This Baby is Mine, No Mine- Ariella Saba

This Baby is Mine, No Mine

By Ariella Saba

“I don’t understand how you could do this to me, after all these years, after everything there was between us. If you want a war, I’ll give you a war, believe me. Stop harassing my family and me. What you’re saying isn’t true, and never was. You can repeat it a thousand times over. It won’t make it more real, more true. This child is not mine, I don’t recall ever participating in its creation. You can’t dump this kid on me. Stop harassing my family and me. I won’t let you ruin my life. I’ll take you to court. I don’t understand how you could do this to me after everything there was between us.”

This response was written by Writer/Director Avi Mugrabi and is one of the strongest, if not most realistic responses, that appears as an hour-long monologue, with slight variations, on a video screen. Mugrabi, along with 300 other influential people across Israel and the world, both men and women, received a 5×5 inch wooden box at his home in the mail, with a drawing of fetus inside, the fetus looked almost real: reddish, brown, orange, or yellow with a bubble-wrap texture. The following question was attached to the drawing: “Will you claim paternity over this child?”

The box was sent my artist Miri Nishri, all the responses she received in the form of written responses, works of art, as part of the box or separately, she recently exhibited as part of a multi-genre exhibit at the Kibbutz Gallery. Tali Tamir curated the exhibit.

Nishri has been working on the project for two years, and documenting it for another two. She’s planning on publishing a book, and is currently seeking funding that will allow her to exhibit the project in a unique format, that won’t just document the responses, but will preserve the sense of materials and sensuality that characterized the exhibit.

“Visiting the exhibit is like flipping through a book,” says Nishri. “The spectator can read a verbal response and then take in a visual artistic response a few feet later, while Avi Mugrabi’s hypnotic and never ending monologue permeates in the background. Even responses such as his will find their way into the book.”

The fetus-object that Nishri sent out to artists, academics, religious people, writers, curators, politicians and critics is seeking a family and pedigree. It demands adoption in the highest sense of responsibility: parent-child. In its fetusness it symbolizes passivity, unrealized potential, vulnerability and helplessness. Like a work of art seeking context, recognition and ancestry. Nishri works on two levels: as the Matriarchal mother, the goddess of fertility that distributes her fetuses’ to fathers that will claim their paternity, and as an artist asking for an active response to her work.

The project is made up of opposites and reflections that play a deceitful game with one another. By distributing her fetuses by mail to people that were meticulously selected by according to their pedigree and social status, Nishri decided who will be her immediate audience, whoa re the people she wishes to converse with, and who she would like to add to her intellectual-artistic-virtual family. She awarded herself the freedom to override the artistic establishment and its significant players by picking the medium of mail art – a medium widely used by artists to send and distribute their work. She transforms the artist into curator and from artist to collector, as the collection of responses she received remains in her possession.

The dialogue Nishri conducts with her selected spectators, that are also those responsible for the success of the project, continues to inseminate itself and multiply, as it’s later exhibited in the gallery space: one response creates a dialogue with another response, positive and embracing responses, alongside responses full of rage and denial. The unwanted babies are piled up inside a plastic bag awaiting an alternative father, and the random spectator who visits the gallery is fertilized from the dialogue created among the parts made into a whole, and carries it on with him onward into his own life, to the relationship with his own private baby.

The deep human level that Nishri examines with her artistic metaphor is the question of the mutual responsibility we share as humans and the essence of the dynamic and spiritual relationship between people. In her reaching out to potential “fathers” she writes: “by being a person that lives in this world just as I do our relationship is virtually unavoidable.” She diverts the attention her chosen observer towards his own responsibility within the world around him, without him being fully aware of it. “My gift might be good, giving and generous, but it’s the sort of gift you think about returning, because they demand of you to play a sort of game you wouldn’t necessarily choose play of your own accord,” says Nishri.

Compared with Mugrabi’s response, Father Marcel Dubois’ response identifies with Nishri’s approach completely. Dubois: “The community is a large body, whose organs are connected to each other with grace. There’s help and mutual responsibility. Everyone contributes to the existence of the other and of the whole. For example: I have a spiritual relationship with a Carmelite Nun, we write to each other occasionally and I know she prays on my behalf and I for her. But even when we don’t, she continues to pray for me, her mere existence in the world contributes to my existence and the other way around.”

