effy: a literary magazine

Kat Zagaria

THE PERFORATION PROCESS began long before I met her. At 24 weeks pregnant, I saw the undulating form of a baby, shrouded within her protective cocoon. Her features shifted, uncertain in their sonic rendering, black eyes gleaming out. I peered into endless, alien pupils. She seemed to smile. I saw, unmistakably, my own philtrum’s indentation above her lips. 

Despite seeing the space between my nose and lips every day, I had never consciously registered its shape until encountering it unexpectedly. I imagined my daughter might have thick hair, my hazel eyes, my long face — but my philtrum? I have spent countless seconds, minutes, hours, days registering its precise shape and depth from my peripheral vision until it became a background fact of my being, as undeniable as my heartbeat. Here it was, staring back at me. Something I have looked at every day, yet never seen. The unfamiliar brought it into focus.

That was when I suddenly became We. 

After giving birth, my focus underwent an intuitive split. Seeing through my daughter’s eyes was vital to ensuring she lived. Her needs blurred with my own; there was only us, only our. Overwhelmed by an empathic shift, I struggled to understand my new orientation to everyday life. Holes punctured my concept of self.

Today, she is 14 months old.¹ The yolk of her primacy still coats my mind, oozing into each cerebral fold. My attention forever shattered — dishes pile. Laundry languishes.

The unfinished in our backdrop.

TWO ARTISTS, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Marisa Merz, created work that could never be finished. This was intentional: their oeuvres serve as a collective commentary on the fleeting nature of everyday care. Merz’s practice foregrounded temporary actions focused on her daughter, Beatrice; Laderman Ukeles is best known for her Maintenance Works series, in which she performed everyday labor such as washing sidewalks and steps to draw attention to the menial acts that form the un(der)paid foundation of contemporary society. 

The works of these artists are often characterized as feminist. Such ideological labels become fraught when considering how these artists elevate ordinary acts of domesticity, particularly emphasizing caregiving and motherhood. At worst, works based on these premises risk reifying gendered stereotypes in their foregrounding of the everyday, of care, of parenthood as performed by a feminine body. But Laderman Ukeles and Merz deftly outmaneuver would-be pigeonhole critiques. Through their work, these artists explore the cyclical nature of care, the ambivalence that often accompanies caretaking roles, and care’s inherent unfinishedness.² Their incomplete works bear a striking resemblance to our everyday lives.

LABOR INTERRUPTED MY unconscious sense of my body as my own. It started as a full-body rash whose burning and itching threatened my sanity, consuming my legs until only blemished skin remained. An induction and three failed epidurals culminated in my daughter’s decelerated heartbeat and my eventual C-section. A week after giving birth, I would experience postpartum pre-eclampsia. 

Amidst all that, I do not remember my daughter’s birth. I know that what once tethered us is now severed. But I am unable to consider us as separate. After all, I never saw her leave me. I held her in the hospital — impossibly perfect, my incongruity.

 When I met her, I realized I had always known her. She is me, I am her. I/We.

MARRISA MERZ CAREFULLY arranged her art as the ocean wind tossed it. The object was a chain of stitches, shaped to spell “BEA.” Her looped, precarious string holds its fragile form with strategically placed needles. Photographer Claudio Abate took a picture of this work on the occasion of the 1968 exhibition, Arte Povera + Azioni. In his image, the sun glints off the sand just beyond the letters.

The Amalfi exhibition featured twenty artists and left a mark on contemporary art. Today, arte povera is recognized as a movement that foregrounded the use of everyday materials and eschewed the separation between art and life. Its practitioners lauded the temporary, emphasizing actions we might more readily recognize as performances today. 

Abate photographed three other works by Merz on the beach that day. The letters that form Bea were — intentionally? unintentionally? — carried off by the sea. In another image, waves foam just beyond Merz’s Scarpette (tiny crocheted shoes). Her artwork seems haphazardly placed, left behind in a moment of coastal exuberance. Each of these works feels disjointed with the beach setting  — somehow too private, too intimate for the open sky, threatened by the salted air. They suggest a laying bare of domesticity, an ode to temporality.

