children approximately the same ages as our own. The kids had a great time, playing outside and enjoying each other's company. Kids who are used to being around art are often the most respectful ones, they knew when to give the adults space to get stuff done and enjoyed being outside and running up and down the stairs. We also remember a communal feeling among the parents, which is the best always, when people can take turns watching over the group. At the time we didn't have many friends in NYC who had kids and were in the art world, at least not in our age group. So this experience was hugely positive and made us feel that we were not isolated as artists having a family.

LoVid, still from Kids at Noise Show, 2016. Image courtesy of the artists.

How do you think cultural organizations can shift their policies and practices to be more hospitable to families?
This is a very complicated issue that in our opinion expands from the art-world and into a larger discussion on the workplace and family life in the US. Each artist might have a different perspective whether they see their career as a job like any other job (teacher, dentist..) or as a lifestyle, socio-economic group. If art is a job like any other, then artists should not expect to have any other conditions than those of anyone else.  
In general we think that as a society we should strive to balance the gap between the workplace and personal lives for parents and non-parents. This includes vacation times, flexibility in work schedule, etc, and valuing self-care and enrichment. It would be great if working parents had more choices for childcare near their workplace and that includes artists.
More residencies and institutions could provide childcare as an option or give honoraria towards covering childcare, or at least allow/encourage bringing children.  


 

V. 
MICHELLE LEVY & MEGHANA KARNIK
(EFA Project Space)

Michelle Levy (left), Director of the EFA Project Space and Meghana Karnik (right), Program Manager of the EFA Project Space.

As organizers of an art space that strives to be a supportive, open platform, hosting The Let Down Reflex, an exhibition that illuminates the concerns of the contemporary artist/parent, was a huge learning experience for us. We discovered our own blind spots while helping the curators create a presence for something that remains largely invisible. Thanks to our collaborators’ insistence, we saw that holding an opening reception in the the daytime that encourages families to attend could be likened to the first day of Spring when everyone comes out. The fact that a contemporary art gallery filled with parents, children, and art colleagues and peers all together felt like a radical act, was a message to us. Our vision has been limited by the accepted norms of the art world -even progressive non-profit spaces like ours. It’s a quiet phenomenon: that in becoming parents, artists (especially mothers) have to fight not to be  taken out of circulation. Art openings and public programs, essential opportunities to participate and network, happen at night, competing with children’s bedtime. Childcare is not offered. Professional artist parents must stay home with their children or find a solution to showing up without them, resulting in a significant void either way.  In light of our curators’ call to action, we found ourselves asking: how do we remain sensitive and supportive of important voices that have been marginalized? What can we do as program administrators functioning with a limited budget within a larger organisation? We could say, as a modest program, we hadn’t looked into childcare options before because we have limited resources. Or, because our organisation as a whole does not have the proper liability insurance and while it is a nice idea, there are many other more urgent matters that need attention. When asked to rise to the challenge, we learned that there are attainable gestures, even with limited resources that can make participation more accessible to artist-parents. For example, setting aside $50 to have a childcare worker in the gallery during performances or panels and offering select events during daytime hours and a space for strollers, rest, breastfeeding, etc. The truth is, that we never looked into family-friendly options because nobody ever asked us to -until this show. Parents should not have to ask, but sometimes institutions need a reminder, and we are proud to offer a humble example that change, incremental as it may be, is possible.

VI.
CLOSING WORDS
Amber Berson and Juliana Driever

We are incredibly grateful to the m/other voices foundation and Deirdre Donoghue for hosting this series of interviews over the past three months. We would also like to thank all of the artists who participated in The Let Down Reflex at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and particularly all of the artists who signed on to extend the conversation with us through these interviews. A big thanks to Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik, EFA Project Space staff, who were major supporters of this project. There were so many people who were generous with connecting us to resources and information. In particular, we would like to thank Christa Donner, Andrew Simonet, Cevan Castle, Tim Devin, and Leah Sandals, who have been creating and sharing deep wells of knowledge and information for artist-parents.

June 2016/The Let Down Reflex:Part II

In our June column we are pleased to continue with the curatorial team behind 'The Let Down Reflex' Amber Berson from Montreal and Juliana Driever from New York.  Over the three month period of May, June and July, Berson and Driever bring us a monthly column on parenting in the arts, with contributions by artists: Dillon de Give, Home Affairs (Arzu Ozkal, Claudia Costa Pederson, and Nanette Yannuzzi), Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), Lise Haller Baggesen, LoVid, and Shane Aslan Selzer, with an additional text from EFA Project space administrators Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik. In this month's column we feature  Home Affairs (Arzu Ozkal and Nanette Yannuzzi), Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley) and Shane Aslan Selzer. These contributions take shape in a series of interviews on revisionist approaches to accommodations and policies on the participation of families and parents in the arts and culture.

