La Recherche de Ma Mère
Miriam Mirolla

The predominance of sight over the other senses, also called “scopophilic drive” (Schautrieb), is the dominating line upon which Western art seems to have placed itself for sometime now.
Besides, even you, when you were small, drew on paper, then you’d throw your drawing into the fire, sure that God, thanks to the smoke that would rise to heaven, would see it1. Would you define yourself as a “voyeur,” that is, a lover of seeing?
Paola Gandolfi
My entire life is based upon seeing. I’m a real sight maniac.
I call it “visual bulimia.” Ever since I was a child, I think I made a substitution, a symbolic shift. Paradoxically, I put seeing in the place of food, my mother’s milk, her breast.
This sight mania trains me to discover the smallest details in things and persons. I try to observe everything as if I were seeing it for the first time, and this allows me to be free to change the perspective of things, the viewing
point of my work.
However, I’m aware that looking shields you from being looked at—it allows you to protect your fragmentation.
J.J. Lacan said that, “The gaze . . . is this inverse of consciousness. Consciousness hides, like the inside of a glove, the secret presence of a light that is something other than itself.”2 M.M. The activity of seeing implies the passiveness of being seen, on the outside, and maybe even in our most intimate parts, by someone else. Voyeurism and exhibitionism — this is the dichotomy within the possibility of “seeing.” In your opinion, what is the
fundamental event that moves vision?
P.G. Before breathing, before crying, when we come out of our mother’s bodies, bright light invades us. Sight is the first sense that is unleashed. Birth, in my opinion, is the primary aesthetic experience.
It’s clear that seeing also has to do with control —with being on your guard. So control makes the girl believe she is keeping herself from fragmentation and from her mother’s control.
M.M. How old is the imaginary child we’re talking about, who in order to defend herself “looks”?
P.G. She’s a newborn—a few months old—with her eyes wide open upon a world that has seemingly incomprehensible rules. But her gaze is directed at the world in different ways, throughout life’s various phases.
M.M. What happens on the level of seeing, in your opinion, during this first phase of life?
P.G. I’ll answer you in light of my over-twenty years experience with psychoanalysts, where work on myself as the analyzed has been alternated over the years with studying and researching psychoanalysis and art.
The most important autors show that during the first months of life, a child’s gaze is directed only at her mother, because there is no real distinction between the two. The child perceives her/his mother’s body as if it were her/his own.
The psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer carefully
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La recherche de ma mère. “Seeing” and Other Topics
Paola Gandolfi, Miriam Mirolla
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Miriam Mirolla
The predominance of sight over the other enses, also called “scopophilic drive” (Schautrieb), is the dominating line upon which Western art seems to have placed itself for sometime now. Besides, even you, when you were small, drew on paper, then you’d throw your drawing into the fire, sure that God, thanks to the smoke that would rise to heaven, would seeit1. Would you define yourself as a “voyeur,” that is, a lover of seeing?
Paola Gandolfi
My entire life is based upon seeing. I’m a real sight maniac. I call it “visual bulimia.” Ever since I was a child, I think I made a substitution, a symbolic shift. Paradoxically, I put seeing in the place of food, my mother’s milk, her breast. This sight mania trains me to discover the smallest details in things and persons. I try to observe everything as if I were seeing it for the first time, and this allows me to be free to change the perspective of things, the viewing point of my work.
However, I’m aware that looking shields you from being looked at—it allows you to protectyour fragmentation.
J.J. Lacan said that, “The gaze . . . is this inverse of consciousness. Consciousness hides, like the inside of a glove, the secret presence of a light that is something other than itself.”2
M.M. The activity of seeing implies the passiveness of being seen, on the outside, and maybe even in our most intimate parts, by someone else. Voyeurism and exhibitionism—this is the dichotomy within the possibility of “seeing.” In your opinion, what is the fundamental event that moves vision?
P.G. Before breathing, before crying, when we come out of our mother’s bodies, bright light invades us. Sight is the first sense that is unleashed. Birth, in my opinion, is the primary aesthetic experience.
It’s clear that seeing also has to do with control—with being on your guard. So control makes the girl believe she is keeping herself from fragmentation and from her mother’s control.
M.M. How old is the imaginary child we’re talking about, who in order to defend herself “looks”?
P.G. She’s a newborn—a few months old—with her eyes wide open upon a world that has seemingly incomprehensible rules. But her gaze is directed at the world in different ways, throughout life’s various phases.
M.M. What happens on the level of seeing, in your opinion, during this first phase of life?
P.G. I’ll answer you in light of my over-twenty years experience with psychoanalysts, where work on myself as the analyzed has been alternated over the years with studying and researching psychoanalysis and art.
The most important autors show that during the first months of life, a child’s gaze is directed only at her mother, because there is no real distinction between the two. The child perceives her/his mother’s body as if it were her/his own. The psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer carefully
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M.M. Your first hole in the wall, the symbolic equivalent of Mundus, reveals a profound continuity within your work, based on the sublimation of the most ancient betrayal in love. In your case, who disturbed the love relationship?
