Leave the Kitchen Window Open
Miranda Abbott
The posters were everywhere when I arrived in Milan. The Fondazione Prada was advertising writer and artist Miranda July’s exhibition, New Society. Perhaps the posters were a coincidence. And that my name is also Miranda, and I came to Milan to write. And it was July. Sticky, hypnotising July. I booked a ticket online. I went to the wrong address. I found the right one, took the elevator upstairs.
I gave my tote bag to the flamboyant Milanese man behind the information desk and held my bag check tag in between thumb and forefinger, slyly discarding tiny rolls of paper across the gallery floor as I walked.
The exhibition was two stories high. I climbed the stairs to reach the second floor and entered the big wide room. In the furthest corner, the wall was painted a ketchup red. I walked over and found podiums in front of the wall, each displaying an object that could perhaps be found in an attic or the back room of an op shop. A porcelain house for mice. Danish clogs nailed onto the wall. A kitschy painting of a fruit bowl. It all looked impossibly out of place in the aristocratic building of the Osservatorio.
I leant forward. The mice were each wearing little mouse spectacles and little mouse bonnets. The child mouse’s toys were arranged as if he had flipped his toy box over and watched every object fall to the floor.
In the gallery, an elegant woman’s black bag brushed against me as she walked past, taking photos.
I felt embarrassed for the mice. I felt embarrassed for the tacky red wall. I also felt comforted by it.
The didactic of the installation read: Assignment #43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parent’s house.
The installation prompt came from July’s online art project, Learning to Love You More. Assignment #43 was excavated from the archives and executed IRL using locals’ treasured and loathed objects from their childhood homes.
Over 8000 people participated in the project. In the time it ran from 2002 to its close in 2009, the website posted seventy art assignments.
I stared at the objects. I bathed in the display of domestic intimacies.
New Prompt: |
Assignment #43: |
|---|
In the installation, a particular piece caught my eye. Much smaller than all the other objects, it symbolised the era of girlhood branded by Polly Pocket and My Little Pony VCR tapes.
The object felt private to me, even in the public forum of the gallery. I wanted to protect it from public scrutiny. I wanted to steal it and take it home with me.
The object’s accompanying description read:
My mum used to put all sorts of miniatures on a table in the morning like a big expansive doll house.
| New Prompt: |
Assignment #71: |
|---|---|
Response: |
Walls dissolving, mess escaping. Wiping breakfast crumbs with a blue Chux. The miniatures unify and conquer. They inhabit the north, south, east and west quarters of the table. The doll house lives inside the big house, but the walls delineating are transparent, permeable, a passageway. The big house sustains, the doll house consumes. The doll house leaks, miniatures will be found in strange hiding places for months. The big house gives its water, its warmth and its light. |
Privacy is learnt laboriously over the slow years of a child’s development. Privacy becomes known to a child only after they learn the difference between their mum and the world. Before this, the child’s world is indistinguishable from their relationship with their carer. Thus, Mum no longer holds separate public and private selves, but becomes public-private. The hyphen here represents a piece of tape struggling to hold the two in place. It will lose its stickiness and eventually fall off, leaving Mum with an absence to search for an alternative bridge.
In this loss of delineation before a child learns the difference between public/private, Mum may forget this boundary also. This change happens slowly, until the slash separating has become translucent. In ten years’ time, Mum will attempt to search for it as if looking for something in the dark.
1. An art gallery, a supermarket, the bus ride home, the office where she works.
2. The bedroom where she makes love, the bathroom at work, the doctor’s office, the church confessional.
For Mum, the lists have merged and may now read as follows:
3. The cervical exam, the labour/delivery ward, the first photo of the newborn with her legs still spread (soon to be a Facebook post) the coffee shop where her toddler pulls her breast out of her dress.
♢
| New Prompt: |
Assignment #72: |
|---|---|
Response: |
It is open weekdays between 10 am–2 pm. It is closed at the same time as your lunch break at work, if you are lucky enough to get one. You must buy a ticket to enter. You must wear appropriate clothing. You mustn’t bring too many things. You mustn’t bring food or water, or small children, or anyone that will make loud noises. The floors are of poorly insulated cement. A heater would disrupt the feng shui. The ceilings are unapproachably high and yet, still impossibly clean. The support beams are ‘exposed’ but will be painted in the same equalizing white to match every other doorknob or fixture. The didactics are black on white, perhaps white on black depending on the influence of shadow. Footsteps are exaggerated. So are sniffles and coughs. Sneezes are forbidden. If there is a bench to sit on, it will be a slab of something stone, perfectly flat on each face, no carved groove for your arse. No back support. An appropriate distance between you and the other viewer who is also sitting, uncomfortably. Most likely holding their breath. |
How can we be moved, in a place that tells us with its sterile architecture: please don’t touch or be touched?