Home Affairs, And Everything Else, 2016, (installation view) Image courtesy of the EFA Project Space

Amber Berson is a writer, curator, and PhD student who conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on the subject of artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated The Let Down Reflex (2016); TrailMix (2014); *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (2013); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013); and The Wild Bush Residency (2012–14). She is a member of the Montréal-based Critical Administrative Practices Reading Group; sits on the editorial committee of .dpi, a feminist journal of digital art and culture; and is the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. Her writing has been published in Breach Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Esse, Fuse Magazine and the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies. She is a mother to a toddler named Paloma.

Juliana Driever is a curator and writer. Her work strives to create equity for art and ideas that exist beyond a perceived mainstream. She is primarily concerned with public space, site-specificity, and participation, and has worked on a variety of related exhibition, programming, editorial, and writing projects. Recent curatorial work includes The Let Down Reflex (2016, with Amber Berson, EFA Project Space, New York, NY), Socially Acceptable (2015, Residency Unlimited/InCube Arts), Art in Odd Places 2014: FREE (with Dylan Gauthier, New York, NY), and About, With & For (2013, Boston Center for the Arts). Her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs, and has been featured online with A Blade of Grass Foundation and Bad at Sports, and in the print volume Service Media: Is it ‘Public Art’ or Art in Public Space? She is a mother to a seven year-old named Jackson.

To read the editorial written by Berson and Driever please see here.

The Let Down Reflex - PART II
By Amber Berson and Juliana Driever

III.
HOME AFFAIRS
(Arzu Ozkal and Nanette Yannuzzi)

Home Affairs, And Everything Else, 2016, Image courtesy of the EFA Project Space.

Do you find that the experience of being a parent in the art world affects mothers differently than fathers, or primary caregivers more than non-primary caregivers?
Arzu Ozkal: Absolutely, it affects women more than men, in the art world, in academia, everywhere. When I took my teaching position, during the new faculty orientation, a male faculty said, pointing the female faculty in the room “whatever you do don’t get pregnant till you get your tenure!” Male faculty can have children anytime because “obviously” they have a “wife” to take care of the children. We are still dealing with these social and cultural norms imposed on our society. Glad to see more and more are questioning traditions and patriarchal value systems.

Tell us about an extremely positive art world experience since becoming a parent. What types of things have helped you?
Arzu: Very recently, I was invited to talk about a piece of mine at a gallery in San Diego. The event was scheduled in the evening so I had to bring my 4-year-old son with me. There was another artist with his 3-year-old daughter. Obviously our kids were having a good time, and interrupting the conversation a little bit, which was making me nervous. The curator (big shout out to Chantel Paul) asked one of the gallery attendants if she could watch the kids for the rest of the event. I am aware that is not in her job description to watch children, but she did an amazing job showing them around, telling them about the works. It was incredibly helpful to know that there is someone in the space who can keep an eye on my son, so I can focus on the conversations. It has to be the responsibility of the art space, and the curator to ask the artists if they need childcare during an event they are a part of, at least offer to pay for childcare that evening.

Did you find that you had to make accommodations within your own practice after the birth of your child? How did you navigate this?
Arzu: It is a struggle to remain active in your local art community. I am mostly a solo-parent, lately. I try to take care of everything while my son is at preschool between 9:00 AM till 5:00 PM. I have to be selective about the openings I attend as I can afford one babysitter a week. I am perfectly fine taking him with me to events, but I don’t like disrupting his bedtime routine, as we all know most events are typically scheduled during this time. Some would ask, you miss openings so what? As an artist attending art events and openings is a big part of your practice. You talk to other artists, organizers, meet with curators, etc. If you miss most of the events, sadly, you fall off the network. I am still trying to navigate this; I cannot say I am succeeding. I invite people to my studio for coffee during the day, so I can at least tell them it is not because I don’t care.  
Nanette Yannuzzi: I should preface my answer by saying my children are 21 and 17 and my answers reflect this perspective, and yes, absolutely, my art practice radically changed after the birth of my children. Myself, and my husband at the time, worked in an academic institution in a rural town of less than 10k people and a forty minutes drive to the closest city. The childcare center in town, now a gleaming success story, was abominable back then and the only other daycare center was more than we could afford and had a waiting list of over a year. Daycare for our family became a time-consuming, revolving door of college students, who were great, but their priorities were, rightly so, elsewhere. 
What we did was something we called the ‘tag-team’. I’d stay at home with the kids while he went to the studio at night; and he’d do the same for me and back and forth we went. The weekends were the only time we were in the same place at the same time with the kids and so instead of going to the studio, we’d spend it together as a family. 
Having a fraction of the time I used to have, my work became more planned and perhaps more goal-oriented. I lost the studio practice I’d developed over the last decade, instead, my studio practice took place on the kitchen table or the living room/bedroom floor amid the bustle of family life. Distractions and stops ‘n starts, became the norm, and the extended time I used to have to contemplate or intensely focus, were rare.