P.G. It’s clear—my mother. I was convinced I was the only true love of my father’s life. He was an architect. He taught me how to observe,
see colors, their hues, proportions, the geometries among shapes and objects.
M.M. What did your mother teach you?
P.G. She taught me how to listen, especially to my feelings, through sound (sound comes before words, and music is stronger than words). She played classical music on the piano—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy . . . and, like every mother, she carried primordial feelings within her—strong like the lava of volcanoes. She was able to transmit them better through the sound of the piano.
When she played, a state of “unio mystica” was created between ourselves, preserving from the separation the deepest and most ancient part of our relationship.
M.M. In Duchamp’s last work-installation, Étant donnés, from a peephole the observer can spy on a probable killing of a woman-doll, alive-dead, in any event acephalous.
P.G. I never thought it was a killing. But I thought, I’ve always thought that Duchamp suggests we spy on, look at a “perfect sexuality,” man and woman together. The image we catch a glimpse of is a woman with breasts, a vagina, and her hand holds a gas lamp, therefore a phallus, that lights up the scene. This is the real primary scene, the sublime desire of every artist—to look inside the mother figure, reach that secret place. The
psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer calls this place the claustrum and says that “the inside of the mother figure is the place of wealth, connected to primary needs . . . In a word, the place of symbolic formation and therefore art, poetry, imagination.”4
M.M. We might say that Duchamp elaborated a primary scene from a male point of view. Do you think a female artist would see it in another way?
P.G. The creative act searches through the pre-Oedipal unconsciousness and inevitably you’re dealing with the mother’s body. Symbolization can take on any form, even the most abstract, but the desire to probe into the place of origin is universal—it’s the same for both sexes, and both have a never-ending nostalgia for it, even if the results of such a search will be different. I believe that the imagination of a man and a woman, over time,
is structured in a different way, due to many physical-chemical, cultural-social differences.
For example, our culture imposes upon women the sublimation of the primal love relationship with the mother figure. The woman will always remain an exile from this archaic land, since her sexual partner is usually a man.
Julia Kristeva sustains that “for the heterosexual, the mother figure is the rival. This explains the contemporaneous love and hate, both rather violent, with regards to the motherfigure.”5 How can one affirm her/his own identity if the first identity is denied? You need a lot of courage to reformulate maternal geography.
In order to go on “la recherche de ma mère,” one needs to face places of deep hate and deep love.
Oftentimes, it is shocking to discover how much aggression lies hidden behind the most benevolent maternal attention, and that a typical female modality is fragmentation (in speaking, in acting, etc.) given by the removed, strong aggression. The consequences of such a lack of aggression make recognizing her own desires difficult. For the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein says that “there can be no art without aggression . . . you need to be able to access your own impulses for destruction to repair and put together another world.”6
The arduous path of discovering differences through the exploration of the female psyche has brought my work as an artist to uncharted places.
M.M. You talk about “maternal geography.” Can we say that, in your work, each painting is the exploration of a precise part of the overall map?
P.G. In these last years, I began to paint maps of Rome from which a kind of archeology of the self, parts of the female body blossom. Rome was destroyed and rebuilt a countless number of times throughout history. Therefore it is layered and, if “identity is codified on the body by means of a process of psychic mapping”7, in the Piante series it’s as if I want to see what the layers-architectonic identities of Rome hide.
M.M. The uterus-tomb symbolism is a very old literary topos that draws together the concept of death to the female womb—even in its Indo-European linguistic matrix (muttermurder). A recent sculpture of yours in precisely entitled Archeologia del sé. What does your personal psycho-iconic invention consist of with respect to tradition?
P.G. It’s the reawakening of a woman who has just emerged from the earth. I would call her “the one who comes forth,” like the “Gradiva” studied by Freud8. On her shoulders she brings, carries, on her hair-Milky Way the memories of her childhood: her mother’s breast, the small, multi-colored, polka-dot skirt.
M.M. Why is it an out-of-scale sculpture?
P.G. Her hair is 3 meters long, her head is double the normal size. And the breasts, skirt, and womb are double because childhood memories are always larger than life. Memories fool around with size.
M.M. Bodies coming out of the ground are recurrent in Western art. For example, the bodies of the damned that come out of the ground in the frescoes of Luca Signorelli in the Duomo of Orvieto. But you invent a more radical re-surfacing: in addition to the bodies that come out buildings, you’ve invented bodies that come out from the bellies of their own mothers in an anomalous way—even risking piercing. Macchina madre comes to mind . . .
