“Milking the Artist” (2022) involved Oona producing breast milk while talking about the fetishization of female bodies, then auctioning glasses of milk to the audience for up to $200,000. Paleolithic painters mixed pigment with their own spit.īecause of its associations with the maternal body, it is unsurprising that human milk - as both subject matter and medium - still represents something of a taboo in contemporary art, so much so that artists Oona and Lori Baldwin were removed from the Scope Gallery’s Art Basel exhibition due to claims that their performance was too controversial.
#My very own lith breast feeding series#
1992–1994), Antony Gormley’s use of his blood and semen in his Bodily Fluids series (1986–1992), and Portia Munson’s “ Menstrual Print With Text” (1993). Other bodily fluids, typically blood or urine, have been used by artists since at least the 1960s, such as Richard Hambleton’s Bloodscapes series (c. Eva Zasloff, “Reflections of light on breastmilk particles” (2018), images taken by microscope of light reflections on breastmilk particles at 750x magnification
Though idealized for centuries in Madonna and Child imagery, the corporeal, emotional, and practical realities of feeding a baby remain less often explored. Or gushing breasts as a manifestation of nature, as in the 16th-century Fountain of Neptune in Bologna. Throughout art history, we can find depictions of divine or mythological milk, like the aforementioned painting “ Origin of the Milky Way” (1575). This can leave parents facing numerous challenges, including balancing the demands of breastfeeding with paid employment or being asked to leave when nursing in a public place. Generally presented to new mothers as the best thing they can do for a baby’s development, parents often lack practical support, which would allow them to establish and sustain breastfeeding. Today, breastfeeding itself is also an emotional and sometimes divisive topic.
The potential for milk to transmit physical or moral characteristics is evidenced in the strict advice on finding suitable wet nurses that can be found throughout history from disparate continents the world over. As such, it was viewed with suspicion, as a possible contagion. For much of Greek and Roman antiquity, milk was thought to be menstrual blood transformed by the heat of childbirth, transported from the uterus via a special vein.
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