What Fatherhood Means to 6 Contemporary Artists
Parenthood has historically been a footnote to the biographies of male artistic masters. Here, six contemporary artists portray the lifelong role of "Dad" and its creative implications.
Conceptual art rarely commands an audience of 200 million. It’s an eye-watering figure that exceeds even Marina Abramović’s world-famous staring contest at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet in 1987, the feminist art duo Polvo de Gallina Negra (“Black Hen Powder”) took over live television in Mexico for a performance about the depredations and empty flattery of motherhood under the patriarchy. The artists in this collective, Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer, made use of their guest appearance on the popular talk show Nuestro Mundo, by expropriating standard armchair pitter-patter to stage a live performance, an act of fathomless chutzpah. Over the hairsprayed coiffure of Guillermo Ochoa, Nuestro Mundo’s tentative host, the artists slipped a flowery yellow apron made tumescent by a styrofoam belly, crowning Ochoa Madre por un día (“Mother for a day”) with a regnal crown of pipe cleaners. Ochoa gamely play-acted being pregnant, while the artists offered him different pills to induce empathy and simulate the travails of gestation. When the studio audience leered and cat-called, the artists advised Ochoa to ignore the lacerating envy of patriarchy’s evil eye. “Mother for a Day” comprised just one intervention within “¡MADRES!,” a durational artwork (to put it mildly) in which the artists investigated motherhood from a first-person vantage—a performance initiated with crucial help: “One day we decided to work on motherhood, and, naturally, the first step was to get pregnant...The project began with the birth of our daughters, achieved with the support and solidarity of our husbands, the artists Victor Lerma and Rubén Valencia, who kindly helped us to get started.”
These contributing husbands are but a footnote in Bustamante and Mayer’s inquiry into motherhood, but the comment actually begs a much larger question: Where’s all the artwork about being a dad? The situation appears hopelessly lopsided. Polvo de Gallina Negra is but one entity in a pantheon of art about motherhood stretching back centuries but finding a new flavor in the 1970s–’80s, when the Venn diagram of second-wave feminism and women’s lib ushered a raft of conceptual work on the erasure and subjugation of maternal labor. Entries in this canon include Mary Kelly, whose scientific journals catalogued her newborn’s effluvia; Lorna Simpson, whose photo-text juxtapositions centering on Black femmes eroded the presumed neutrality of the white, patriarchal status quo; and Mierle Ukeles, whose “Maintenance Manifesto” articulated the janitorial drudgery required to keep everything together, whether “everything” be a split-level ranch in the suburbs or a municipal dump (in either case, it’s all guts and no glory). There is an easy and pat explanation for the absence of dads from this milieu. Those who do not have to advocate for their own humanity— whether that fight entails the right to equal pay or the right to not be murdered by police—have a certain freedom to talk about literally anything else. Complex forces are at work in the casual nonexistence of the domestic in how we think and talk about male artists (especially straight, white, cis ones). And in this vacuum, something is lost.
To be clear, we have masses of artwork about family by artists of all genders, but these portrayals often mine a Freudian quarry to portray the inner angst of the artist. The classic example here would be the bizarro worlds of Mike Kelley, full of musty threats suspended within ratty stuffed animals. And when fatherhood is woven into artists’ biographies, it’s often flattened into mythology. Just think of how Picasso’s gaggle of offspring helped secure his reputation as a lothario. (A more fitting descriptor might be “creep,” given his courtship, at age 45, of the 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter.) In an alternative scenario, we find biographical avoidance altogether. It’s not well known that Matisse’s daughter was tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo during World War II for her role in the French Resistance. For an indelible family trauma, the ordeal receives relatively scant attention. Men like Picasso and Matisse are given the luxury of compartmentalized biography: Their art stands alone, on its own terms. It’s a latitude that all artists deserve but few achieve.
All this is to say, it’s long overdue that we talk to artists about dadhood. Let’s slip a metaphorical yellow apron over the helmet hair of the art world and swallow some empathy pills. (Leather daddies and zaddies have their own pride of place, but for our purposes we’ll restrict this inquiry to the dads of childrearing.) The artists in this portfolio submitted work that reflects their own experience of parenting, and the humanity and tenderness elicited by the Himalayan task of guiding another human being through the world. In reflecting on parenthood, Artur Lescher recalls an Amazonian framework in which having a child demands branching apart one’s soul. So we ask: What does that feel like?