Merz is the only member of the arte povera movement whose work often featured her child.

MY DAUGHTER ARRIVED under the veil of maternal twilight consciousness. I experienced meeting her as I would a stranger. She was entirely helpless and, against all reason and experience, entrusted to my care. 

Blue eyes peered at me from behind the plastic of the bassinet while I lay next to her in my hospital gown. How many times have I laid next to a stranger, both of us filthy, bound by an intimate experience but nothing more? It’s a cold way of knowing, carnal, bodily, but soulless. We are unsure what to do with ourselves when we are no longer entangled.

Does sharing a body equate knowing? Our eyes have shields, passively curious, but care and its recognition elude our gaze. We do not know each other. The maternity ward is a waiting room, and I recline next to a stranger.

I am just learning our duet. My hands fumble, and I play the wrong notes. I am certain this time she needs to nurse, but no, it is a diaper. My body does not cooperate; my milk floods her gullet, and she sputters and coughs. When she sleeps, I lie next to her, locked in a vivid labor flashback. Her cry jolts me back to this moment. I anxiously stumble through her needs, nervous system aroused. 

My body helps her, but I watch from outside myself. I am quiet. Disengaged. Dissociated. 

I cannot feel the music. It permeates my ears but I am not listening. I am methodical. I latch onto schedules — how many hours has she slept? What does that mean for her day? How many diapers is she producing? When are her wake windows? — anything clinical can obscure my feelings. I manufacture distance from a baby that needs proximity through fastidiousness, because I am not capable of giving her my entirety. Not yet.

AT MONTH 4, she smiles. My haze is shattered. Something has broken through. She sees my struggle. She cares. I did not expect her to, I told myself I didn’t need her to, but she has witnessed my (e)motions nonetheless. I understand her cries. This one is hunger. That one, rare and high, is pain — teeth. She cues me, I respond. We coregulate, breathing together.

Gradually, I attuned to her rhythms. Our movements synchronized in a call and response. Cry, change, nurse, rock, sleep, repeat. We learned to cure one another. Immersed in our harmony, I forgot my solo completely.

MARISA MERZ IS known for a particular work titled Living Sculpture. It is a massive form composed of layers of stapled tinfoil. The sculpture’s many parts are shaped as rings and can be easily disassembled. The work grew from one central organism, which was installed and continuously added to in the Merz home. In photographs from 1968, the mother sculpture peeks out from behind an oven vent, crawls behind a television. In its enormity, the sculpture eludes perception. Its scale bucks against the nanometer thinness of Merz’s material. Living Sculpture is at once this and that: nearly sheer in one dimension yet engulfing in all others. The work billows and moves. It dances somewhere beyond the realm of solidity to which most monumental sculpture hews.

Merz stated that the work is an index of her time caring for Beatrice. Living Sculpture’s portability often meant it was found outside the Merz home, representing its artist in the galleries of Turin. Today, international museums carry iterations of Living Sculpture. But the artist’s home-based creative process and family-oriented conceptual impetus feel at odds with such institutional placements. Living Sculpture occupies a uniquely liminal space, teetering somewhere between a site-specific work — one informed by and created in its setting — and a more traditional work that leaves the studio for the gallery. 

When it departed the home, the journey of the Living Sculpture was often documented, creating new avenues for environmental interpretation. Merz frequently hung the sculpture in trees or in other ways that asserted its biomimicry, threatening the object’s fragile material. It cut a stark contrast, this mechanically produced humble reflective material stretching its limbs among a tree’s branches. Inside the home, Living Sculpture radiated claustrophobia. Out in public, it was out of place in both aesthetic and substance. No matter its environment, it was uncertain of its footing, a material manifestation of being tied to a child in strange and incommunicable ways. 

MY CONCEPT OF SELF was severed, but I did not feel pain upon our separation.

