It is my duty to let you all know that there is a woman named Marni Kotak who, at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery, plans to give birth as a performance art piece called “The Birth of Baby X.”
I’ll give you this paragraph to digest that information.
But really, an exhibition of this nature shouldn’t shock us too much. The defiantly gynocentric brand of performance art has been on the scene for decades, ever since Carolee Schneemann performed “Interior Scroll” in 1975 (can you guess where the scroll was?).
And I think it’s great that this art exists and is so widely and respectfully recognized. Hurrah for feminism, I am woman, Eve Ensler, etcetera etcetera. “The Birth of Baby X” will certainly fall in line with this doctrine.
But the concept behind the piece also contains residual traces of historical antifeminism, like when in 1778, Marie-Antoinette had to give birth to her first child in front of tons of courtiers. She fainted from a) embarrassment and b) the fact that she was shoving a baby out of her body.
So any attempt to analyze a piece of art like “The Birth of Baby X” is doomed to be fruitless. The only way to look at is for what it is: a weird, kind of narcissistic stunt. And I’m glad it’s happening. The world needs incidents like this to keep it interesting.
And that baby’s going to have more friends the second it’s born than I’ll have in my entire life.
Katherine Proctor is the assistant Arts editor for The Daily Tar Heel. She enjoys mid-Western accents and bears no relation to any witch-hunting puritans from “The Crucible.” Each Tuesday, she will highlight national Arts content for Canvas.
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