“I Give Myself to You”: Tala Madani’s Mechanical Daughters and Imperfect Mothers
Published on elephant.art.
“I have a problem with interviews,” Tala Madani confesses as we begin this interview. “I have such a mirroring habit. It’s my immigrant self.” Born in Tehran, Madani and her mother moved to the United States when the artist was fourteen. This mirroring impulse—the assimilative imitation, the strategic precision unwittingly slipped into—is one that belongs both to the immigrant and to the daughter, learned for both continued survival and reliable love. But Madani’s muse since the birth of her eldest child six years ago defies such limitations. Shit Mom—aptly, a mother painted with brown oil to look like she is made of faeces—slides between forms and spreads herself out with the clumsiness of sleep deprivation and morning school runs, attempting to clean herself up without much success.
The latest iteration of this character is presented at Pilar Corrias in Daughter B.W.A.S.M. (Born Without A Shit Mom), an exhibition of new works brought about by the artist’s encounter of Francis Picabia’s Fille née sans mère. Rendered over a technical illustration of a steam engine, the painting was influenced by the interest for mechanisation the artist observed in American culture—an enthusiasm not dissimilar to the one resurfacing with the current rise of artificial intelligence. Madani has a similar interest in machines as stand-ins for post-human bodies beyond failure (an expectation for machines to amend and eradicate our past errors, not dissimilar to that projected onto a child by a parent). These artificial beings are increasingly assuming a quotidian role—a quarter of teenagers are turning to chatbots for mental health support as demand remains unmet by conventional services—yet remain unregulated and unreliable. How can we navigate these dynamics, and embrace and imbue these machines a certain humanness needed to survive their inevitable acceptance?
Throughout Daughter B.W.A.S.M., Madani depicts Shit Mom, who in her very essence is diametrically opposed to such idealised forms and algorithmic functions, pulling herself across the canvas to embrace these robots. While the mechanical bodies are moderated and ordered, silk-screened to perfection, that of Shit Mom defies definition. Her mess contaminates the paintings and her surrogate daughters’ sculpted metallic frames with brown splatters. Unlike them, she has no finite incarnation, no ultimate, ideal form; she remains ever unframeable and unfinished, outgrowing herself and transgressing her own limits in ways that are grotesque, excessive, absurd, and very much hilarious.
Within a situation this precarious and obscure, such comedic contaminations and disruptions—glitches—of these mechanical daughters’ perfection and sanitation “may not be errors at all, but rather a much-needed erratum,” as Legacy Russell writes in Glitch Feminism. Within a world that conditions us “to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics,” Russell continues, the glitch “is a correction to the machine, and, in turn, a positive departure.”
I spoke with Madani about maternal love, the paradox of self-oppression, the artist’s use of the grotesque logic, the current state of painting in Los Angeles, and more.
How did you first encounter Picabia’s Fille née sans mère? What drew you to it?
I was reading about Picabia’s work—he has this wonderful four-volume catalogue raisonné. The way he used photography makes him feel really contemporary to our way of looking at painting. It’s interesting to look at people who were really trained in academic painting, so you can’t tell as easily when they use photography. I’m talking about turn-of-the-century painters—people who we don’t associate with photography—but they would have used a postcard to paint a landscape, like Picasso. We don’t think he used a photograph or a postcard to paint. We always see them in situ, as if they’re doing it from life.
I was interested in Picabia as a link. He was a Dadaist, so he was a link between our sentiment in painting and material. Dada is a thing, too—the absurdity, the humour. Reading him without any thought, I found the titles of his mechanical drawings so amazing and provocative—Brilliant Vagina, The Bride, Daughter Born Without a Mother. I was drawn to that last one in particular, which is a drawing of a machine. I just thought it was good as a joke about Christ—the son born without a father—but then I remembered that I have a mother in the painting world. The idea came conceptually much faster than it did visually. I wasn’t interested in just pulling from art history and making it a little joke for myself. I sat with it, and I thought, Well, what else is there? There are all these daughters born with mothers right now—the bots. I can give Shit Mom to these motherless daughters.
