Chain Fetus- Ruti Direktor

Chain Fetus

By Ruti Direktor

It seems that Miri Nishri’s project “Is this baby yours”, has aroused an emotional response in more than a few people. The list of people who responded to the wooden box containing the fetus image is just as impressive and distinguished as the most prestigious lists of signatories in the good old days of petitions against the Occupation. If you weren’t opposed to being part of those petitions, you wouldn’t mind appearing on this list as well: Father Marcel Dubois, Natan Zach, Gideon Ofrat, Moshe Zuckerman, Ronny Someck, Adi Ophir, Avi Mograbi, Dganit Brest, Bianka Gershuni, Philip Rantzer, Yoko Ono, Dan Daor, Ron Pundak, Ariel Hirschfeld, Nurit Govrin, and many other worthy artists and intellectuals, people who responded in all seriousness to the image of a fetus that was sent to them by mail in a box together with texts, forms and a request to respond. So impressive and honorable, and those giants are so looming, that it really is difficult to explain why this project seemed to me to begin with (from the moment I received the wooden box in the mail) more nagging and annoyingly fussy than exciting, more fawning and coquettish than provocative.

Some Background. Miri Nishri has been active as an artist since the beginning of the 1980s. In recent years the image of a fetus has entered her paintings. A touching image, of course, anchored in feminine thought, and a manipulative one to a known extent, being targeted directly to our soft belly – children, babies, in their mother’s womb.

In the past two years the fetus has become a project. Miri Nishri made three hundred little wooden boxes and sent them to various addressees, designated in the accompanying page as “people whose messages and works shape our environment and our quality of life”. So to begin with, whoever receives the box is being flattered for actually having been a recipient. And when someone flatters you, it’s difficult to refuse. On the outer side of the box there’s a note pasted on with the text “Miri … Fetus Distribution”. On the inner left side of the box there’s an image of a fetus in various shades and on the other side (interior) there’s a printed text with the title “Is This Baby Yours?”

And then: “No DNA tests have been made, but it’s fairly certain that unmediated meetings with seminal material, yours as well, have brought about his birth. From the very fact of your being a person who lives in this world as I do, the relations between us are unavoidable. Therefore, I regard you as a full partner in the creation of this new life within me… Would you acknowledge your paternity over this child and undertake the full responsibility this implies? Your answer will transform this progeny into your creation in every respect.”

The explanatory page attached to the box further states: “In the virtual era in which we live, suddenly an object that poses as a human being, as your offspring, a creature that needs your compassion and your total commitment. How would you respond? … You’re invited to complete the creation and to give it significance in any context you may deem correct – the response could be in any material, format or medium, including verbal and nonverbal responses and/or by means of choosing and filling one of the attached forms.”

True enough, there were four forms attached to the box: a pink adoption form, a light-blue paternity declaration form, a yellow paternity denial form, and a green alternative option form.

How would you react?

I, personally, apparently do not belong to the species of artists and intellectuals, those creative people that you only need to give them a trigger and right away they’re ready to respond, unfortunately, any more than to those “whose messages and works shape our environment”. I happen to be no fan of organized group team-building activities; I hate forms of any kind, and I have a slight allergy to manipulative formulations. The wooden box in the role of work of art that arrived at my house demanding my response in an apparently agreeable but actually quite aggressive manner, is fawning at me by making me part of those “people whose messages and works …” but immediately it threatens/reproaches me by stipulating that “without your response this creation is not complete, lack of response will be interpreted as ‘a rejection of the newborn'”.  

“What about a sense of humor”, you say?

I was immediately reminded of those awful horrid chain letters we used to receive in the mail under the guise of a promise of great happiness, something in the style of – this letter was started ten years ago in Tibet. So-and-so in Katmandu received the letter, sent it to his friends and the following day he won a million dollars in the lottery. If you don’t send this letter immediately to ten of your close friends a curse will be cast on your house. Woe onto the one who disrupts the chain. Anonymous in Kazakhstan failed to send the letters and got hit in the head by a coconut, etc., etc. Scary!