What are some of the unique economic challenges that artists and culture workers face? How do you think these challenges affect those with families?Nanette: Artists and cultural workers in the U.S. face challenges related to a culture that is largely unaware of the importance of art and culture in their everyday lives, and a government that hasn’t embraced their artists since the Work Projects Administration of the 1930s. The needs of the majority of practicing artists, relative to costs related to studio rentals, equipment, and other art making material, aren’t even on their radar. Social programs directed at making the lives of artists who choose to have families, less stressful, are non-existent. Countries such as Ireland and Denmark offer tax-free grants or direct subsidies. Similar support is available in Canada.  Not so in the U.S.
Because of this lack of support, almost every artist has a ‘day job’. If you’re a parent, you have three jobs; your art production, your day job, and your parenting, and that’s a lot of jobs, especially considering how demanding and important the job of parenting truly is.

How do you think cultural organizations can shift their policies and practices to be more hospitable to families?
Nanette: It would go a long way for cultural organization to acknowledge their centuries-long practice of male-centered programming and begin to discuss how to implement shifts in policy that acknowledge women, families, and primary caregivers as the wholly significant contributors to culture they are. It’s like any other kind of change. Think about life before recycling! I remember when no one recycled. Once the awareness took root, we found a way. Now, practically every community and most families experience recycling as the norm. Awareness, comes first, making a commitment to changing the doctrine follows and implementing that change, one-step at a time, is the next. That’s why it’s important for artists to stay on top of these issues. We’re bringing about the awareness. That’s what artists do, “understanding the world and understanding human beings” as Werner Herzog once said.

IV.
LEISURE
(Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley)

Leisure, Conversation with magic forms, 2015, Image courtesy of the EFA Project Space.

What are the accessibility accommodations you would like to see in the art world for parents?
There are not many accommodations for parents and children in or out of the art world. The issue with the art world is that it is not a 9-5 job - it’s also your social world and it’s necessary to go to events in the evenings. Evening daycare can be prohibitive to cultural workers with limited salaries or uneven and unpredictable incomes. If you have a partner and you’re both involved in the art community, either as artists or as cultural workers, there is a trade-off there, and one of you always seems to be missing out. Either you're staying home with children while the other attends openings or, if you actually managed to get to an event with your children, one of you is always dealing with them and not able to engage with the art or peers. It is a cliche perhaps, but priorities do shift during the early years of having small children.  Some of this has to do wit the physical reality - the little ones get up really early no matter what time you go to bed!  But also perhaps in terms of drive, ambition and a general sense of sociability. 
If some openings were on the weekend in the afternoon that would be helpful. Also a little table with crayons or play dough lets parents be able to have conversations with other adults while their kids are occupied - this makes a huge difference and is so simple to do.
The issue of residencies is difficult to resolve, but if some provided childcare, or offered several short residencies rather than ones that are a month or several months, they would be more accessible.  As a collaborative duo - residencies have been an important aspect of our practice.  Allowing us to focus and be connected in a way that allows for a shared intellectual and creative world.  With three children now between us, creating that shared space of ourselves in the last 6 years has been one of greatest challenges.

Tell us about your experience creating a new work for this show, considering the topic was not necessarily within your regular practice.
Since we started working together, our shared practice has been a way to work out and think through questions we were grappling with in our personal and professional lives.  At the beginning that might have meant navigating how we identified ourselves as practitioners, or how we interpreted where we are from both geographically and in terms of our generation.  Increasingly, our relationship to each other (after over ten years of working together!) has also become part of this kind of inquiry. Although we often take a story, image or existing artwork as a starting point, inevitably all of our projects are grounded in this subjective dialogue between the two of us.  
That said, the research elements of our work allow us to keep a kind of critical distance between ourselves and the work we are producing.  In the case of this project, we felt the desire to put ourselves into the frame in a different way, including documentation of the everyday actions we observed our kids doing in the environments we have somehow created for them.  We felt that this experiment was not completely resolved for the exhibition itself, but was very helpful in moving us forward in a new direction that we will surely continue to explore. For us, the exhibition was a moment to open up our dialogue in a different way and to make work relatively quickly within parameters set by the curators. Working with curators in this way is a challenge to our 1 to 1 dialogue, but ultimately makes for interesting new ideas to engage with.

What are some of the unique economic challenges that artists and culture workers face? How do you think these challenges affect those with families?In Canada it’s difficult to make a living as an artist. There is not much of an art market and some of us have less success at getting government grants than others. In the past Leisure would self-fund our projects, but after having children we had to stop that practice. Family budgets have become a bigger and more important part of our lives and we are also now dealing with the consequences of some of the financial risks we took early on to support our creative practices (credit cards!). Relating family with security is a very real concern that cannot be underestimated.  This combined with the very real physical and time commitments of childbearing and rearing have played a role in the decision making of generations of women artists and there are so many aspects of this that we are still figuring out in our generation.
Many art-trained people facing the financial uncertainty of an art career, rely on positions as cultural workers in one way or another. For many this works, it is a way to stay close to the cultural world, and to balance creative work and find some stability. But these positions can further complicate the story, particularly when kids become part of the mix - the pay can be low and the hours can be long, often beyond 9-5, that sometimes it can hardly feel worth it.  The desire to change professions so you can make more money and have more guilt-free time with your children - not to mention time in the studio - becomes very tantalizing.
Before becoming mothers we were both working full-time whereas after children our work situations became more piecemeal. For us this has also been part of the positive side of the family challenge, with time being limited, we have become increasingly focused on where we want to invest our time, what we really want to do and make. We realized we needed to do projects that could pay for themselves, and we had to focus on making that happen. More news on this in the next years!

