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Topics: Video, Hyperallergic, menstruation, menstrala, Guernica, Cloths, Sexism, Life News, Entertainment News
Art school grad Carina Úbeda Chacana unveiled her exhibition, Cloths, at the Center of Culture and Health in Quillota, Chile late last week and it was composed of a display of five years of her own menstrual fluid along with dangling apples meant to represent her ovulation. As part of the hanging display, Chacana stitched the words “Production,” “Discard,” and “Destroyed” below each of the stains.
While art world watchers are probably not surprised by the concept or the execution, the mainstream world still reacts with shock at the thought that anyone would consider menstrual blood or a woman’s menstrual cycle the subject or material for art.
London’s Daily Mail published one of the first stories about the show in the English-speaking world and their commenters seem outraged, with one Floridian commenter with the handle redhigheels55 exclaiming: ”Not art! Just disgusting and scary to think that the public would go for something so nauseating.”
Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman went one step further than the Daily Mail article and titled his post, “Woman Puts Five Years of Menstrual Blood on Display at ‘Art Show’,” using scare quotes around the all important term ‘art show’ — it isn’t really art, he seems to suggest in his typical boorish style.
Others were even more repulsed, but on the internet, where people can comment under a perceived veil of anonymity, that’s not very surprising.
What many people may not realize is that there’s a long history of female artists, I have to admit that I don’t know a single male artist in this category, who use menstrual blood in their art. In fact, there’s even a name for it nowadays, Menstrala. The term was coined by artist Vanessa Tiegs and has been adopted by a few bloggers and Livejournal groups, though has yet to cross over into mainstream acceptance.
The topic has even been the subject of reviews, essays, discussions, and art history. Last month, writing in Guernica, EJ Dickson explained the expected responses to Menstrala:
If you look on the Internet at menstrual artists’ websites, the negative responses to their work generally fall into one of two camps: people either find it disgusting and unhygienic, or they think it is hippy-dippy feminist nonsense.
I asked Dickson why she thought many people continue to be repulsed by the notion of Menstrala:
I guess I understand why some people would be squeamish about menstrual art, just as they’d be squeamish about artists using other bodily fluids (urine, semen, etc.) in their work. What I don’t understand is why menstrual art produces such a uniquely visceral response, particularly in men. When I told my male friends I was reporting this piece [on Menstrala for Guernica], they all reacted with abject disgust, even though a lot of these dudes were art history nerds and were familiar with Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, the Italian dude who canned his own shit whose name I forget, etc. This was in stark contrast to my female friends, who mostly responded with a mixture of curiosity and even awe (like “wow, I wish I was brave enough to do that”).
I think people continue to be repulsed by menstrual art because menstruation is one of the last taboos in our culture. For some reason (I’m betting on sexism), people are totally OK with having every other bodily function out in the open (I’m thinking of the dog semen-eating scene in Van Wilder specifically, but I’m sure I could find more culturally relevant examples, but the concept of women bleeding out of their vaginas assaults our delicate sensibilities. Nobody wants to hear about it, let alone see it. And women who do menstrual art are thrusting it in people’s faces and forcing them to see it. Which is not to say that I think all menstrual art is good, or even important. But you have to admit, it’s pretty ballsy.
So, here we are again, confronted with sexism that allows us to watch a 2002 film of a frat brother eat dog semen as comedy gold but menstrual fluid continues to gross people out. When Piero Manzoni packaged his feces into cans in the 1960s or when Warhol urinated on paintings in the 1970s or 80s, the shock eventually dissipated, but women using menstrual fluid continues to raise eyebrows even though it has been going on for decades.

Judy Chicago, “Menstruation Bathroom” (1972) (viaperiodtumblr.tumblr.com)
In 1972, Judy Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom” installation featured a bin overflowing with bloodied menstrual products, it was part of a generation of works that probed feminist ideals of women’s art, women’s lives, and the blurring of the boundaries between private and public. Fastforward 40 years and simply being a woman and revealing the natural processes of the female body continues to be a revolutionary act in some circles. The fight for women to assert their bodies on their own terms as a central subject continues.