My silhouette shifted, deflating — snatching? — inflating elsewhere. I was torn open, now visibly repaired. When nursing, she pulled me out of my self. I became her, growing her with each meal. Connected, once again. I/We.

We are a new two-body problem, each yearning for containment.

I begin to use “we” instead of “her.” At first, it’s cute. But I know it’s also more accurate. I understand and express what she cannot. I use collective and singular pronouns interchangeably to the detriment of all conversation; our specificity slips away as the listener tries to grasp our meaning.

My corporeal form has gained porosity. I am We.

We are blissfully unbound and unraveling. A self feels so antiquated, stodgy. We are two drops of water, parts of a larger tide, ebbing and flowing. Flowing.

The home cannot contain us. We venture out, but feel out of place. Nowhere really wants us. We’ve forgotten something. — diapers, a snack, a change of clothes for her, a change of clothes for me. We are dirty again. We go back to the house, and become stir crazy again. It is raining. We cannot take a walk. She screams and points at the door.

LIVING SCULPTURE CANNOT be separated from the era in which it was created: a time when inexpensive kitchen appliances, often clad in chrome, were imported from the United States to Italy. Against such a backdrop, the work exudes a kind of domestic terror in which an ever-encroaching being takes over the home, devoid of life yet breathing, swallowing more and more space.³ Its composition of a material most readily associated with food preparation evokes gendered roles. In both post-war Italy and today’s increasingly egalitarian society, one person disproportionately performs the care of the kitchen and its functions. The partner who shoulders the burden is often also responsible for childcare. Merz draws a direct line between these laborious environments when she recognizes the sculpture as an index of Beatrice’s care.

Her commentary denoting the work as a kind of archive is frequently regarded in jest, but to take her words lightly undermines Living Sculpture’s analogy. It is not a direct register of hours but rather an emotional corollary of Merz’s experience, giving form to a suffocation of personhood. 

Years prior, chrome-clad furnishings proliferated in Western interwar homes. Interior designers such as Donald Deskey rushed to pair metallic surfaces with handmade items. Ceramics and textiles softened the otherwise austere and sterile appearance of stainless steel. Thirty years later, Merz drenches her home in the mirrored veil, giving visual manifestation to the anxiety accompanying a distorted reflection, always watching, stalking its creator and her family.

Living Sculpture is a gluttonous excess of malleable, shimmering material — preserving what, exactly? Its scale in the home foregrounds the inhospitality of metallic ambitions, highlighting an increasingly mechanized interior landscape as at odds with harmonious domesticity. It offers a larger commentary on the gendered, domestic submission to automaton: shiny, beautiful, and in service of the care and preservation of another thing.

HONEY-SCENTED CRIES fill my ears.

My 1-year-old daughter cannot differentiate between need and want. Her current object of desire is another dose of Zarbee’s infant cough syrup. The bee on its box taunts her: all sweetness, no sting.

I cannot see daylight between necessity and nicety either. I categorize her presence and happiness as a need for me. My mind sees understanding her presence as a want to be preposterous, as if I am trying to convince myself that 2+2=5. Ridiculous. I need her. (The inverse I recognize as accurate as well — if I quiet a nagging “she’d probably be fine without you” and “you don’t know what you’re doing.”) Her happiness is paramount to my breathing.

My mental rewiring is complete. Ancient synaptic circuits trace their familiar route, etched indelibly into grey matter.

ART HISTORIAN TERESA Kittler describes Merz’s practice as a “performance reimagined, privately, intimately and away from the audience, camera shy, mute, her back turned.”⁴ This idea may be why, in 1967, the artist refused to give a traditional interview to the Italian art journal Notizia Arte Contemporanea. While the issue features Merz’s arte povera contemporaries pontificating on their views of what was important in art, Merz not only refused but instead provided NAC with a transcript of a conversation with her daughter on what to eat for lunch. 

Marissa: Bea, why did you change what you want from panettone to boiled potato and mayonnaise?