Did you find that you had to make accommodations within your own practice after the birth of your child? How did you navigate this?
Having children made us rethink our entire practice on many different levels. So this is a complex question to answer. We had been doing a lot of curating as part of our shared practice, and after we each had children we decided to focus on our studio practice. After the arrival of our children, we had so little time to carve out to work together - we wanted that time to be devoted to our own art practice. We also found the desire to make things became much stronger after having kids. And we felt a new confidence in having something to say, something uniquely our own, and this was something we felt we could only do through a visual practice.
Another aspect was that previous to having children we had been doing residencies every two years or so. We did one very short residency when the first of our children was 4 months old, but we realized it was really not feasible otherwise. We couldn’t be away from our very small children for extended periods of time and we couldn’t bring them with us and get any work done. Even if there was room for our partners and children to come, we didn’t have the funds, and potentially our partners couldn’t get the time off. So, residencies are something we had to put on hold for a few years.
But in some ways having children was the best thing that ever happened to our art practice in that it made us realize how important our practice is to us, that it has to be a priority (even though that can be difficult with family obligations), and that we have to really devote ourselves to it and work when we have the opportunity to, there’s no messing about anymore.

V.
SHANE ASLAN SELZER

 Shane Aslan Selzer, Horizonline: Gowanus, 2013-2015, Image courtesy of the Artist

Why do you think the art world is so slow to include artist-parents and families?
I think the phrasing of this question leaves out the keyword for my answer. CHILDREN.
Artists get compared to children all the time. Particularly in the US, we have a tough time being taken seriously as productive contributors in society. Artists are often referred to as being childish, self-centered, and irresponsible. Many of the models practiced in the art world seem predicated in part by the image of the artist as someone who can’t handle business (one who is child-like) and wayward in our ability to prioritize self care. Artists themselves sometimes perpetuate these myths around competency for a host of reasons, all tied back to the valuation of individualism and the lore of genius. We need to start asking what the stakes are that keep artists from visualizing themselves as family members in a range of capacities and capabilities.
As artists we reject society’s dismissal of our work. We do this daily, in the face of many micro-aggressions. We affirm self, –our ideas, our time, our bodies, our engagement with (an)other. But if we place parenthood outside of self care and we place artists outside of these stakes as well then don’t we exclude both from engaging the other?
For a wide range of reasons (both pragmatic and psychological) I find that many American artists make a decision early on in their careers to not have children. For me, this was in part an effort to honestly acknowledge that my decision to be an artist meant that my life would involve much more precarity than other paths would hold. I thought that in order to prioritize my art practice I would need to make sacrifices. They manifested in different ways, always it was about time spent, and resulted in time alone. But, I don’t think we need precarity for inspiration, I think we’ve been backed into a corner where we are tricked into thinking that we have to accept precarity as the price of committing to our own ideas.
I grew up in a family that loved and honored the presence and input of children. My own practice is very much influenced by the work of children and the developmental processes of learning in humans and animals. The physical presence of children feels pretty natural to me, in fact very necessary. Still, I thought that I needed to choose between my art practice and my desire to parent a child because the practice itself took all of my resources, time, worry and inspiration.
I did not plan my pregnancy. I hesitate to write this publicly because I am protective of my family’s privacy, but I also think that too many of us go through this process feeling isolated regardless of the choice we make and its outcomes. Shouldn’t we be able to tell and hear these stories in order to expand the ways we conceptualize parenthood? In graduate school I was fascinated by D.W. Winnicott’s writing on the child-mother relationship, and his ideas about the “good-enough” mother returned to me when I first became a parent. I think many parents wonder if they’ll be “good-enough” but artist-parents have a lot of outside noise telling them the answer is already no, you can’t be enough and if you are, the work will suffer.
What surprised me was how much I depended on my skills as an artist to face my fears about parenthood. I believe that, like so many artists, I am resourceful, hard working and self reliant in many important ways. I see the potential rewards in taking risks and committing to the process. These skills actually prepared me quite well for the challenges of parenting, particularly the parts that require quiet perception, trust in process, and lots of sleepless nights.
What also surprised me was how much my role as a parent has become essential to my practice. I have less time, so much less time, and certainly less money, but I am more focused, better able to parse out what’s essential to the work and what’s a distraction. You could say that parenting is a long game and so is an art practice. While I’m certainly not advocating for every artist to raise children, and I respect and honor the people close to me who decide not to be parents, I do think that the artworld would benefit immensely from considering children and families as a more integrated part of creative practices and how to sustain them. This requires a serious reconsideration of the value of children as artists, viewers and critics within the artworld. It means integrating children into programming rather than always separating them out. It means confronting and possibly embracing the messiness of our own relationships to self and other. I think children can teach us to bridge between internal and external schema by laying new foundations for thinking about the role of care within the artworld.