The evolution of art that uses menstruation fluid has not been a smooth road, Dickson explains the perception quite succinctly in her Guernica essay:
When Chicago’s piece was first exhibited, menstrual-themed art was considered subversive, an innovative way of bringing a social taboo to the forefront of cultural conversation. Yet it has since acquired a reputation as a pretentious gimmick, intended solely for shock value. The satirical Wikipedia website Encyclopedia Dramatica, for instance, has an entry on menstrual painting, calling it “the practice where women paint shitty, terrible pictures … and get asspats for being liberated.” Menstrual art’s reputation as an amateurish gimmick was cemented with the 2001 cult film Ghost World, in which a dippy art teacher (Ileana Douglas) praises a dimwitted student’s final piece, a tampon in a teacup. “It’s a response to a woman’s right to choose, which is something I feel super-strongly about,” the student cheerily says.

Artist Zanele Muholi’s “Ummeli” (2011) is a digital print on cotton rag of a digital collage of menstrual blood stains. (via blankprojects.com)
People’s discomfort with menstrual blood is well documented, and it may have even been the cause of Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s divorce to his wife Effie Gray, and Pliny the Elder’s reference to it in his Natural History: A Selection makes you wonder if he ever even saw any:
“Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.”
In Lauren Rosewarne’s book Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Televisionshe outlines that there’s a “general cultural imperative to keep menstruation hidden, there is an even more specific demand to keep it hidden from men” (italics hers). She also explains, early in her book, that psychologists acknowledge that the experience is shrouded in secrecy for women but some are quick to point out that the concealment is a reinforcement of the stigmatization of menstruation. Hence, many pop cultural references — and even art works like Chicago’s, I might add — that deal with the topic of menstruation relegate the bodily function to the bathroom, which is a space that is often gendered and segregated. More recent work, at least in the art world, often removes the connotation of a bathroom into a more neutral space like the gallery’s white box — is this part of the coming out of Menstrala into a more public space?
While in pop culture menstruation is often mentioned, usually in a negative light, it is noticeable that menstrual blood is seldom present. The presence of blood can even be perceived as dangerous, as this Russian Tampax commercial suggests:
In contrast to its absence in pop culture, in the art world, menstrual blood tends to be front and center in discussions of menstruation. Perhaps it is our culture’s fascination with making the hidden processes of the world transparent or our need to examine what others choose to ignore. As artist Vanessa Teigs explained in an interview, “Menstrala simply reminds us that menstrual blood is not invisible, not to women. Menstrual blood is the only blood that is non-violent.” She goes on in another interview to explain that some research suggests our reactions to menstruation are more deep seeded than we might realize and that the words ritual and taboo both derive from the bodily function (“ritual come from r’tu, meaning menstruation in Sanskrit and the word taboo comes from tapua, meaning sacred in Polynesian.”).
Maybe these Menstrala artists know that there is power in revealing something that is considered mysterious, and only when the shock is gone will people simply get over it.
Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascoët
Kerascoët's lovely, delicate pen-and-watercolor art -- all intricate botanicals, big eyes and flowing hair -- gives this fairy story a deceptively pretty finish. You find out quickly, however, that these are the heartless and heedless fairies of folk legend, not the sentimental sprites beloved by the Victorians and Disney fans. A host of tiny hominid creatures must learn to survive in the forest after fleeing their former home -- a little girl who lies dead in the woods. The main character, Aurora, tries to organize the group into a community, but most of her cohort is too capricious, lazy and selfish to participate for long. There's no real moral to this story, which is refreshing in itself, beyond the perpetual lessons that life is hard and you have to be careful whom you trust. Never has ugly truth been given a prettier face.
Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni
Squarzoni is a French cartoonist who makes nonfiction graphic novels about contemporary issues and politics. While finishing up a book about France under Jacques Chirac, he realized that when it came to environmental policy, he didn't know what he was talking about. "Climate Changed" is the result of his efforts to understand what has been happening to the planet, a striking combination of memoir and data that ruminates on a notoriously elusive, difficult and even imponderable subject. Panels of talking heads dispensing information (or Squarzoni discussing the issues with his partner) are juxtaposed with detailed and meticulous yet lyrical scenes from the author's childhood, the countryside where he takes a holiday and a visit to New York. He uses his own unreachable past as a way to grasp the imminent transformation of the Earth. The result is both enlightening and unexpectedly moving.
