Milkyways E-Book

Camille Henrot

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 95

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history, psychoanalysis, and more—from ancient maternity myths to modern maternity wards; from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous. Alongside illustrations of the artist's work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, Henrot's perspectives in writing oscillate freely between the personal and the societal, the obvious and the more complex, the visceral and the utterly mundane. Milkyways was originally conceived for Republik magazine on invitation by Antje Stahl. Written with Jacob Bromberg, Antje Stahl, and Léa Trudel. CAMILLE HENROT (*1978, Paris) is one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today, with a practice encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by references from literature, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology and the banality of everyday life, she questions what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world. Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide in venues including Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; New Museum, New York; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. She lives and works in New York City.

Leseprobe

Milkyways

Milkyways

Camille Henrot

Colophon

Author

Camille Henrot

in collaboration with

Jacob Bromberg, Antje Stahl, and Léa Trudel

Project management

Fabian Reichel

Copyediting

Kimberly Bradley

Graphic design

Neil Holt

Archivist and Image coordinator

Léa Trudel

Typeface

Arnhem

Production

Thomas Lemaître

Reproductions

DLG Graphic, Paris

Printing

Livonia Print, Riga

Paper

Munken Print White Vol. 1.5, 90 g/m2

© 2023 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, and authors

© 2023 for the reproduced works by Camille Henrot: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, and the artist

Published by

Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

Mommsenstraße 27

10629 Berlin

www.hatjecantz.com

A Ganske Publishing Group Company

isbn 978-3-7757-5534-4 (Print)

isbn 978-3-7757-5535-1 (ePub)

isbn 978-3-7757-5536-8 (ePDF)

Printed in Latvia

Cover illustration:

Camille Henrot, where does the words come from?, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

With special thanks to Mennour and Hauser & Wirth galleries for their generous support

Contents

Foreword by Camille Henrot

Introduction by Antje Stahl

(Pro)creation and its Myths

Rabenmutter or The Bird Mother

Echoverse

Please Do Not Touch

Maison Absolue

After School

The Disorder of Things

Pump and Dump

Milk: On Debt

Sexuality

Mother of Tears

The Goss

Mamas / Mammals

Untitled (Soon), 2019

Untitled (Soon), 2019

Untitled (Soon), 2019

Untitled (Soon), 2019

Camille Henrot

Foreword

Drawing by the artist’s son Iddu, 2022

Writing about procreation and motherhood feels like taking a brick out of a wall and watching the whole house collapse as a result. The image of Pandora’s box comes to mind: on the outside, it’s a precious thing, but once you open it, all the dynamics of prejudice, essentialism, relational dynamics, and power are exposed. The beginning of life is truly where all things start, good and bad.

Soaking in the intensity of my experience of motherhood, words became a vital resource. This book does not attempt to draw any sort of conclusion to these conundrums or resolve any conflict; rather it is a collection of sensations and thoughts, limited by my own experience in terms of culture, race, class, gender, age, etc. I also consider the limits of my ability to write in a language other than my mother tongue, as well as the way my mind works, leaning heavily towards monkey mind.1

Since I was a child, I’ve been perplexed by the idea of what it means to be normal. I wanted to change myself and the world around me so that I would be a “normal” child, and later a “normal” mother, but the more I thought about it, the more I accepted that this cannot exist. What we assume is common ground between us can also be the issues that are most divisive and impossible to resolve. There is no global image, there is no ideal mother, there is no good-enough mother: there are only many, many singular forms of care, or lack thereof. Although we are all “Of Woman Born,” to quote Adrienne Rich, child care is still a topic that everyone has a strong opinion about.

The process of writing this book was messy and full of vulnerability, inconsistency, hesitation, and ambivalence, but ultimately I believe that these feelings are ones that I want to work with. It also feels unresolved in the sense that society moves fast. Statements that feel provocative now might feel banal in only a few years, if not sooner. In fact, it is my hope that this collection of essays may one day read like the key to a door that is already open.

I would like to thank Antje Stahl for initiating the column in Republik magazine, in which some of these essays appeared in earlier versions, and for her support in many moments of apprehension; to Jacob Bromberg, my longtime friend and collaborator; Léa Trudel, my studio manager and archivist; and editor Kimberly Bradley for making this particular dance-battle of the mind legible. Reading artists’ voices on this topic has been vital for me in my own experience of childbearing and childrearing. I want to acknowledge most importantly the work of Moyra Davey in compiling The Mother Reader, and the inspiration of artists like Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Alice Neel, and more recently, Talia Chetrit, Loie Hollowell, and Jenna Sutela. I would also like to acknowledge writers bell hooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maggie Nelson, Paul B. Preciado, Adrienne Rich, Jacqueline Rose, Suzanne Suleiman, Hélène Cixous, and my therapist Luis Alvarez. Thank you to Monilola Ilupeju for her thorough sensitivity read of several essays, to graphic designer Neil Holt, and to the publisher Hatje Cantz.