In the domestic, the doors are always open. There are no closing hours. In the domestic, every surface, according to small fingers, begs to be touched.
♢
| New Prompt: |
Assignment #73: |
|---|---|
Response: |
Having a heart attack. |
In the gallery, I walked back down the stairs. I retraced my steps through the first floor, squashing the paper breadcrumbs with my shoe.
I noticed an artwork I missed on my first walkthrough. Six bright yellow posters taped in a vertical line onto a support beam read:
Meanwhile
Babies were born
Oranges fell from trees
Cars crashed
And yet
The minutes passed so slowly.
♢
Catherine Opie’s Self-portrait/Cutting (1993) displays a universally familiar drawing on an unorthodox canvas. The artist is turned away from the camera, shirtless. Her bare back is freckled and red in some places, white in others. A child’s drawing is etched into her skin with a blade. The right side of the house drips with blood, as do the rays on the semicircle sun.
The mother/mother couple both sport triangles for dresses and wear smiles on their faces, holding hands.
A body of work.
A labour of love.
The skin swells, pulses, rashes and runs, and yet the artwork lays flat on her back and persists.
| New Prompt: |
Assignment #74: |
|---|---|
Response: |
The junk drawer closes only with full force. We bleed on our partner’s white sheets. There is a pile of tampons, stain remover and razors in the corner of their bathroom cabinet. It is the messiest corner. We conceal it behind rolls of white, perfectly round rolls of toilet paper. We leave the lid off the olive oil. We clean up the oil spill and they offer to help. We defecate as we labour. We silently wince in pain as our toddler bites a nipple while we are on the phone to our boss. We ignore that cupboard. We put off a hard rubbish clean for the third year in a row. We pump in a dark room at work. We leak onto our jeans. We spit on our thumbs and scrub at the stain. The pump machine whirs rhythmically, loudly. Our co-worker reaches behind the bottle of breast milk in the fridge to retrieve their lunch. We tie up our hair. We take a tram. We give our handbag containing an apple core and used tissues and our children’s toys to the flamboyant man behind the front desk. We pray he doesn’t look inside. We leave crumbs of paper across the gallery floor as we roll our bag tag between our thumb and forefinger. We sit on the slab of stone bench. Sweating, bleeding, leaking. We arrive home to our toddler standing at the front door, open mouthed. As we embrace them, they say, ‘Mamma I so happy you’re home’. |
On Instagram back in Melbourne, I discover an installation piece from 1998 by artist Tracey Emin.
Tracey installed the bed in the gallery herself. In the middle of the room it lay, other artworks decorating the walls surrounding. The bed is unmade, and the sheets seem unwashed.
Used tissues and packets of pills. Empty vodka bottles, an ashtray, red crayons. Children’s toys, polaroid film, Marlboros, a tube of toothpaste. These items lie discarded on the floor beneath the bed.
The caption on the post reads:
Rage, self-exposure, open to ridicule for making something considered ugly and placing it in a space of contemplation.
A user in the comments corrects the title:
The piece is called My Bed, not just Bed. There is a radical difference there I think.
| New Prompt: |
Assignment #75: |
|---|---|
Response: |
Leave the kitchen door open. Let the street smell the steam. Let it travel to the gallery, the Osservatorio, to the top floor. Let the white paint on the walls bulge and bubble with humidity. Let the children touch it. Let us peel the wallpaper. Let me bring a blanket. Let me cook a meal. Let me set a table on the slab of stone bench in the centre of the gallery. Let us sit on the ground beside it. Have a picnic. I’ll bring the olives, you bring the bread. Let us eat with our fingers, watch our children touch the paintings and climb up and down the stairs. |
References
Chang, P. (2020). Milk Debt. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/417380704
Emin, T. (1998). My Bed. London: The Tate Institute.
Finkelpearl, T. (2001). Dialogues in public art: Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles on maintenance and sanitation. London: MIT Press.
July, M. (n.d). Untitled, New Society Exhibition. Milano: Fondazione Prada Osservatorio.
July, M. and Fletcher, H. (n.d). Assignment #43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parent's house. Learning to Love You More.
Opie, C (1993). Self Potrait/Cutting. New York City: Guggenheim Museum.
Strahan, L. (2019). Here We Are… In: Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt, Writing in the Expanded Field. ACCA.
Miranda Abbott is an emerging writer from Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice explores hidden memory and the body’s role in writing. Her work has been published in The Big Issue, Baby Teeth Journal and RMIT’s Catalyst magazine. She is currently interning with the Stella Prize. You can contact her through mirandaabbott.com.au.