My Barbarian
My Barbarian’s latest exhibition explores motherhood as a foundational site of social change. It comprises the artifacts—masks, stage, backdrops—from the collective’s performance of Bertolt Brecht’s pro-Communist play The Mother (1932), as well as a highly personal video entitled Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, 2013. The show posits a maternal lineage for all kinds of communitarian efforts, including My Barbarian’s own.
Although the artifacts can’t fully communicate the performance’s substance, the empty stage, flanked by masks hanging at the ready, suggests the space might be activated by anyone. This invitation for collaboration is also at the heart of the video, a series of six short episodes created with My Barbarian’s actual mothers and two of the collective’s artistic forebears, Mary Kelly and Eleanor Antin. The segments involving the mothers are affecting not only for their intimacy but for the varied picture of motherhood they present, from the struggles of a young single mom to the kooky outdoor talent show staged by a free spirit to the protective fury of a woman defending her son’s right to wear women’s clothing. Kelly and Antin’s segments are more surreal, evoking historical precedents: the birth of psychoanalysis and the early feminism of Eleanor Roosevelt, respectively. Mothers are invoked as an essential glue in the constitution of society and as individual claimants to basic human rights and freedoms. The thread that runs through all the segments is the push-pull between this fundamental role and something more personal, desirous, and specific.
The final segment of the video is a beautiful performance in which the three members of My Barbarian take turns holding one another in a pose resembling Michelangelo’s Pietà, 1498–99. As the members trade places, a number of possibilities for maternal relationships emerge that have nothing to do with gender. It’s a lovely metaphor for communal nurturance that stems from but also confounds the original binary relationship between self and mother.