Thank you to my husband and the father of my children, Mauro, for not only taking on his own share of traditional mothering, but also for embracing and welcoming my sense of maternal ambivalence. I would like to thank my children Iddu and Sol for their pure sense of enthusiasm, joy, and lack of inhibition—a recipe for some of my favorite drawings of all time. Thank you to my mother Maud for being such an unconventional parent that the word “mother” never felt too narrow. Thank you to my older sister Mathilde, my second mother, and a well of unending support and intellectual energy.

Another motivation for writing this book is that opening discussions on these topics could serve to inform part of an alternative political approach to how we live and grow together. Mothers do not have to reinforce old systems; they can rather inspire new models of care, resistance, and innovation. My hope is that one day, motherhood will no longer refer to a fixed identity determined by gender, health, and reproductive and economic ability to care, but rather to a way of moving through the world. Mother, newly defined, is someone who stands by, stands close, and certainly, stands against.

1Monkey mind or mind monkey, from the Chinese compound xīnyuán and the Sino-Japanese compound shin’en心猿 [lit. “heart-/mind-monkey”], is a Buddhist term meaning “unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable,” “Monkey Mind,” Wikipedia, last modified on March 23, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind (accessed April 14, 2023).

Antje Stahl

Introduction

Portrait of Camille Henrot, 2018

Ever since I met Camille, she has been permeating her personal experiences with intellectual furor. So it was only a matter of time before she would transmute the Milkyways column into an essayistic volume and the artist book you are now holding in your hands.

In early spring 2021, I asked Camille if she might be interested in writing a column for the Swiss magazine Republik. It was the second year of the pandemic and we both lived in Berlin. Camille had started a residency at Callie’s to facilitate the preparation of several exhibitions in Europe, including Mother Tongue, for which she assembled little dragons that cling to the breasts of bird creatures or facilely devour them in a flash. I suggested that we show a selection of these works on motherhood and contextualize them in short texts.

Ultimately I myself was trying to adjust to the torn life between breastfeeding and desk—my son was not yet a year old when I started working as a writer for Republik. And Camille’s work felt like an aesthetic immersion of the experience that so many of us shared.

I vividly remember when I first saw Camille’s sketches of a nude woman desperately trying to keep breast pumps latched to her nipples. It was in New York, in her studio on the Lower East Side, and her first son Iddu was still a baby. I thought I recognized the curator Jenny Schlenzka in these works, collectively titled Wet Job—I had worked for Jenny at the Museum of Modern Art long before she took over Performance Space New York as its first female director or even sat as a model for Camille. “Why isn’t the genre of Stillleben (still life) transgressed by the subject of motherhood?” I asked, slightly enraged.

Stillen means breastfeeding in German, thus still life easily directs a native speaker’s mind toward a breastfeeding life—and its transformative effects. We wearily sit still while the milk flows out of our bodies, alongside our awakened thoughts: in the presence of a newborn, our own existence is fleeting and all vanities vanish. Wouldn’t everyone agree? A few years later, an online column by Camille seemed to be the right format to express these milky ideas.

So we started selecting images for the column, together with Léa Trudel, Camille’s studio manager and archivist based in New York, and Nadja Angermann from Republik’s photo department. In addition to going through her series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Camille delved into her extensive material collection. She chose and shared underlined passages from novels and essays, notes for lectures, catalogue contributions, and exhibition texts that inspired a more essayistic approach than originally planned. We also met regularly in her studio (or at the playground with our sons) and had conversations that I recorded to catch the ephemeral aspects of mother-minds and our quotidian routines. And the more chapters we faced—each devoted to a different topic—the faster Camille’s cosmos of thought seemed to expand.

It was summer by then, Camille was pregnant with her second child, and my father was dying.

Camille reached out to Jacob Bromberg for support. A poet and frequent collaborator of hers, Jacob entered the collective workflow on the essays, while caring for his three-year-old son in the southwest of France. Milkyways is thus the result of navigating both major life events and the pandemic parenthood balancing act, making for a complicity inside of this exceptional moment in our lives and in the world.

Some of these essays appeared in Republik between April and October 2021. Others were rewritten, and several new ones have been composed by Camille together with Jacob and Léa specifically for this book. Grasping the imagery and reading the essays, I again find myself in the Milkyways orbit. Here, everyday life with children has eliminated the boundaries between body and environment; everything is imbued with a longing for a transcorporeal existence and for conditions that nurture the needs of all of planet Earth’s most vulnerable entities. Hopefully the result will be a flourishing of political thinking in the same spirit.

(Pro)Creation and its Myths

Dos and Don’ts – My Bio, 2021

Death and birth seem the most banal, inescapable, and yet defining moments of each human life. But while death has inspired countless narratives in literature, philosophy, cinema, and the visual arts, representations of birth have largely remained constrained to the realm of gods and myth. There is Venus, for example, who materialized naked and beautiful in a shell on the ocean’s surface; Athena, who sprang from Zeus’s splitting head(ache); Eve, who was formed from Adam’s rib; and, of course, baby Jesus, via the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. All of them came to life by way of male or divine fertility, detached from sexuality and pain, ignorant of the shadows of death—miscarriage, stillbirth, maternal death—and seemingly waterproof or otherwise unaffected by bodily fluids. It’s enough to make one imagine that the emotional and physical reality of procreation and birth were simply not worth thinking about.