Who wants to get such a gift in the mail? Who needs such a promise of happiness? Who wants to receive a wooden box with a tamaguchi picture, forms in four colors, an intrusive invitation to respond and oblique insinuations that whoever doesn’t respond is an inveterate, screwed up, disappointing failure. If you’re nice – then you’re a “partner in this extended family”, but “if you don’t want to cooperate, “send the baby back to me and I’ll look for another potential father for him.” The baby? Suddenly this is no longer an abstract and allegorical image of a fetus (alive or dead), but a baby, and lack of cooperation makes you the antisocial kid who is spoiling this oh so creative but simultaneously so demanding group game.

I’m not denying that there are some interesting questions that could arise from this project, but none of those has anything new to say with respect to similar instances of mail art that were made in the past – in the 1960s or the 1970s when the artist designated for himself in advance, through the mail, the audience of his respondents-spectators, there was something subversive and establishment-bypassing in the manner in which he was acting outside the routine means of art production, though there’s always been in these activities also something that reinforced the bubble-like effect of involvement in art. On the other hand, artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres or Uri Tzaig, who in recent years have raised to discussion values such as giving and generosity, indeed do give something to their audience, something physical or a spiritual experience, without the pressurizing aspect (like a Polish mother-in-law, to put it superficially) of “I’ll give you something, on condition that you’ll be good little children and give me something back”.

Miri Nishri’s mail project is ultimately being exhibited in an art gallery as a series of full-fledged art objects, evidently enjoying the limelight aura of the people who responded to the request, and creating an intimacy (imaginary, in most cases) with the select addressees at the expense of a further alienation of the wider public. The (frayed) analogy between creation and birth has not benefited from any new perspective.

Miri Nishri is excited by the response to her project, and justifiably so, from her point of view. But what is the difference between this project and the matchbox project initiated by the Yavne Art Workshop a few years ago? Two curators sent matchboxes from Yavne to dozens of artists throughout Israel and in the world, and hoped for the best. It came out good. Artists gladly responded to the challenge (among them no lesser than Richard Long and Annette Lemieux!) and made charming pieces in matchboxes. Artists are creative people. Just give them a theme, an opportunity, a stimulus, and they’ll do something, and besides, this is also about a certain sense of professional solidarity – an artist wouldn’t refuse a colleague’s request, if only to receive a response in kind when the time comes and it’s his turn to ask. But in contrast to the matchbox project, which perceived itself as a quasi joke, “Miri Fetus Distribution” exudes a pretension to be heralding some new tidings, or at least an alternative, in the realm of artist-spectator or artwork-audience relations. The intimacy is attained, if at all, under intimidations of guilt feelings and art does not enjoy a more sympathetic stadium. On the contrary, it perpetuates its basic sense of inferiority – you didn’t want me in an art gallery or a museum, so you’ll get me at home, through the mail, in a passive-aggressive wrapping.

And the responses themselves, in other words, what did the people make or write? The artists did what they usually do, only in a box. The poets wrote poems, the intellectuals sent contemplative texts, a clinical psychologist took it personally and therapeutically, and Avi Mograbi sent a cassette that looks like the pseudo-documentary videos he makes. His voice emanating from the cassette accompanies the exhibition with the intonation of a man under harassment, a man refusing to acknowledge the paternity that some woman is demanding from him: “You can’t drop this kid on me. I’m asking you to stop pestering me and my family… How dare you do this to me after everything that happened between us… and what you’re saying is false, nothing of the kind ever happened…” Whoever would have guessed that some day I’d find myself identifying with an evasive, refraining man who refuses to take responsibility?

In contrast, in the past year I’ve received in the mail also six issues of “42 ma’alot” (42 Degrees), a magazine on fashion, music, design, culture. Nice, rhythmic, energetic, with no demands, no strings attached, culture is not that threatening thing that always involves some sense of solemnity and guilt, and an alternative is what happens when it doesn’t get named. Celebrating its first anniversary, “42 ma’alot”, is a genuine, non-virtual young creature which I gladly embrace, save its issues, and wish it a continued successful life.