 

To read The Let Down Reflex: PART I, please see here. 

May 2016/The Let Down Reflex:Part 1

In our May column we are pleased to feature the curatorial team behind 'The Let Down Reflex' Amber Berson from Montreal and Juliana Driever from New York.  During the month's of May, June and July they will bring to us a monthly column on parenting in the arts, with contributions by artists: Dillon de Give, Home Affairs (Arzu Ozkal, Claudia Costa Pederson, and Nanette Yannuzzi), Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), Lise Haller Baggesen, LoVid, and Shane Aslan Selzer, with an additional text from EFA Project space administrators Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik. These columns will take shape in a series of interviews on revisionist approaches to accommodations and policies on the participation of families and parents in the arts and culture.

Amber Berson, Montreal, Canada /  Juliana Driever, New York, USA.

Amber Berson is a writer, curator, and PhD student who conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on the subject of artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated The Let Down Reflex (2016); TrailMix (2014); *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (2013); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013); and The Wild Bush Residency (2012–14). She is a member of the Montréal-based Critical Administrative Practices Reading Group; sits on the editorial committee of .dpi, a feminist journal of digital art and culture; and is the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. Her writing has been published in Breach Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Esse, Fuse Magazine and the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies. She is a mother to a toddler named Paloma.

Juliana Driever is a curator and writer. Her work strives to create equity for art and ideas that exist beyond a perceived mainstream. She is primarily concerned with public space, site-specificity, and participation, and has worked on a variety of related exhibition, programming, editorial, and writing projects. Recent curatorial work includes The Let Down Reflex (2016, with Amber Berson, EFA Project Space, New York, NY), Socially Acceptable (2015, Residency Unlimited/InCube Arts), Art in Odd Places 2014: FREE (with Dylan Gauthier, New York, NY), and About, With & For (2013, Boston Center for the Arts). Her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs, and has been featured online with A Blade of Grass Foundation and Bad at Sports, and in the print volume Service Media: Is it ‘Public Art’ or Art in Public Space? She is a mother to a seven year-old named Jackson.

The Let Down Reflex - PART I
By Amber Berson and Juliana Driever

The Let Down Reflex is a project that began from a place of personal frustration. Weary from concealing our roles as parents in order to not jeopardize our careers, we set out to organize an exhibition that would act as a rallying cry to all parents with an investment in the cultural lives of their families. We were fed up with fighting for better work hours and better conditions at workplaces within the art world. We were exhausted by assumptions that our appetite for professional involvement would - and maybe should - change because of our parental status. And we were tired of feeling alone; alienated from the larger (art) world by our fear of speaking up about these issues.

What we desired was a forum in which we could safely discuss these feelings. As we dug into our research, what we found was a community as hungry for this discussion as we were.

The “let down reflex,” a term referencing the involuntary reflex that causes nursing mothers to produce breast milk, takes on a double meaning in this context, referring here to the reflexive tendency of letting down parents, and particularly mothers, within the flawed structures of the art world. As an exhibition, The Let Down Reflex  put forward a radical presence for families where they are typically absent: excluded from residency programs, low-pay/high demand exhibition opportunities, panel discussions, and the like.

In an attempt to continue and to enlarge the conversation that began with the exhibition, we’ve posted a series of questions to participants in the show. Not everyone who participated chose to answer, but most did - including Dillon de Give, Home Affairs (Arzu Ozkal, Claudia Costa Pederson, and Nanette Yannuzzi), Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), Lise Haller Baggeson, LoVid, and Shane Aslan Selzer, with an additional texts from EFA Project Space administrators Michelle Levy and Meghana Karnik.

The questions and answers that form this special series for m/other voices are also an attempt to speak with you - the reader. The full set of questions are posted below, and we would love to hear your feedback. We truly believe that working together we can make the changes necessary to create a better, more feminist future for (artist) parents.

1. What are the accessibility accommodations you would like to see in the art world for parents.

             a) Do these exist already outside of the art world?

             b) What existed historically that you would like to see brought back?

1. Why do you think the art world is so slow to include artist-parents and families?

2. Tell us about your experience creating a new work for this show, considering the topic was not necessarily within your regular practice.

3. Do you find that the experience of being a parent in the art world affects mothers differently than fathers, or primary caregivers more than non-primary caregivers?

4. Tell us about an extremely positive art world experience since becoming a parent. What types of things have helped you?

5. What is something you would change?

6. What are some of the unique economic challenges that artists and culture workers face? How do you think these challenges affect those with families?

7. Did you find that you had to make accommodations within your own practice after the birth of your child? How did you navigate this?

8. How do you think cultural organizations can shift their policies and practices to be more hospitable to families?

Amber  Berson, Juliana Driever
May 8th, 2016

I.

LISE HALLER BAGGESEN

Lise Haller Baggeson, Mothernism, 2016, Photo courtesy of the EFA Project Space, New York.