Bea: You’re asking me why I changed what I want? Since the panettone is not there it remains only an idea, instead the boiled potato is there, therefore it is real.

Marissa: Wasn’t your desire for panettone real?

Bea: Yes it was real but I could not eat panettone, so I could not satisfy my real desire. Instead, with the boiled potato and mayonnaise I can satisfy my desire, which is also real.⁵

THE INTERVIEW IS often cited as emblematic of Merz’s eschewing of the wider contemporary art establishment — another example of the artist’s humor at the audience’s expense. But such an understanding is reductive at best. While her contemporaries accepted the invitation to interview at face value, Merz had effectively submitted a piece of art to the magazine. In alignment with arte povera values, Merz collapses any distance between the everyday, the interview, and art. Other artists in the movement made careers by bringing everyday materials into the gallery. Merz questions the utility of this unidirectional application of the movement’s philosophy. She endeavors to break apart arte povera’s dominant schema by bringing conceptual art into her life, as well as that of those she encounters — family and journalists alike.

Merz does not permit an interview. Her refusal to participate creates a stopgap in time. The artist’s dialogue itself is a musing on the uncertain nature of desire and our inability to feel satisfied. Satisfaction eludes us as repetition inevitably consumes, asserting the oroborus of the quotidian.

MY daughter nurses.

ARTE POVERA REJECTED what it saw as an encroaching tide of consumerism, utilizing postwar excesses when material critique was demanded, but otherwise privileging temporary actions. Such a focus on ephemeral moments and rejection of decorative opulence caused the movement’s works to mimic everyday life.

Nothing ever reaches a complete state in life. There are cycles of creation and consumption, but the everyday is an ongoing process. Merz recognized the stasis inherent in completion as something alien to her experience. 

I WAS BORN after my mother’s successful kidney transplant, necessitated by complications from her autoimmune disease, lupus nephritis. The pregnancy put stress on her transplant, which she lost. She went on dialysis to manage, blood cleaned of toxins through mechanical osmosis. A bacterial infection landed her in a coma when I was ten. She emerged after three months, no longer able to drive, write on a line, or do multiplication. Spells of vertigo plagued her. Her bones snapped easily when she fell, brittle from years of steroid use to keep the disease at bay. She had a hip and knee replaced in quick succession. 

That was her disease. But in its grip, there was her.

She loved to bake. She listened to jazz and collected teapots. She exuded a calm wonder about the world around her, content to meditate in a field until butterflies landed on her.⁶ (With my clumsy hiking and excitable nature, I could never.) 

She also loved art and insisted we see the latest exhibits. We journeyed through the Lincoln tunnel, braving New York City traffic till we reached an accessible entrance. We moved through the halls, me pushing her wheelchair. 

When home from school and my father still at work, I cooked and cleaned for her. I held her hands as she hobbled down our hallway. I helped her dress, showing her where jacket sleeves were when rheumatoid arthritis robbed her fingertips of their touch. I shoehorned similarly numb heels into her orthopedic SAS sneakers. 

This is care work—work that I continue now, with my daughter. She is learning to stretch out her arms into shirtsleeves and place her feet into pant legs. I cook bizarre meals for someone who cannot have refined sugar and lacks teeth: carrot waffles, tuna quinoa bites. Sometimes, she eats what I make. She marvels at her shiny, gold sneakers as I tie their laces.

My mother died when I was 19 due to complications from her disease. Our relationship will always be unfinished, cut short by lupus. 

Today, I juggle bringing my daughter to art galleries and lectures. I am once again navigating these institutions with a mobility device—albeit a stroller instead of a wheelchair—and an immediate relative who needs my care. I wonder: What is the precise point at which the institutional and the domestic intertwine? Where does the domestic institution manifest?

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES maintained an artistic practice focused on the labor inherent in domesticity. She paid particular attention to the unseen work that enables contemporary life, advocating for the prioritization of feminine labor in an institutional context. Pieces such as Proposal for an Exhibition: “CARE,” epitomize this concept. 

