Niki de Saint-Phalle and my mother
I think about He Chengyao’s work. Mother- daughter relationships are never easy, even though Chengyao’s approach is the mental illness that her mother suffered I think about all the daughters that later become mothers and perpetuated the infinite line of generational traumas.
I read in the social media tons of advices about body, spirit and mind. “The most important meal of the day is the breakfast, do not skip it” and I force myself to eat cereals every morning, to later come back to my old routine of not eating anything at all or just a light yogurt. How can I change those years of conditioning of my mother not giving me breakfast because she didn’t feel hungry? I feel the angriness inside of me, her selfishness, blind as a horse with blinkers, never thinking about my needs. It might sound lame, my mother wasn’t that bad, but her wounds hurt me. If I could do a performance I wonder if I would do it full of anger, shooting to my mother pictures like Niki de Saint Phalle did with her 22 caliber rifle at a plaster-covered canvas with bags of paint. Called Shooting Painting, 1961. One of the series of her performance Tiers ( fire or gunshot in French).
“The smoke gave me a feeling of war. The painting the victim. But whom was the painting representing? My father? All men? Short men? Tall men? Stout men? Or the fat ones? Was it my brother John? Or was representing myself?”
Niki de Sain-Phalle found relief in that bath of red, yellow and blue that in her eyes was a bath of blood, a metamorphosis of the pain, a representation of death and resurrection.
Not only in modern times as human kind we have tried to find answers. I assume since the beginning of our consciousness we have had inside of us the most Existential questions. Just society and television numb us. Some have tried to answer it through art, others through personal enlighten and religion, other find relief in philosophy. Nevertheless all of us are in this dimension trying to find the answers for unknown questions.