filthy pot shots from a bad mum and her AI offspring
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| Childish and confrontational … Tala Madani’s DWASM (Teddy). Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen Studio/Tala Madani; courtesy the artist,The Guardian and Pilar Corrias, London. |
What’s the opposite of perfect? Well, shit, according to Tala Madani. For years now the Iranian-born US artist has been painting Shit Mom, a fetid smear of a human figure intended as a subversion of feminine, maternal ideals. And in the painter’s latest show, Shit Mom has a new child in her care: she has adopted an AI daughter.
The rub is immediately obvious: the AI robot represents perfection; Shit Mom its impossibility. As they interact across the canvases, the gleaming mechanical perfection of the daughter – born motherless, hence the show’s title “Daughter BWASM”, or Born Without a Shit Mom – gets streaked with smudges of filthy brown. The more the mum cares for her daughter, the more she taints her. The robot can’t avoid getting moulded in her mother’s image.
The show is one of the first instances of AI being used as both tool and subject in a big London gallery. Madani treats AI like a component of modern society that has to be dealt with, accepted and adapted, rather than just some fancy new toy to gawp at and play with.
And they are unique looking paintings: ultra-precise screen prints of AI-generated robots overpainted with loose, brown marks. They’re both glittery and shiny, and dull and gross. In one, two neat pink and orange bots seem to be pregnant with big, gloopy, brown bumps. In another, Shit Mom kneels before her enormous mechanoid child, trying desperately to clean her but only succeeding in tarring her in turd. The whole thing looks like screenshots from I, Robot or Ex Machina, caked in skid marks.
Which is Madani’s whole shtick. She makes big, clever points in the most intentionally childish, confrontational way. I don’t think these are intended to be beautiful, decorative images. They’re funny, satirical takedowns of societal norms.
Where Shit Mom has previously been used to talk about anxieties around motherhood, the character here is dealing instead with technological fears and wider sexism. Why do we call machines “she”? Why are all the robots in cinema hot babes? Madani traces much of it back to early modernists such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. A 1916 painting of a mechanical wheel by Picabia, titled Daughter Born Without a Mother, gets riffed on here (and covered with shit, obviously), while nods to Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase reoccur throughout the show. Culture and history have always treated women like machines, mechanical automatons for childbirth and care, and Madani has had enough.
Two animated films here play on similar themes. In one, Madani inserts Shit Mom into experimental vignettes of nude women walking by Eadweard Muybridge, smearing all the objectified perfection of this early cinematic experimentation. In the other, she makes Shit Mom ascend endless staircases. But I don’t find the films all that interesting – the AI theme is stretched a little thin across the whole show.
But with every work here, the artist is rejecting, mocking and spurning norms and expectations. It is scatological humour as rebellion, faeces as fuck you. It’s funny, clever, aggressive, subversive, satirical art. Not shit at all, really.
Full article here
Via The Guardian
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