What are the accessibility accommodations you would like to see in the art world for parents?
"I think briefly, historically there was a better understanding of children as cultural participants. Not only as cutesy makers, but also as audiences. I am thinking specifically about some shows that happened in Scandinavia, like Palle Nielsen’s “The Model,” in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (1969) and the exhibition “Children are a People” at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebaek, Denmark 1979). Those two exhibitions bookend a period where it was okay to expose kids to (sometimes difficult) art, and vice versa. It is something I remember fondly from when I grew up —although we weren’t a very artsy family, my parents found that tagging your kids along to museums were part of a cultured upbringing. And we would actually come along to the museum to look at art, and not to sit in the kiddie corner and “be creative." I feel like since then we have become more protective, and wary of confronting our kids with actual artwork —and to take the sometimes difficult situations or conversations that may arise. Last summer we went to Venice with whole family and I had a long conversation with my daughter, Eleanor, about feminism, upon seeing the installation “Shrine for Girls” by Patricia Cronin Installed in an off-site chapel in the city. It was tough conversation, because I had to explain to her some of the background to the work, but ultimately a rewarding. This is not a responsibility that can be put solely on the cultural institutions, but something that parents need to invest in themselves — a little like if you want to take your kids out for dinner in some place that is not Chuck E. Cheese’s, they need to learn how to eat with a knife and fork, etc."

Why do you think the art world is so slow to include artist-parents and families?
Because it is easier not to. Because there is not enough money involved, and because the art world likes to think of itself as “avant-garde” and in opposition to family life which is “bourgeois.” In other words, there are a lot of reasons, built on assumptions that are both contradictory and lazy. But, I think as artist/parents it is important to ask ourselves, which “art-world’ we want access to; is it the same old same old, or can we think of alternatives that might nurture us better?

Do you find that the experience of being a parent in the art world affects mothers differently than fathers, or primary caregivers more than non-primary caregivers?
Definitely. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard said about a female artist that “she had a kid and then she started making really shitty work.” I’ve never heard anybody say that about a man. Also, I have never heard of a man who got dumped by his gallery, or otherwise demoted (artistically or academically) because he had kids. Fathers are not expected to be as hormonally challenged by parenthood as mothers are, also they are not expected to be as burdened with care work as women are. I hate to say it, but it’s a little bit like the sole dad hanging out in the playground with his Baby Bjorn —everybody thinks he is totes adorbs! So they are not met with the same double negative expectations as women are when “returning to work," although they may face some of the same economical and (time) managerial challenges.

Tell us about an extremely positive art world experience since becoming a parent. What types of things have helped you?
It was extremely positive to open a show in Amsterdam of drawings I had made in collaboration with my then 4-year old son ("Stories For Boys" 2004), with him standing in the door to the gallery and welcoming everybody with “welcome to my exhibition!” It was also extremely positive to experience the reception my book and installation “Mothernism” and to tour Europe and the U.S. with a project dedicated to “stake out the Mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.” I had written it out of frustration, because I didn’t think the (art) world was ready to breach this topic —but, boy, was it ready! So sometimes you are positively surprised. Next stop is to “put the Mom in Moma!” We’ll see...

II.

DILLON & PEREGRIN DE GIVE

Dillon and Peregrin de Give, By My Own Admission, 2016, Photo by Ramsay de Give.

Tell us about your experience creating a new work for this show, considering the topic was not necessarily within your regular practice.
By My Own Admission was a new work undertaken for The Let Down Reflex. In it, my nightly bedtime routine as a father putting his 2.5 year old son to sleep was staged as a theatrical event. This project allowed me to be present with our son while preparing for the show, as we rehearsed at home. In addition to practicing his part each night, he assisted in making photographs of his security blanket, and documented his own bedroom with a toy camera. I think we both enjoyed a sense of getting this work done, injecting a different type of discipline into our ritual. We did this work together, and that is why he was listed as a collaborator. With the help of my partner I decided when and how to inform him of his participation in the performance. Even with his buy-in the possibility of failure (not achieving sleep, rejection of the situation or public meltdown) was a known quantity. A rehearsal nap in the space a few weeks out was key to establishing the premise, but the final details– that people would be watching us– were revealed only a day or so in advance. The script for our final stage play was based on possible responses to his mood. As it happened, my son actually fell asleep in front of the audience, slept all night, and woke up the next morning asking where they were! It had been necessary to negotiate a contract agreement for sleeping over in the gallery; actually doing it was a kind of adventure. This project became about testing and accepting the good will of an audience, and putting the wonderful/banal duties of a male “stay at home” parent in the spotlight. Producing this routine for public view also served as an explanation of my absence from certain prime time art world events, and a solution for being present.

What are the accessibility accommodations you would like to see in the art world for parents?
Since parents quickly become experts in evaluating whether or not a given situation is appropriate for their child, the art world need only meet them halfway to accommodate. The most important considerations can be undertaken quickly and without cost. In order of importance, my request list would look like this:

1. For art viewers with kids: a smile, nod or other non-patronizing greeting. This is an immediate way of saying “you are welcome here”, a recognition of the human complexity in the shared situation, and a way of cracking the door to a channel of communication if the need should arise.
2. In art spaces: a basic consideration of safety, seen from a child’s eye level (covered electrical sockets, removal of broken glass, fallen thumb tacks etc.) OR a posted announcement that the space has not undertaken any child safety precautions.
3.  A word of explicit invitation in show/lecture/performance announcements can work wonders. “Children are welcome” should be understood to mean organizational openness, not “children’s event”.
4. A slightly increased tolerance to child-produced sounds.

