Thinking about performance, I came across Marni Kotak. She is a performance artist who tackles questions about the lines between life and art.
Late in October, in an art gallery in Brooklyn, she gave birth.
In the weeks prior to her delivery, she changed a gallery space into a birthing room – soothing blue paint on the walls, a large bed, birthing pool, piles of pillows printed with family photos – and a midwife and doula on hand for the labour. Before her labour, Marni sat in this transformed space, waiting for contractions and talking to visitors. And she collected contact details for those who were interested in attending the birth of her child. The gallery has not disclosed how many were present at the birth, but they prepared for an audience of approximately 15 people.
On the 25th of October, baby Ajax was born, healthy and vigorous at 9lbs 2 ozs. The show got good reviews.
When I first heard about this, I was outraged. How dare she turn the birth of her child into a spectator sport? What did she expect from the audience? What did she want to offer them, anyway? I wasn’t hung up on decorum, but by admitting an audience, she was commodifying what should be one of the most personal experiences a couple can go through. And how could she adequately focus on the essentials of birthing when also aware of the gaze of others? I worried about her and about her partner, and about the baby who was to be born in such a stranger-rich environment.
I couldn’t quite get my head around wanting to deliver like this. I still can’t. But Marni and her husband Jason Robert Bell are both artists, and they decided to birth in this way to challenge the definitions of art. They want to broaden art to encompass any profound shared human experience. In the Village Voice, Marni Kotak put it this way:
“I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art. This child is the greatest work of art that Jason and I could ever make together. So often I find that people overlook how our lives are full of the most amazing, shocking, challenging, beautiful, and disturbing experiences — far more interesting than anything anyone could put together as a “performance.”
There is something here, something life-affirming beyond the initial shock value of this performance piece. Marni Kotak was trying to draw attention to wonder.
She gave us a radical performance of regular, natural life in a time and place where the regular and the natural play slight roles in our lives. Today, birth is seldom seen as regular. It is medicalized – and even scheduled. Women are encouraged to see labour as a dreadful crisis that is happening to them, rather than work in which they are wholly immersed and involved. Take your average sitcom birth scene. Suddenly, in just the worst and most comedic moment, the woman shrieks “My water’s broken!” and panic breaks out. She’s forced to sit down or lie down and is rushed off to hospital immediately (note the passive voice) so that the professionals can fix the problem. There’s little space for waiting, wondering, watching, and working.
Marni Kotak advertised her birthing as a performance, but there was no scheduled curtain time. Instead, she gathered people around her to wait with her. She invited strangers to wonder with her and then to watch her work as she gave birth to her child. She was bold in subverting conventions of privacy and physicality, and, in doing so, also questioned assumptions about how we live through pivotal life moments as physical, spiritual, and social beings.
I don’t want to canonize Marni Kotak, and I certainly wouldn’t wish to emulate her, but I do catch a glimpse of something prophetic in her performance of birth. It reminds me of Jeremiah buying the field at Anathoth. In Jeremiah’s time, life wasn’t natural – the country was about to be invaded, all of life was precarious, and Jeremiah knew it. But he also heard the call of God to engage with real life. God told him to buy a field from his cousin. So he did, and in this regular activity – the acquisition of property – the people caught a glimpse of life beyond the immediate circumstances. It was an act of hope, and, in his act, they saw that someday there would be peace, and someday land would be bought and sold again. Someday, there would be regular life.
Regular life. Natural life. Maybe an advent glimpse of life to come.
And still ahead of us, another birth in a strange place, also shocking, making us uncomfortable, and asking us questions, challenging us to consider again the profound shared experience of being human.