How do you understand the mother-daughter relationship? I was with my own mother last night, so today I’m finding myself reflecting on that dynamic. How, if at all, do you bring that into your paintings?
This tension between daughters and mothers, fathers and sons, is somewhat culturally specific. I don’t know if these are in the paintings at all. I was just teasing it. The reason I was painting a daughter is because of the title, to be frank; had Picabia titled the painting Son Born Without a Mother, I would have had the same adoptive tendencies. Shit Mom will be there to spread her goo on all motherless children. But I do think something is interesting about why that tension requires navigating even exists. And I think—outside the paintings, I’m talking socially here—it’s how we project ourselves onto that same-sex child that creates a lot more tension.
The only thing that I can say about the fact that they are daughters and mothers is that bots are not young children—they are adult children, because that is how we experience bots. They don’t really make child-form bots, thank God. To imagine two adult women of whom one needs to be mothered became an everyday challenge of what mothering signs are. What are mothering cues where touch then is not sexual? If the child is an infant, we read maternity into that touch, so it became interesting to navigate the proximity of these two figures. The umbilical cord then became a sign. I also love the idea of contamination, not in terms of the negative connotation, but this I give myself to you.
I don’t think she can. That’s the robotic thing: they don’t leak. That may be what is quite scary to people about the way that technology is affecting us, because it’s affecting us in a very internal way when it shouldn’t be able to at all.
This is an interesting cause-and-effect question: have we made the void with our lifestyle that now these technologies can sit in that void so surprisingly and comfortably, or is it making us more like that? I mean, we know it is—not necessarily the bots, but technology has made us more isolated and disconnected. There are people who are content having a relationship with what they know is not real. Donald Winnicott defines creativity and the importance of play. When you’re unhappy as a child—maybe you’re missing your mother, or you’re on time-out—you change your reality to one that you can stand. And if children don’t know how to play, to make believe, they’ll have very sad lives. You could suggest that the fact that people are able to make believe that these bots are there for them is an extension of adult play in order to survive an unbearable dynamic of loneliness. Do you hear the choir behind me?
A choir of birds?
No, of children!
I wish I did. You’re doing figurative painting, but the ability of Shit Mom to detach elements of herself expands the work beyond the figurative—there are these elements of her that fall off and stain and mark her surroundings. She can be absent from the painting, but traces of her remain in it. While I was walking around the exhibition, a scene came to mind from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel—an image of the birth of the giant Gargantua.
I remember this book! Nathaniel, my husband, showed it to me like fifteen years ago while he was reading it for a video he was making, Giantbum. His work, which is much more to do with language, brought me closer to being able to see shit as a usable metaphor, as a usable object, as a productive element to think about. There are a lot of these medieval drawings where the head is broken and the idea, the ideal, emerges from it. I thought about this with the painting D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth). The baby comes out of the head—a Shit Baby.
Yeah, that’s the painting that reminded me of the scene. It was where, following her over-indulgence during dinner, the pregnant Gargamelle began to groan. All the midwives came rushing to her, feeling for the baby and finding loose shreds of skin. But this flesh was not the expected child—it was her right intestine falling out from consuming too much food. The baby Gargantua instead crawls up inside of Gargamelle’s body—entering her vein, ascending through her chest to her shoulders—and is born through her left ear. He demolishes her.
The exaggeration and overindulgence and messiness is very interesting—she ate too much, so it’s almost her fault that the baby’s done this. But I didn’t want to posit the robot thing in very human mythologies because it’s not as messy; I don’t think it merits proximity to Adam and Eve, or Gargantua and Pantagruel. It doesn’t deserve it, because it’s just a sucking in thing, right? Another amazing image is Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The book is entirely different from the movie, visually. In the book, there is this red, Jello-like entity that engulfs all information in this way, though it’s not robotic. AI is never a symbiotic relationship; it takes and gives in a way that is not residual. It doesn’t have that sense of touch or affect.