P.G. The painting was executed four years after a pencil drawing I made of it—and I would be so bold as to say the delivery was long. The body’s perimeter is contained by the hairthoughts that are unleashed from the head, as if it were a second skin. In this painting, I try to represent the ph sical and psychic boundaries of a woman and in particular of the mother
figure—a place of turbulence for the imagination of everyone, because her form, her perimeter, her body changes each month. The philosopher Rosi Braidotti says that “the monster and the mother transgress the limits and the form of the model of normal corporeity . . .”9 The woman, as a symbol of difference, is monstrous. If we define a monster as an anomalous being, then we can sustain that the female body shares with the monster the privilege of inducing a singular mix of horror and charm. The logical attraction-repulsion is extremely significant—the psychoanalytical
theory takes it on as the fundamental structure of the desire mechanism.
M.M. If in Macchina madre you show the containment phase, in other works you dismember the female body—you make pieces out of it as if an explosion has taken place somewhere . . .
P.G. The reasons for my splitting are not of an explosive type. I try to discover the splitting we experience every day. The body parts represent
Ego parts. I’m talking about the deconstruction female thought must continuously undergo in order to grow, to find new places, new transformations of the Ego. At times, the body parts are like a coagulated memory, frozen by an imaginary camera, which sets aside a small detail of a very complex and ar- 31 chaic scene. But it is precisely that grain of skin, that color, that gesture that arouses and unleashes that buried memory inside of me—found only after having dug through many layers.
As the archeological finds, it’s hard to find an entire statue or building underground. You find fragments, precisely because it isn’t whole. It forces you to imagine and reconstruct the missing parts. So, whoever looks at my paintings is lured into an elusive “trap.” With effort, I make them become active spectators.
A few let down their defenses by remembering, imagining, making their personal archeologies flow. Others strengthen them.
I’m convinced that art must unleash problems, not resolve them.
M.M. Up to now we’ve mostly talked about the aspects of individual living. But the historical reflection regarding female identity has obtained important results on both the political- social side and the contemporary aesthetics side. What is your position regarding this?
P.G. A woman’s work bears with it—firebranded—all that difficult history from the moment of birth to the moment of self-fulfillment.
And her way of inventing will be influenced by the great contradictions our culture imposes upon her.
Every day, we face a male-structured society and therefore a masculine way of thinking.
One of the fundamental questions in order to begin thinking about new “signs” is: in what way do we fit into this world? The mass media is built according to a male perspective.
The art market is built according to the diktat of this point of view. The result is that still today few female artists dare to “look” because they are female.
M.M. What do you think about the work of the ever-growing number of female artists in this period?
P.G. Cindy Sherman, one of the artists I love most, was able to work in depth on female stereotypes. She knows that seduction has
been our only legitimized power, and in her video stills, she shows us with irony and sarcasm, as Rosalind Krauss says, the “womanas- image,” the “woman as the performance of lack . . .10 and how much this lack is indispensable within society.” But even more so, Sherman has dealt with the dark side of the female soul, where anxiety and fear loom above, thus ultimately revealing the monstrous, the disgusting, the decomposition, the undefined.
Another artist I consider very important is Louise Bourgeois. In her work, the symptom throbs through her body in the place of words, and with sculpture she is able to re-elaborate feelings, memories and close them off in rooms-cages where she leaves body parts. They look like hallucinations
that have taken shape. She has founded a silent language that shouts forcefully, speaks about itself. It sheds light on a corporeal thought common to all women.
M.M. For what reason, in your opinion, have so few women artists emerged in the history of Western art?
P.G. I believe the reason must be sought in the education of girls through history. Throughout the world, deep underestimating of the female gender has been, over the centuries, one of the reasons that in the past it was impossible for women to translate the expression of self into art and spread it outside their homes.
Not by chance, the few historic female artists had to undergo the approval of their father artists or their mentors who found work for them. With great suffering, I’ve noticed, by attending many exhibitions, that even by the most talented female artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi or Elisabetta Sirani, the design of their paintings and in particular both male and
female bodies was of discontinuous quality. Instead, the details of the fabrics and objects were painted and drawn in a sublime and coherent manner—as if caressing with the brush and possessing objects found in the
home was possible. And with bodies, this was difficult, or done with difficulty. In order to paint and draw a proportional body, the mother during childhood must pass on, to the future artist, the experience of understanding the form of one’s own body, of its limits, its emptiness, and as a result its selfproportion. Only this way can one understand the positioning of one’s own body and self in society. And it’s clear that at the time of Sirani
or Gentileschi, this was highly improbable. Instead, when we talk about female artists who lived right before the French Revolution, when the middle classes began giving women an active role, for example Elizabeth
Vigée Le Brun or Angelica Kauffman, the uncertainties in drawing disappeared. You don’t see mistakes with proportions, bodies anymore.
In our times, despite the great advances in improving and evolving deep-rooted patterns, I believe that symptoms, bodily signs that substitute words, in women, are still the privileged place of communication. Not by
chance, among contemporary female artists, the body has been and will be a central theme to be analyzed in-depth.The art critic Rosalind Krauss sustains that, and I’m convinced of this, the third essential opening of contemporary art, alongside the conceptual and media revolution, is female artistic expression.11