In it, Laderman Ukeles wrote:

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother.
(random order).
I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking,
renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now
separately) I “do” Art…My working will be the work.⁷

Laderman Ukeles is not the first to propose carrying out the act of mothering within an exhibition context.⁸ However, her CARE exhibition proposal goes beyond simply recognizing motherhood. The manifesto’s first line — “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (random order)” — hints at the jumbled confusion of identity heralded by parenthood. Laderman-Ukeles proposes a collapse of personas, underlining how caregiving is inseparable from professional artistic life. 

“CARE” outlines a project that flattens all distance between the institution and the domestic. The proposition is radical, honoring the artist’s own labor of motherhood as a continually creative and artistic act, worthy of being understood by a broader public and her professional peers as creative labor. Simultaneously, she equates this act with other unseen moments of labor that occur under the auspices of the institution, such as floor mopping and dusting. 

Laderman-Ukeles locates in these actions maligned and hidden aspects that underpin society, moments of work too often met with ambivalence and ingratitude. Like reconciling her myriad identities, she argues for comfort in understanding the interconnected facets of care work. She fashions them into an artistic performance, reducing the distance between them. While the exhibition has a distinct duration, care work is ongoing, existing before a show’s inception and continuing long after. By basing her art on the hidden tasks that enable everyday life, Laderman Ukeles advocates for eliminating distinctions between skilled, unskilled, paid, and unpaid labor. She recognizes all as art, all as worthy of gratitude, none as unworthy of a place in the gallery.

Inklings of future works, which Laderman Ukeles would become well known for, are here. She would go on to create many works of Maintenance Art (1973), in which she washed the steps of museums. She continued her veneration of those whose work often goes unnoticed yet enables modern society with pieces such as Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), in which she shook the hands of 8,500 sanitation workers in New York City, thanking them. Art critic Lucy Lippard recognizes the physical aspect of Touch Sanitation as “linked to childcare, and to caring in general.”⁹ Not coincidentally, Lippard titled an essay on Laderman Ukeles “Never Done” — a nod to the unfinished nature inherent to care work.

MY PARTNER IS away, and my daughter has just visited the doctor. I am her solo caregiver this week. She has been diagnosed with a double ear infection and some sort of bronchitis, needing a nebulizer treatment every four hours for the next two days. It is her first time encountering the machine, and she screams; its mask registering as a sort of torture device. I must hold her flailing arms down, press her whipping head against me, and place the mask on her face. She wails louder.

The next morning, I write out a schedule for us.

• 6:30 AM: Nebulizer, diaper, nurse
• 7:30 AM: Breakfast
• 8:30 AM: Diaper
• 9 AM: Snack
• 10:30 AM: Diaper, nebulizer
• 11 AM: Lunch
• 12:30 PM: Diaper, nap
• 2:30 PM: Diaper, nebulizer
• 3 PM: Snack
• 4 PM: Start Dinner
• 5 PM: Dinner
• 6:30 PM: Nebulizer
• 7 PM: Bed

I will revise this several times during the day, until only a scratched-out, wrinkled piece of paper remains.

LADERMAN UKELES REFERRED to motherhood as “unfathomable care.” She wrote of how a baby’s metabolism is three times faster than that of an adult. “That means that the mother must calibrate herself to a completely different time and space world that [sic] the one she lives in. Isn’t that sculpture? Moving into an expanded-defined space beyond ourselves.”¹⁰ 

I recognize this space.

It is in this reflection that I locate the clearest parallel between Merz’s and Laderman Ukeles’s artistic practices. Both created art within an expanded definition of sculpture, considering the discipline one in which the artist and audience’s perception of space and time is shifted beyond themselves.