Technology has put painting in crisis—or our need for perfection that drove us to make the bot is also driving us to a certain kind of image-making that is very dead. Not so much in London, but it’s all over L.A. Maybe it’s the Hollywood pressure—it’s very much about melodrama and a kind of cinematic realism. We need to think about form as we want to experience it. Do we want a stiff, controlled form, or do we want action, freedom, chance? There was that meta side-experience while making the paintings. There seems to be this attraction right now to representational form, or precision in painting. Shit Mom is a sort of saviour in this sense—she leaves parts of herself behind and is totally imperfect.
Humour and absurdity are massive elements that are both in this grotesque logic and in your work. The way that Rabelais worked was in response to the ideals of the official religious culture of the Middle Ages and its restrictive attitude towards the human form.
That’s exactly right—this repeated use of the grotesque as a reaction to our need to seek perfection and mastery, as opposed to recognising it as how we oppress ourselves and acknowledging that that standard is an oppressive force. Mastering it doesn’t make us a master of it; it makes us a really good slave to it. It’s about the way you’re allowing your brain to become conditioned to what you need to do.
I’m curious about why you render these modern, sterile domestic spaces. The rooms you paint are so clean, and then Shit Mom comes in and disrupts them, smearing herself across the space.
I made these paintings where children mould Shit Mom and turn her into a makeshift shit ladder that they use to climb to the top of the painting. I like this idea of the bottom of the painting or the top of the painting. But I’m usually disinterested in space—the paintings are just conceptual ideas that take place on the canvas, and they’re not located somewhere specific. Maybe I put a horizontal line that suggests space, like a floor of some kind.
Because I was so much with Picabia, I ended up being with Duchamp at the same time. They’re so interrelated; Duchamp was such a supporter of Picabia, and brought his work to America. I was thinking about Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and Muybridge as the photographer who gave so many artists their deck of photographs to choose from. I kept coming back to how it might have been happenstance—if Duchamp had instead depicted a figure ascending the staircase, perhaps the artists who followed him would have inherited that gesture and instead rendered a figure leaving them, going up. This dissension might have just been an accident. I’m interested in how photographs solidify these happenstances and accidents, and make them into matters of fact. I thought, then, I’m going to flip it—all my figures will ascend, ascend, ascend.
I wasn’t going to be specific about what set of stairs to work with. I just Googled “staircases” and used everything that was usable online. The animation came first; I printed the photographs and painted the figure going up onto them, but I liked the images enough that I wanted to make some paintings of them. I loved shitting all over that form. I also enjoyed painting from one corner of the canvas to the other, as if Shit Mom is also climbing the painting itself. I thought the staircase could be a nice space for Shit Mom to push herself on, or break upon—she doesn’t always make it up the stairs. Pieces of her do.
I love the splats and squelches.
I’m also fascinated with these sounds that Shit Mom makes. The sound is that of her substance. It’s not a voice, which is something I tried, but it didn’t feel right at all.
They’re sounds that your brain would make for the video regardless. And, I mean, Shit Mom doesn’t need a mouth—she can decide to open and close her body however she wants. How does this video work alongside Muybridge’s animations?
I wanted him to teach Shit Mom how to walk. I wanted to fit with the fact that Muybridge—being a stand-in for photography—has really defined figurative representation in painting, especially the female form, and meditate on how we’re connected to that. You know what they say: if you name it, you can move on from it. I wanted to think about being stuck in being defined through images.
Your use of these videos feels conceptually tied to this series of paintings. I keep thinking of the women in Muybridge’s films as daughters without mothers—early technological beings who persist without an origin. Muybridge kind of becomes their parent. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about the empathy we project onto machines and how these so-called AI daughters aren’t daughters at all, but costumes for companies. I wanted to ask you about ideas of maternal care towards machines, but that also feels so untruthful.
Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” who recently won the Nobel Prize, was asked about whether he thinks there’s an existential danger with AI. He said he thinks there is, the way we’re going about it, and that the only method of stopping it is teaching AI maternal love. That’s supposedly the only instance where humans are truly selfless, because to hormones, at least for the first six months of motherhood. But yes, I don’t think we need to give them care—we need to give ourselves care.