If ‘The Great Mother’[1] goes to Palazzo Reale.

‘The Great Mother’,  Palazzo Reale – Milan (August 26th-November 15th, 2015).

 

 

The Great Mother goddess is a hypothetical female and primordial divinity, present in almost all mythologies, through which the Earth manifests itself, and the ability to generate and feed : indeed it seems that the Great Mother specifically concerned the first nomadic populations, who lived by hunting and gathering wild fruit. However in the elegant setting of the rooms of the main floor of the Palazzo Reale in Milan ‘The Great Mother’ offers no nourishment that is no difficult to swallow and digest. “Messages a little too layered…!”, I heard someone comment. The Great Mothers on display are the work of women, contemporary and living artists, even if something comes from Surrealist and Futurist women : but they seem little interested in feeding, perhaps.

In the very long video ‘Grosse fatigue’[2], also winner the Silver Lion at the Venice Festival, gametes are vacantly mentioned, even they are already present in primordial reptiles : man is absent at all. And the children of the exhibition are hungry.

The children of Nathalie Djurberg (1978, Sweden) for example[3]. Nathalie is having success also here in Milan, where it seems that the Art Galleries compete for her. Children in her video ferociously chase the poor woman until they return to their mother’s womb as a clear failure of a nutrition in bad shape. Wouldn’t be easier to realize in time that they were hungry, not only of food but also of thinking and speech ?

I combine that video to Ragnar Kjartansson’s video (Rejkjavik, Iceland) with the hateful repetition of an elegant, robust, elderly woman spitting contemptuously at an indifferent young man in suit and tie, perhaps also contemptuous of her, but already inclined to melancholy hatred : the title, a bit naive, is ‘Me and my Mother’, where the capital letter for ‘Me’ is really disproportionate. Suffer or kill, give up or attack : haven’t we already watched for a little too long this daily pantomime from servility to civil war ? Already more than fifty years ago Carlo Emilio Gadda had abundantly enlightened us about the victim-son who, even coming to know the truth, it would be the greatest achievement because nothing can change. [4]

From ‘The Great Mother’ here it is a flash on Virginia Woolf[5], who offers herself to the photographer in the dress worn by her mother who died a few days ago, a hint of an indefinable smile curves her thin lips : Virginia had been waiting – we are told – for the triumph of that replacement for a long time, and while waiting for which she believed having been prevented from living her own life.

And here it is a small photo of Sigmund Freud with his mother Amalia in 1925[6], while another photo - that Freud himself displayed in the anteroom of his Studio in London - depicts Oedipus who, solving the deadly enigma of the Sphinx[7], becomes king of Thebes and marries the queen Jocasta, thus also freeing the city from the monster of a Great Mother. But, as we say, Oedipus and Jocasta pay dearly for the sudden remorse for their satisfaction : a non-solution is remorse, which does damage right when it is removed.

But it is from young Slovakia, which entered the EU just under twenty years ago, that something interesting and provocative comes from a young artist, and forty-year-old father : Roman Ondak[8] proposes a real and present woman, here teaching her one year old child to walk. It seems that Roman was observing his wife while teaching their little son how to take his first steps, reading the satisfaction of the child who felt accompanied to enter independent adult life. And he was also able to read the satisfaction in his wife to collaborate in the independence of the child : what certainly recalled the artist and the man, since real life is a whole other world, precisely that one that every child wants to enter.

No one, in fact wants to be brought back ‘inside’.

 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco Sul Naviglio - September 18, 2015

TutorSalus.net - Freudian journalism

 

 

[1] ‘The Great Mother’,  Palazzo Reale – Milan from August 26th to November 15th, 2015 : conceived and promoted by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi together with Comune di Milano and ‘Palazzo Reale per Expo in città 2015’. At care of Massimiliano Gioni.

[2] ‘Grosse fatigue’, Camille Henrot (1978 living, Paris) 2013, Silver Lion Venice, room 15.

[3] ‘It’s the mother’, video by Nathalie Djurberg, room 19

[4] ‘La cognizione del dolore’, Carlo Emilio Gadda(1963) Garzanti editore 2008

[5] Virginia Woolf, room 29.

[6] ‘Sigmund Freud with his mother Amalia’, 1925; ‘Oedipus solves the Sphinx enigma’, J. A. D. Ingres 1808-London, Freud’s Studio, room 4.

[7] Mythological monster with a woman’s body, head of a lion and wings of a bird that devoured anyone who entered Thebes without having guessed an unsolved enigma : “Who, despite having only one voice, transforms into a quadruped, biped, triped ?”

[8] ‘Teaching to walk’, Roman Ondak, Zilina-Slovakia 2002, room 14