As early performance art practitioners, arte povera’s adherents operate within this framework; their azioni seamlessly integrate art and life. Merz’s Bea on the Amalfi beach exists between sculpture and performance — but is closely aligned with Laderman Ukeles’s reflection in its enthrallment with motherhood. It is an example of the perceptual shift within the artist moving to the audience — an object/action destabilizing one’s space and time. Both artists engender in their respective audiences a sense of unmooring. This unsteadiness mimics the questions of selfhood that arise in caregiving contexts.

If perceptual shift is the goal of sculpture, then gestation, birth, and caregiving are monumental works, dwarfing even Merz’s Living Sculpture in their capaciousness. They hold within them the potential to unseat even the most firmly rooted, self-aware individuals.

UNFINISHED ARTWORK STRIKES me as more inherently truthful, acting as a corollary to everyday life Merz and Laderman Ukeles championed the temporality of the everyday and asserted their place as individuals through its uplifting. When artwork focuses on that which is fleeting, it undermines the heterodoxy of the idea that an artwork is something permanent, made to outlast its maker.

Merz’s foregrounding of Bea is emblematic of  I/We confusion. Unwilling to separate the creative desires of the self from the creative act of birth, Merz collapses the two. Abate’s documentation of Bea — better considered azioni povera than object — reflects life breaking free from institutional constraints: Motherhood, art, and nature clash.  Bea is the point at which sea foam crashes into domesticity.

Care permeates all we see, yet remains shielded from public scrutiny; it forms the backdrop for our understanding of everyday life. 

I recognize this space.

My daughter nurses.

Motherhood exudes unfathomable joy and unfathomable exhaustion simultaneously. My words spill over one another on my tongue, my mind unable to bring their contours into focus. I need to breathe; I need the wailing to stop. I pull her close to me, and she latches. Golden colostrum kintsugies us together again, and again, and again.

1. Never has grammar felt so incomplete; better to express her age as I would in a romance language — she “has” 14 months, alluding to so much more growth, to the development she collects with the passage of time. ↩︎
2. Once again, grammar fails me. Task, act, action — these are all things that can be completed. Care cannot; its nature is ongoing. ↩︎
3. Indeed, Beatrice would recall being afraid of the sculpture. ↩︎
4. Kittler, Teresa. “Marisa Merz.” In Entrare Nell’opera: Processes and Performative Attitudesin Arte Povera, edited by Nike Bätzner, Maddalena Disch, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Valentina Pero, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, and Musée d’art moderne Saint-Etienne, 178–82. Köln, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2019. 182. ↩︎
5. Bandini, Mirella. “Marisa Merz in conversation with Beatrice Merz.” Notizario Arte Contemporanea, 1973. 10. Translation my own. ↩︎
6. An actual memory of mine, I believe from a visit to the Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center in Far Hills, New Jersey. ↩︎
7. Laderman Ukeles, Mierle. “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” 1969. Heading II, subpoint A. Mierle Laderman Ukeles papers, 1965-2018; Series 1: Project Files, circa 1966-2018, Box 1, Folder 2. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/mierle-laderman-ukeles-papers-21742/series-1/box-1-folder-2 ↩︎
8. See the work of artist Lea Lublin, who presented Mon Files (My Son) in Paris in May 1968, a monthlong exhibition and performance during which the artist cared for her newborn son in the Gallery, installing a crib under one of her paintings. ↩︎
9. Lippard, Lucy. “Never Done: Women’s Work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles.” In Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, by Patricia C. Phillips, Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, and Laura Raicovich, 10–13. New York: Prestel, 2016. ↩︎
10. Laderman Ukeles, Mierle. “Mothering,” 1969. Mierle Laderman Ukeles papers, 1965-2018; Series 1: Project Files, circa 1966-2018, Box 83, Folder 20. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/mierle-laderman-ukeles-papers-21742/series-1/box-1-folder-2 ↩︎

---

Kat Zagaria is a curator, writer, and mother. Her exhibitions and writing examine the intersection of these three identities. She is based in Maine but hails from New Jersey. She is particularly interested in what is left unfinished: in parenthood, in art, in life.