The Scatological Disembodiment of Tala Madani’s
Shit Mom

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Tala Madani, Shit Mom Animation (video still) (2021). Single-channel video with color and sound, 7 minutes and 45 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tala Madani’s paintings and animations drip with unmentionable visions: enormous erupting penises that overwhelm their handlers, men engorging and cavorting with frosted cakes, wanton imbeciles ogling young girls. In one particularly potent animation, a growing embryo watches from inside the womb as a spectral projection of the world’s violent history unfolds before its virgin eyes. In response, the fetus wields a hidden pistol and shoots at this uterine cinema, wounding its mother’s body, now marred with luminescent, confetti-like holes. While not explicitly a commentary on matricide, The Womb (2019) represents one of Madani’s many references to the ways that patriarchal cycles of violence ravage the maternal figure.

Patriarchs generally account for Madani’s most recognizable subjects: These bald, unkempt, fleshy, and semi-naked middle-aged men defile her canvases with their bizarre and maniacal pursuits, suggesting deranged carnivals of noxious hypermasculinity. Within this context, her depictions of more innocent characters, such as children and babies, deliver fresh discomforts. In Blackboard (Further Education) (2021), a line of schoolchildren marches into the jaws of a prone giant and emerges from its anus as graduates clothed in caps and gowns, a damning view of the pedagogical obedience demanded by our contemporary educational institutions. In the series Abstract Pussies (2013–19), a giant girl—a young child—sits with her legs agape as a gaggle of miniature men gather at her feet and attempt to peer beneath her skirt. While the male gawkers’ twisted antics vary between the paintings (in one, they all villainously don 3-D glasses), their backs almost always face the viewer, framing their vantage point as our own. This shared perspective implicates us in their exploits, a grating realization that violates the decorum of our assumed neutrality as viewers —a brilliant subversion on the part of the artist. Pointed in their wickedness, Madani’s unholy tableaus allegorize the rampant perversions of our patriarchal culture, supposing our own complicity.

Despite their lurking dangers, Madani’s paintings revel in their materiality, offering interludes of tangible pleasure that dually blunt and amplify their enclosed horrors. Often, this haptic handling of paint actually functions as the key to the work’s discomfiting tone: Her slick, goopy marks frequently reveal—or rather, become—spurting fountains of semen, blood, breastmilk, skin, urine, and feces, firmly situating the abject as a key component to the language of her work. In philosopher Julia Kristeva’s eminent 1980 text on abjection, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, she conceives of the abject (particularly with regard to the body) as that which has been cast off and displaced from its original subjecthood, disrupting its meaning. Our encounters with the abject, according to Kristeva, arouse psychologically dissonant states of familiarity, unfamiliarity, attraction, and repugnance—like beholding a corpse or an open wound.¹ Here, by rendering the viscous byproducts of the body as luscious, painterly gestures, Madani coaxes the viewer into this potent territory of abjection, severing the self from its carnal blueprint and commingling aesthetic arousal with repulsion.

Of the range of fluids that Madani reproduces in her work, it is her depiction of feces, arguably the vilest of the bodily excretions, that commands the most conceptual attention. In her series of paintings and animations, Shit Mom (2019–present), Madani disrupts simple, earnest scenes of motherhood by deconstructing the mother’s body, rendering her with unbecoming smears of dismal brown paint—a material surrogate for shit. In fact, this maternal figure is so gesturally laden with feces that she becomes excrement: Her physical body mercilessly dissolves into the muck, an exorcism that recasts her as a shadowy, scatological form. Despite her abject swampiness (she often pools into drippy piles before rearticulating herself), this mother-shaped being continues to enact the sacred duties of motherhood. Although this narrative accommodates a textbook Freudian reading, which posits the mother as an abject figure necessarily cast off by the child in the creation of their discrete self, Madani’s shit mom instead interrogates, through a feminist lens, the condition of motherhood as both a patriarchal institution and a deeply intimate existential state. (Indeed, shit mom doesn’t actually “appear” gendered; in Madani’s series, in which caregiving status is up for examination, female identity is not a prerequisite for being a mother.) These works also exhibit a tender, comical, and sometimes biting reverence for the hermetic and largely uncategorizable psychosocial experience that motherhood entails—an experience often opined and more often misunderstood within wider cultural discourse.

Motherhood is a paradoxical enigma, a contingent state of being that accounts for one of the most extraordinary yet unblinkingly ordinary phenomena of human existence. It is often mired in grueling mundanity, its complexities flattened or dismissed. A mother who gives voice to these dichotomies, or who struggles to adhere to the beneficent image of a Madonna, becomes a taboo—she’s a shit mom. At the beginning of Adrienne Rich’s totemic treatise on motherhood, Of Woman Born (1986), she scrutinizes this dilemma with the astute observation that “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”² This denigration, Rich emphasizes, stems from the historically persistent, male-driven omission of motherhood as a topic of scholarship and meaningful philosophical discourse. Despite being firmly interwoven with the patriarchal social order, motherhood is an island—its contours form in quiet obscurity, emanating from the primal bond that comprises the inner sanctum of the mother-child relationship. Perhaps this accounts for the isolation of Madani’s shit mom, depicted either with her children as her sole companions or completely alone.

Tala Madani, Biscuits (installation view) (2022–23). Images courtesy of the artist and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photos: Jeff McLane.

Tala Madani, Biscuits (installation view) (2022–23). Images courtesy of the artist and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photos: Jeff McLane.