In my opinion more specific, “supportive” measures for artists with kids in an American context- such as dreaming up appropriate child care scenarios- can only progress with a staunch willingness on the part of institutions not be paralyzed into inaction by fear of legal liability.

June issue:  Home Affairs, Leisure, LoVid 

April 2016 / Helen Sargeant, UK

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In the April column we are pleased to feature Helen Sargeant, an interdisciplinary artist and mother of two sons aged 7 and 14. Sargeant works from home collaborating on projects with her family and from her studio in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. In her artistic work she is concerned with disrupting and challenging idealized representations of the maternal and the idea of the 'good mother', her photographs recording the ever shifting, transitory moments that she shares with her family. This year Sargeant completed M(other) Stories, a year long journal (2015-2016), comprising of autobiographical writing, juxtaposed with photographs taken at home and during the school runs by using her smart phone camera. Over the course of a year, she published 332 posts documenting the work and challenges required of a woman balancing her roles and responsibilities as mother and artist. M(other) Stories was presented at The Motherhood & Creative Practices Conference, London South Bank University,  2015. Sargeants's work was exhibited at the Project AfterBirth (White Moose Gallery, UK) and she was one of the collaborators on The Egg The Womb The Head & The Moon -project and accompanying exhibition. Most recently her work was shown at the Artist as Mother as Artist exhibition (Lace Market Gallery, Nottingham, 2016.) Her column forms a part of a new and ongoing investigation going back in time to when she became a mother and was dealing with post-natal depression.

THE MISERABLE MOTHER
Part One: A Silent Earthquake

"A mother needs to know herself, to own up to the diverse, contradictory, often overwhelming feelings evoked by motherhood. It doesn't matter whether she stays at home, goes out to work, is partnered or single. Only a mother who can face her own inner turbulence can make sense of her child's. It's only by accepting that at times you are a bad mother, that you can ever be a good mother." [1]

I am running against the tide of people. Playing out on the millennium, the embankment, South London, the year 2000. All is hopeful. Me and my friend avoid the crush by scaling a metal fence, then we just smile and watch the revellers pass.

Naoise is at home unwell. The interruption of illness has lasted for two weeks. I work in-between the nursing. Trapped by the walls of the house, I stare at the screen and interact with friends via social media to remain sane. Endless TV cuddles, rainbows, bubbles popping, talking shallots, bowls of porridge. Suffocating love and care and attention. Wishing you well. Holding in the frustration as you clamp your mouth shut and for extra protection place your hand over your face to refuse the antibiotic syringe. The yellow school bus passes, cars whoosh, carrying people to work. We are stuck. Stuck in home space.

Peeing, balancing on the edge of a bath. A blue line creeping across a circular window of plastic. A sharp straight positive line. Unexpected... Unplanned. I drag in yellow smoke. I am alone. Am I alone? You are multiplying. I am not one. I am one and another. You are not Un. You are my compass, my north, my south, my east, my west. I feel sick.

“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-to think ; well, not even to think. To be silent, to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something visible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright , it was thus that she felt herself, and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strongest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless….Beneath it all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless” [2] 

Feet on the stairs, no more peaceful, alone. I pour chocolate stars in a bowl and Naoise eats them all up. I think he is better. He talks to me from the sofa, I try to write. He is watching horseshoe crabs reproducing. “They have survived for over.….billion years.”

The top floor flat Tuffnell Park, drinking lucazade. Blood tests for sugar levels from the comfort of my sofa. Notes. More notes. Temporary housing. Temporary care. I will never meet the same midwife, always strangers going through the motions. So many babies being born in this city. Me and my bump, just another number.

Bus rides to and from the pussy cat hospital. Hazy crazy scans of your little body emerging from within. Belly growing, waste disappearing. I feel you move. Fleeting. Once you were a fiction, now you move, you are real. Getting stronger, emerging from the dark.

Filling in application forms, to make my situation secure trying to be responsible. I can no longer squeeze into my boyfriends jeans. Mum buys me one set of pregnancy clothes. All black, and loose to disguise my bump at the job interview. All black, as if marching to my own funeral. 

Move to Kings Cross.

Precariously pregnant, front heavy, standing on a chair scrubbing off grease from the surface of kitchen cupboards with vengeance. White washing walls, licking clean the loo, staring blank out of windows. 

Making up a tiny bed, smiling with satisfaction, pinning red labels onto the wall above our bed, mummy above my place daddy above his. 

Packing a weekend bag with tiny clothes, maternity pads and nappies. I forget the energy bars and anything else important.

Watching wheetabix become heavy pillows of milk. Eating bowl after bowl after bowl.. 

Soaking in the bath, plug of mucous dislodged.

