Would you acknowledge your paternity?- Gilad Melzer
Would you acknowledge your paternity?
Miri Nishri appealed to artists and other persona to adopt a baby doll
About a year ago the artist Miri Nishri gave me a small wooden box with a sticker on it stating ‘Miri – Embryo Distribution’, with telephone and fax numbers. “Is this baby yours?” This was the opening line of the appeal inside the box. The baby, with serial number 000018 stamped on the box, was kind of reddish, but it has siblings in orange, yellow, and brown – a multiracial family. Nishri painted an embryo on a sheet of bubble wrap and photographed it. “In the meantime I’ve lost the original painting”, she says, “but it doesn’t matter. Anyway, the work is more about duplication, distribution, and less about the original”. Is there a place for a duplicate, a copy, a reproduction, in an art gallery? Who, or what, if at all, is the original of this creation?
About 300 ‘babies’ have been sent during the last two years to those whom Nishri calls “influential people in various fields” in Israel and abroad. In an exhibition at HaKibbutz Gallery she exhibits the visual and written responses sent to her by ‘fathers and mothers’. Among the respondents were artists, curators, critics, writers, religious figures and academics.
Every potential parent received with the box four standard forms in different colors: an adoption form, a declaration of paternity, denial of parenthood, or alternative option form. Nishri, who signs the appeal also as ‘Marie’ – Maria, the virgin mother, who was pregnant, but only as a receptacle for the work of creation – applied also to women, but the appeal, in Hebrew as in English, is addressed to a father. “Would you recognize your paternity”, she asks, where it would have been possible to write “your parenthood” and thus to avoid responses that focus on the lack of gender-balance in the project.
The French artist, Annette Messager, wrote: “How could you ask me to be a ‘father’? I’m shocked. I am a mother of many…” and here she drew a pampered cat. The poet Maya Bejerano enclosed her poem “redemption is” in her own handwriting. The American photographer, David Levinthal, wrote, in accepting paternity: “The child represents the life I have chosen (or that which I have not chosen) not to live”. It would be interesting to know if Levinthal’s child would have liked his enormous collection of dolls and toys.
To Professor Nurit Govrin the project seemed like a combination of “something very touching together with something very macabre and repelling”. Roberto Benigni, the wonderful father from ‘Life is Beautiful’, was busy making another child-film.
Yoko Ono’s Breast
And there are also not a few visual responses. The project operates in the ‘mail art’ tradition, which began with the Dada movement and was vigorously renewed after WWII with the Fluxus Group. Sending artists disseminate works of art, collages, postcards, photos, within a sort of inner network – an alternative museum in constant motion, which bypasses the establishment museums and galleries. The project treats the relationship between the viewer and the work of art, and the world of art. Your answer-response, or that of anyone who comes in contact with the box, “will turn this progeny into your own creation in all respects”. The viewer is obliged to respond to the direct appeal. Lack of response would leave the baby an orphan, but from a negative choice.
Several artists returned the box with a work of their own. Yoko Ono, one of the ‘mothers’ of conceptual art, and herself no stranger to mail art, pasted on the outside of the box a close-up of a breast, and underneath she wrote the word ‘Touch’. One of the most interesting responses was sent by Kobi Harel: on the written side of the box he pasted a pacifier with its nipple aimed to penetrate a breast with a missing nipple, which covers the ’embryo’. Moshe Kupferman sent a box enclosing another box, wrapped in paper, with a half-exposed note inside “better to see with the eyes”. In an exhibition of her duplicated works Nishri actually functions as the project’s curator. After the reins have passed in recent years in many cases into the hands of curators, Nishri presents her own, and what was given or sent to her. Her baby – the artwork – returns to the center.
– Gilead Meltzer