Echoing this isolation, Madani’s soon-to-close mid-career retrospective at MOCA, Biscuits, confines most of the Shit Mom series to its own small gallery, a cloistered space sheathed in a verdant leafy wallpaper—an adornment that domesticates the white cube—which the artist has sullied with brushstrokes of metaphorical shit. This feces-besmirched installation mirrors Shit Mom Animation (2021), which depicts a dung-bound maternal figure wandering alone in an elaborate house, leaving a trail of brown marks clinging to every surface she grazes. While these indexical traces point to the dangers of her imperfections—every shitty parental mishap might be indelibly cataloged by a noisy social choir, or worse, by the child’s own psyche—these gestures also posit the mother as a mark-maker, a progenitor of life and culture. Despite this life-bestowing power, the tendencies of patriarchal culture nonetheless seep through these stool-smeared walls, weaponizing shit mom’s alleged imperfections as generators of maternal guilt and self-doubt, feeding the mother’s isolation, and poisoning potential articulations of maternal power—collective articulations, in particular.

Thus, as shit mom hovers between abject form and formlessness, she also inhabits the liminal space of perpetual waiting—waiting as she breastfeeds (Nature Nurture, 2019), waiting as the children play (Shit Mom [Recess], 2019)—and she does so alone. Inherently static, the act of waiting freezes forward momentum and keeps the mother entangled in the narrow confines of domesticity. In her potent 2007 essay, “Feminist Mothering,” Andrea O’Reilly asserts the political implications of this socially conditioned, inward-facing conception of motherhood. “In defining mothering as private and nonpolitical work,” she writes, “patriarchal motherhood restricts the way mothers can and do affect social change.…The dominant ideology also reserves the definition of good motherhood to a select group of women.”³ Privileging social compliance and whiteness, this selective notion of “good” motherhood, of course, stems from conservative definitions of maternity and femininity, meaning that single mothers, impoverished mothers, mothers of color, and mothers with multiple jobs are most susceptible to being derided as shit moms. Referencing this reality, bell hooks advocated for the collective, intersectional harnessing of maternal power, positing what she calls the “homeplace,” the realm of the mother, as a “ site of resistance,” an antidote to “the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression, of sexist domination.”⁴

Madani deftly anthropomorphizes the insidious oppression that O’Reilly and hooks invoke in a trio of works displayed together at MOCA: Shit Mom (Hammock), Pinocchio Rehearsal, and Pinocchio’s Mother (all 2021), small canvases whose scenes unfold in a wood-lined, cabin-like room. In Shit Mom (Hammock), our fecal friend indulges in a moment of childless respite—a highly criticized act—by reclining in a hammock, her body discharging drips and stains on the floor beneath her. In Pinocchio Rehearsal, the forms of six ominously smiling men protrude, ghost-like, from the walls of the same room, their noses elongated—presumably with deceit. Lastly, in Pinocchio’s Mother, shit mom kneels and clutches her child, who is dressed as Pinocchio, as the same phantom patriarchs loom and glare from the wall above in an anxious, voyeuristic drama. Here, Madani suggests that, whether seen or unseen, the malignant forces that define the patriarchal institution of motherhood will infiltrate even the most quotidian of private moments, and before long, the child itself will absorb and mimic its culture’s heteronormative behaviors.

As an unapologetically abject figure, shit mom can ultimately be thought of as a radical rejection of the patriarchy-tinged conception of motherhood that our culture propagates. Indeed, Madani initially conceived of shit mom through a gestural act of negation: In refusing to adopt a saccharine depiction of a Madonna and child—and in a forceful rejection of the art historical precedent for the treatment of the nude female form—she purposefully smeared a painting of a mother and baby, thus birthing shit mom.⁵ In nullifying the body, she garners control of it. (In the words of Rich again, “the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”)⁶ In this vein, shit mom’s disavowal of the body can be understood as a strategy of self-preservation. In her scatological disembodiment, she becomes a physically mercurial and indocile figure, no longer woundable and thus powerful in her repugnance.

As an artistic and literary device, excrement has a rich history of deployment as a symbol of social disruption, from the work of James Ensor, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy to Mary Kelly, whose influential work Post-Partum Document (1973–79) incorporates her son’s soiled diapers as a testament to the dirty labor inherent to both mothering and art-making. Feces represent the paragon of abjection, confusing the barrier between waste and renewal, life and death, and reminding us of our base animality. In a short essay on the scatological, artist Lenore Malen quotes the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in suggesting that “‘all that is taboo, forbidden or sacred is devoured by the digestive tract…in order to reduce it to excrement.’” Malen defines this process as the ultimate “abolition of boundaries.”⁷ Shit, after all, accounts for the most fertile soil, catalyzing the decomposition of old matter—perhaps a metaphorical dissolution of conservative boundaries and staid taboos—and fostering the new. By presenting the maternal figure as a strangely beautiful, putrid pile of feces—one that degenerates and regenerates—Madani severs the intimate lived reality of motherhood from patriarchal oversight, allowing the mother to revel in her innate complexities and reform her body, and parental ethos, to mirror her own feminist decree. Ultimately, this liberatory gesture extends from the personal to the collective. In considering the poetic implications of the collective experience of maternity, poet Alicia Ostriker describes a mother’s metamorphosis “from being a private individual self to being a portion of something else” as a totemic realization: “I had the sense of being below the surface, where the islands are attached to each other.”⁸ If we posit motherhood as such an island—a space defined by its isolation—the understanding that it connects to a larger ecosystem can be revolutionary.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 31.

Tala Madani, Shit Mom (Feedback) (2021). Oil on linen, 72 × 108 inches. Collection of the Long Museum, Shanghai. Image courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Tala Madani, Pinocchio’s Mother (2021). Oil on linen, 16.25 × 12 × 1 inches. Private collection, Monaco. Image courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Jessica Simmons-Reid (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BA, Brown University) is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. She’s interested in the interstitial space between the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language, as well as the intermingling of poetry and politics. She has contributed essays and reviews to Carla and Artforum, among others.

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