‘Maybe deodorant is the problem,’ says artist embracing humans’ animal nature
Iranian artist Tala Madani’s first solo show in Greece, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) and curated by Ioli Tzanetaki, captures your attention with the title alone, “Shitty Disco,” borrowed from one of the pieces featured in the exhibition. “It’s like a shitty place that’s not worth spending a night in, but which may still reveal a secret. A place where things are not what you thought they’d be,” says the artist.
Satire, a structural component of her work, as is the cartoon aesthetic, is employed to undermine male and female stereotypes, to comment on Western civilization’s sense of superiority, and to talk about loneliness, repressed sexual urges and the role of family.
Tragicomic figures captured in private, vulnerable and absurd moments are the protagonists. Featuring naked middle-aged men talking to their penises or intestines, mothers wrapped in feces and giant infants in soiled onesies, Madani’s work often provokes uncomfortable titters and even indignation.
“All my paintings are about the desire to let go of what we think is not animal, the superego. Our culture separates us from being animals, we are annoyed by our bodily secretions and pretend they don’t exist. We think we’re superior but, man, strutting around looking so serious and successful, I know there’s a hole in your sock; I know you’re not perfect. We have to accept our nature. Maybe deodorant is the problem,” she says.
Madani is not trying to shake awake the next generation of artists with her work. “I’m just listening to myself,” she says. “An artist needs to have an ideal audience in mind; the people they want their work to communicate with, to satisfy. If you are true to yourself and to this imaginary audience, then you might just manage to reach out to a real one. You can’t respond to trends. You’re not an artist if you do; you’re a production unit. That’s why I trust my own reactions so much; if I’m happy with what I’ve done, if it makes me laugh, then I carry on.”
Madani was born in Tehran in 1981 and moved to the United States with her mother in 1994. She studied political science and visual arts, with knowledge of both art history and present-day politics being more than evident in her work.
“For years, I wouldn’t admit that this is what I do: I paint. Painting was, in a way, a sublimation of all the things I wanted to do but I wasn’t doing. But all of a sudden, two years ago or a year and a half ago, I was able to admit that I actually believe in it in a way that I hadn’t admitted before,” says Madani.
The artist has now lived in America much longer than she did in Iran. I ask her whether she dreams and thinks in Farsi or English.
“It depends on who I dream about,” she says. “If it’s grandparents, it’s in Farsi, it’s childhood, but mostly in English. But I still think in Farsi, unless it’s about sex, or about art, or about ‘shit mom.’ There’s no ‘shit mom’ in Farsi. I can’t even say the word ‘shit’ in Farsi. It’s too awful. I would feel like I’ve done something wrong. It’s probably the same with sex.”
“Shit Μom,” a painting that emerged through an unusual process and went on to inspire a series under the same title, continues to provoke debate in the media, mainly because it shoots down the role of the perfect mother. Is it about women who make mistakes, who fail in their essential role and purpose?
“I made this piece just after giving birth to my son. I painted a painting of a mother and child just to take it to my house and put it in my bathroom – and it was awful, so kitsch. So, I started getting rid of it and luckily, I was getting rid of the mom before the baby. So, the baby was still there, and the mother figure became shitty looking. And I thought, ‘Oh… this is nice.’ The mother-child image is archetypal, we see it in Christianity with the Virgin Mary and Christ and even before that, in pagan religion, there were also virgin mothers, right? So, it’s even older than Christianity, the projection of desire into the female, the idea that she should never desire sex, that she should be a mother without having sex. In our vernacular, in therapy, we talk about shit moms constantly. I mean, this is the whole psychoanalysis: When you can love your shit mom is when you’re released from all your problems. But we haven’t put it in our visual culture. For me, ‘Shit Mom’ is not about bad mothering at all. It’s more about this acknowledgment of life, really. Like, you’re born, and then you touch things, and you get dusty, and you just… that the experience of life is of this change that we talk about. And you don’t have to be perfect and we’re not perfect. But it’s also about putting a mirror up to how we imagined mothers until now.”
Madani admits that she gets incensed by the fact that women are defined in such a strict framework, which is why for years she avoided painting female figures, until “Cloud Mommy” and “Shit Mom” came along.
In our visual culture, says the artist, women are generally depicted in a very specific way: with curves and long hair, and breasts that are always evident, even if only tacitly. “It is sexualized, no matter the narrative, and that’s problematic.”
Yet Madani’s depictions of males often contain penises, I comment. In her work, she responds, the penises are about “a game of power; they’re not used only to identify a gender.”
I ask her if she defines her art as feminist.
“Many museums now around the world have an interest in changing the collections and being more balanced, but one of the things that I saw was that they put women and every other minority in one group and white men into another. You cannot do this grouping because I think white men would find a way to accommodate themselves in this category too. It’s not white men and all the others. Also, women’s issues are not going in one direction – it is not women’s issues vs anything else. The feminist position is to stand in a position of equality, in relation to one’s desire, to one’s needs, to one’s interests.”
Madani comments that no one should be biased, but admits to being surprised at the attitudes of the people she’s met in Greece, at least those at the museum, and believes, to my surprise, the women’s movement must be strong here. “I’ve seen so much more machismo in Holland than in Greece,” she says.
I explain that younger generations have been doing a lot to change prevalent attitudes on the issue and have been successful in many respects, but that male violence against women is still widespread and Greece actually had the highest increase in femicides in Europe in 2021.
She asks whether the motive is sexual or the result of domestic violence. I list a number of reasons, among which are the state’s lackluster response and the police’s failure to take more drastic measures.
“Police culture is something we should see globally. There is a sad economic factor on who joins the police. I feel it’s poor against the poor, criminality comes also from a position of need and now in the US you have this intensely militarized police. So people need to realize that even if they didn’t totally agree with the protests at the universities, the police will be the same for all kinds of protest, whether it’s homophobia or abortions. And their training narrows their perspective of the world even further, because they have to take orders.”
Madani admits alarm at how conservative the world seems to be becoming in recent years, but sees hope in examples like Mexico, which elected its first female president last month.
“We only flair the tragedies, we only think this way, but we have this little bloom going out there and we should stick to it because it is hope in action.”
“Shitty Disco” is running until November 10 on the ground floor of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (www.emst.gr).