The poet Maya Bejerano talks about intersecting consciousness: “I dedicate the poem: ‘Salvation’ to Miri Nishri’s virtual child. His true redemption and that of the people of this world is touch and the mutual corresponding, the way dogs kiss in the street. But for us it’s the intersecting consciousness, thought and feeling, and afterwards the flesh. And thus children should be born out of love of love.”

The artist Dganit Brest responded warmly, with a short haiku-like text, written in red ink: Miri! Miri/Has the unthinkable/Actually happened?/Has the heart’s storm/has passion/bore its fruits?/I will gladly give him/my name/if he is mine/yours Dganit.”

Yoko Ono sent a supportive, feminine and sensual response: a 1:1 photo of a breast, which she pasted on the outside of the box, and wrote the word “Touch” underneath it. But there were woman who responded harshly on the paternity claim, addressed to them by Nishri: we don’t need masculine affirmation or pedigree, they wrote. The French artist Anette Messager wrote to Nishri: “How could you ask me to be a father. I’m shocked. I am a mother to many cats and artists…but I will still try and find this baby a father in my vicinity.” Ruth Gavison suggested to Nishri in her response that she use the term “parenthood” instead of “paternity”, because the initial reaction by most women was that the material was addressed exclusively to men.

Nishri, as the head of a matriarchal family deliberately addresses the patriarchal fatherhood, while addressing women. Nishri: “The society we live in is patriarchal, it’s still the father that gives the offspring its name and pedigree in the world. The more famous and successful the father is, the bigger chance his offspring’s have a chance of succeeding. I reached out to women I though were strong enough to give the baby the same patriarchal pedigree that babies get from their fathers, and by that stating that a woman could also fill that role. There was a trace of humor and playfulness to it.”

Nishri took on the role of distributer, which is also a typically male role. But she’s distributing fetuses that have already been fertilized just by virtue of them being fetuses. It’s clear to her that she’s the mother, because the baby grew inside her. But fathers? There are many of potential that this illegitimate baby disturbs their bourgeoisie calm, or men that display utter human generosity and agree to adopt this baby that isn’t fruit of their loins. One Nishri’s goals in continuing to work on this project is to reach out to more women, to create a dialogue with them to overcome the misunderstandings and receive their responses, something she didn’t find came to fruition at this stage of the project. Her starting off point was her personal frustration as a visual artist. She started her artistic journey after graduating from art school in the early 80s. Since then, she’s worked primarily with drawing and sculpting with issues that relate to biological evolution and organic textures, and has shown her work as part of solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums. In 1996 she received the Ministry of Education’s prize for Visual Art. She’s been working on the fetus motif for the past 11 years on and off since giving birth to her son.

The Fetus project was Nishri’s first conceptual project, so to speak, but she’s still not ready to part with artistic object and material just yet. Her touch is evident in every one of the 300 boxes she distributed, although a carpenter manufactured the boxes themselves. She insisted on a realistic and sensual image for the fetus, that it look almost real, to not weaken the reaction it provoked. She felt the need to turn the art into a living thing, something influential, meaningful and demanding more than a photograph or sculpture.

This project also catered to the need of creating a family and artistic contact. And thus a “family within the family” was created, and that means artists responding directly to other artist’s work and creating joined work, like the response of Yoko Ono, Philip Rantser, Meir Franco, Kobi Harel and others.

The work blurred the lines between life and art. The responses she received, especially during the beginning of the project, she took very personally for better or worse. The negative responses hurt her, and the positive responses elated her, as long as there was a response. There were responses that were intimate, but it was un-intimate intimacy, because eventually everything was exposed and exhibited. Nishri: “Despite the difficult state of visual art these days, I refuse to accept the death of the object or of painting. I care about the physical relationship to material. The relationship with an object is as important in my opinion as the relationship to people. The artistic object doesn’t receive its meaning only when it’s observed. It’s charged with, I think, with positive mystical and ritualistic powers. Art is still art and I believe in the power of still objects. Although the internet could be the ideal medium for the Embryo Distribution Project, I wasn’t tempted to transform the object into an apparent virtual image, and give up its realistic sensuality. As a visual artist nowadays I feel like I’m in danger of being extinct in some remote exotic land, far off in my studio somewhere.”