To be clear, the purpose of this exercise is not to reduce art-dads to a single dimension the way we too often do art-moms. Fatherhood may be key to engaging with any given artist’s practice—or, just as well, it might not. In either case, parenthood is ostensibly a central experience of anyone’s life, and artists are in a unique position to reflect on what that means. According to art-dad Rashid Johnson, it is precisely this careful decision-making—as opposed to, say, Pollock-worthy theatrics—that makes an artist an artist. The caveat is necessary because an overweening focus on any artist’s biography risks tripping over the deadfall of “interpretation,” a woeful form of meaning-extraction that Susan Sontag famously called “the revenge of intellect upon the world.” And to the critic’s point, Johnson laments the indoctrination of his nine-year-old into this art-looking regime: “All the teachers are constantly asking my son, ‘What do you think this means?’...That’s the only way that they learn how to interpret or explore an artwork, is through imagining that that artwork has some sort of disguised intention that it’s refusing to share and that you have to somehow dissect.” So let’s set aside an assumption that fatherhood must necessarily transform an artist’s practice—and while we’re at it, let’s extend that courtesy to women and non-binary artists who are rarely afforded the same independence from their own family planning. Sacred artistic invention be damned, we must turn our attention for a moment to the profane.
The rigors of an artistic practice, its daily grind and focus and labor, cleave closer to the anti-glamour of spit-up and dirty diapers than to any fantasy of divine creative exceptionalism.
To wit, I give you kid-art. The most profane of all aesthetic expressions, kid-art is that ubiquitous marker of parenthood. Scrawled on construction paper, smeared in finger paint or crayon, an off-brand Dubuffet taped to every fridge. This writer’s anecdotal observation suggests that kid-art’s lure is inescapable. It is a rare catnip to which resistance is futile, and wouldn’t you know, artist-dads are not immune. Sam Durant compares his own child’s art, which hangs on his studio wall, to Rothko: “beautiful, colorful paintings— landscapes, skycaps, seascapes—very washy and minimal.” Lescher too admits, that vintage kid-art (his two offspring are adults) hangs proudly in his living room “next to some of the paintings I admire most.” Do Ho Suh’s contribution to this portfolio is in fact a collaborative cadavre exquise with his two children, Aami and Omi. In the artist’s words, these quasi-mycological kingdoms of modeling clay depict “Artland: a wild, fantastical ecosystem...a fascinating expression of the chaos of the child’s mind, as well as their curious, and seemingly inherent, interest in world-building.” Lescher beams about his daughter’s preternatural sense of color, and his son’s astute and critical sensibilities. (The sculptural éminence grise of elegant spatial awareness, Lescher reflects on dadhood through a literal acknowledgment of the projection inherent to the exercise. He submits a photograph showing a shadow of two hands holding, a metaphor for the tensile balance between support and freedom that defines child-rearing.) Artists—they’re just like us!
The conspicuous absence of paternalia from art interviews bears a certain irony, because children are central to Western myths of artistic production and creativity. For a century, young humans have been regarded as a kind of raw conduit for inventive behavior, untrammeled by the repressions and sublimations of us blighted adults. Consider the playful fascinations of the interwar avant-garde, or the deskilled aesthetics of Art Brut. How about those exuberant doodles of Cy Twombly, an artist whom Sam Durant admits never made sense until he had a child of his own? Even when childrearing would seem to impress quite literally on an artist’s oeuvre, the topic remains silent. Johnson relays that he is rarely, if ever, asked about fatherhood, despite what he’s called “hijacking the domestic” in his media and installation- based explorations of materiality, legacy, and home. Though he admits, his household has resisted the encroachment of stray legos and other toe-stubbing forms of chaos—his only child, Julius, is “outnumbered” by Johnson and the artist Sheree Hovsepian, Julius’ mother and Johnson’s wife. The question still stands: Why is the image of changing diapers so inimical to our sense of the rugged and visionary artist? (If we’re getting down and dirty, Johnson estimates he’s dispatched hundreds of diapers, while Durant simply leaves the figure at “countless.”)
Compared to Pollock flinging paint in his shed, or one of Hemingway’s bawdy nights in Paris, the idea of an artist bottle-feeding just seems like a bummer.
Conjecture: The reason we don’t talk about fatherhood is because it diminishes our collective assumptions about the supposed genius of artists. One of our stubborn and intractable cultural mores is that artists are wild and free visionaries. Stereotype? Sure. But it’s also an alchemy that transforms oil on canvas into millions of dollars at every Sotheby’s evening sale. Compared to Pollock flinging paint in his shed, or one of Hemingway’s bawdy nights in Paris, the idea of an artist bottle-feeding just seems like a bummer.
What is lost when we ignore the humanity of artist fatherhood? Toxic masculinity notwithstanding, we forgo key insights into what it actually means to be an artist. Durant states, “Yes, the cliche is that artists are wild, irresponsible, and infantile. It turns out that a lot of us are not really like that; we are adults and capable of raising our own children.” Johnson maintains, “I don’t recognize myself as a creative,” and that which differentiates artists is “not so much in the whimsy of the creation, as much as it is in the cognizance around decision-making.” Let’s listen to what feminist artists have been telling us for decades: The rigors of an artistic practice, its daily grind and focus and labor, cleave closer to the anti-glamour of spit-up and dirty diapers than to any fantasy of divine creative exceptionalism.