Crawling on hands and knees, breathing and breathing. You counting time with an anxious face and pleading me to go to the hospital "NOW!"

Leaving the flat, navigating the open corridor and cold stairwell, each step difficult, clinging onto your arm and my other hand pressed against the grey of the wall. You help me into the back of the taxi, I slump onto the seat, the car navigates the thick of the traffic, I grimace through the pain and nod when asked if I am alright.

  “In her face was the same change from earthly to unearthly that appears in the faces of the dead; but there it is a farewell, here it was a meeting.”[3]

I am pushing, pushing the pram. All is slow, slow, slow. The pram holds me up. Your body is light, the wind sweeps the wheels along and the pram becomes boat adrift at sea. My head hurts with sleep deprivation, my breasts ooze milk. I bleed. One visit from the health visitor. She asks if I am a single mother. I feel like one. Alone. Alone behind the metal door. Me and you, hours alone. 

I fill the day listening to music from the sofa, as you suck on my breasts. Left, right, left, right.  Sleep, wake, nurse, clean, cook, cuddle, dress, change nappies, apply cream, wash clothes, wash baby. Hugging you. Holding you whilst picking up dirty clothes with my feet. Back aches. Finding space to wash me. Loosing me. Loosing I. Becoming ‘We’. 

Slush. Slush puppy time. Days slipping. Awake around the clock.

Carrying you snug against my chest along the Caledonian Road, past The Bun in the Oven Bakery, and young mums with their children sucking up strawberry milk shakes in the Dallas Burger Bar. Walking over blobs of chewing gum stuck hard as cement against pavement grid. The black skeleton of a burnt out car.

Buying a bucket to clean the floor and a large cushion to help prop me up on the sofa and in bed, so I can feed you in comfort. There is a silent earthquake as the plates on your soft head meet.

I arrange neat rows of miniature washing along the edge of the radiator to dry. A motorbike revs its engine and zooms up onto the grass verge in front of the block of flats. I sip strong coffee, then boil the kettle again.

I hang out in empty tarmac playgrounds covered in broken glass, at libraries and playgroups and parks. I push you around supermarkets, and attach plastic bags of shopping onto pram handles, too much weight and the pram will fall back causing you to slip out or bang your head. Everything in balance but I wobble.

At the Salvation Army charity shop I buy an elastic labyrinth wooden ball of fun and a pair of happy yellow daisy patterned curtains. Building a home with brown carpet tiles that form a higgle piggle mosaic across the hard concrete. You lie on your back and your big eyes look up at the movement made by fat stuffed bumblebee, ball, bell and hanging mirror above your head.

Pushing the pram along the Regents Canal to the little wildlife garden behind Kings Cross Station, idly sitting on a bench, pointing out to you, my baby, the blue flash of the dragon flies wing. A quiet conversation with eyes and gestures and coos and oohs and ahhhhhhhs and ‘look over there's’. Horrified seeing dinner plate sized terrapins snatch baby ducks for lunch from the murky brown waters. The trains rattle in and out of the station. Grey bogies form in our nostrils.

At baby massage, slippery with olive oil against gym mat, you roll and turn over. I manage a brief conversation with the other mother whose son is doing the same, she has two older children, he is her youngest, she has a kind, knowing smile.

At home I watch the twin towers collapsing on TV... What is happening? 

I am collapsing into We.

Now that you can sit up straight with back bone strong as steel, I pack lunches and we have little picnics on the rainbow rug under the cherry blossom tree in the gardens at Thornhill Square and in the early afternoon we go to the library for story time.

I stare into the middle distance and then stare some more. I smile and smile at your beautiful face, but I am terribly sad.

“My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence, the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings towards these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance. Their voices wear away at my nerves, their constant needs, for simplicity and patience, fill me with despair too at my own fate, which is to serve a function for which I am not fitted. And I am weak, sometimes from held in rage. There are times when I feel that only death will free us from one another, when I envy the barren woman who has the luxury of her regrets but lives the life of privacy and freedom.. And yet at other times I am melted by their helplessness, charming and yet irresistible beauty- their ability to go on loving and trusting- their staunchness and decency and unselfconsciousness. I love them. But its the enormity and inevitability of this love that the sufferings lie” [4]

*The above text is taken from my new and ongoing investigation going back in time to when I became a mother and was dealing with post-natal depression.
                                                                                                                                -Helen Sargeant
                                                                                                                                                                                                      

[1]   Rozika Parker, Deep maternal alienation, Article by Melissa Benn, The     Guardian, 28/10/2006

[2]    Virigina Woolf , To the Lighthouse: The Window, Chapter 11 

[3]  Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910 (1828-1910) Pevear, Richard, 1943- (1943-) (trans.) Volokhonsky, Larissa (fl. 1990-) (trans.) Bayley, John, 1925- (1925-) (introd.) Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: With a preface by John Bayley (Penguin Classics), London , Penguin 2003: Page 717, Chapter 16

[4]   Rich Adrienne, Of Woman Born, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1976, Anger & Tenderness: Entry from my journal November 1960.