Here by Richard McGuire
A six-page version of this innovative work by a regular contributor to the New Yorker first appeared in RAW magazine 25 years ago. Each two-page spread depicts a single place, sometimes occupied by a corner of a room, over the course of 4 billion years. The oldest image is a blur of pink and purple gases; others depict hazmat-suited explorers from 300 years in the future. Inset images show the changing decor and inhabitants of the house throughout its existence: family photos, quarrels, kids in Halloween costumes, a woman reading a book, a cat walking across the floor. The cumulative effect is serene and ravishing, an intimation of the immensity of time and the wonder embodied in the humblest things.
Kill My Mother by Jules Feiffer
The legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist delivers his debut graphic novel at 85, a deliriously over-the-top blend of classic movie noir and melodrama that roams from chiaroscuro Bay City to Hollywood to a USO gig in the Pacific theater of World War II. There's a burnt-out drunk of a private eye, but the story is soon commandeered by a multigenerational collection of ferocious women, including a mysterious chanteuse who never speaks, a radio comedy writer who makes a childhood friend the butt of a hit series and a ruthless dame intent on making her whiny coward of a husband into a star. There are disguises, musical numbers and plenty of gunfights, but the drawing is the main attraction. Nobody convey's bodies in motion more thrillingly than Feiffer, whether they're dancing, running or duking it out. The kid has promise.
The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis
This is a weird one, but in the nervy surreal way that word-playful novels like "A Clockwork Orange" or "Ulysses" are weird. The main character, a teenage schoolboy named Scarper Lee, lives in a world where it rains knives and people make their own parents, contraptions that can be anything from a tiny figurine stashable in a pocket to biomorphic boiler-like entities that seem to have escaped from Dr. Seuss' nightmares. Their homes are crammed with gadgets they call gods and instead of TV they watch a hulu-hoop-size wheel of repeating images that changes with the day of the week. They also know their own "death day," and Scarper's is coming up fast. Maybe that's why he runs off with the new girl at school, a real troublemaker, and the obscurely dysfunctional Castro, whose mother is a cageful of talking parakeets. A solid towline of teenage angst holds this manically inventive vision together, and proves that some graphic novels can rival the text-only kind at their own game.
NOBROW 9: It's Oh So Quiet
For each issue, the anthology magazine put out by this adventurous U.K.-based publisher of independent graphic design, illustration and comics gives 45 artists a four-color palette and a theme. In the ninth issue, the theme is silence, and the results are magnificent and full of surprises. The comics, each told in images only, range from atmospheric to trippy to jokey to melancholy to epic to creepy. But the two-page illustrations are even more powerful, even if it's not always easy to see how they pertain to the overall concept of silence. Well, except perhaps for the fact that so many of them left me utterly dumbstruck with visual delight.
Over Easy by Mimi Pond
When Pond was a broke art student in the 1970s, she took a job at a neighborhood breakfast spot in Oakland, a place with good food, splendid coffee and an endlessly entertaining crew of short-order cooks, waitresses, dishwashers and regular customers. This graphic memoir, influenced by the work of Pond's friend, Alison Bechdel, captures the funky ethos of the time, when hippies, punks and disco aficionados mingled in a Bay Area at the height of its eccentricity. The staff of the Imperial Cafe were forever swapping wisecracks and hopping in and out of each other's beds, which makes them more or less like every restaurant team in history. There's an intoxicating esprit de corps to a well-run everyday joint like the Imperial Cafe, and never has the delight in being part of it been more winningly portrayed.
The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew
You don't have to be a superhero fan to be utterly charmed by Yang and Liew's revival of a little-known character created in the 1940s by the cartoonist Chu Hing. This version of the Green Turtle, however, is rich in characterization, comedy and luscious period detail from the Chinatown of "San Incendio" (a ringer for San Francisco). Hank, son of a mild-mannered grocer, would like to follow in his father's footsteps, but his restless mother (the book's best character and drawn with masterful nuance by Liew) has other ideas after her thrilling encounter with a superhero. Yang's story effortlessly folds pathos into humor without stooping to either slapstick or cheap "darkness." This is that rare tribute that far surpasses the thing it celebrates.
Shoplifter by Michael Cho
Corinna Park, former English major, works, unhappily, in a Toronto advertising agency. When the dissatisfaction of the past five years begins to oppress her, she lets off steam by pilfering magazines from a local convenience store. Cho's moody character study is as much about city life as it is about Corinna. He depicts her falling asleep in front of the TV in her condo, brooding on the subway, roaming the crowded streets after a budding romance goes awry. Like a great short story, this is a simple tale of a young woman figuring out how to get her life back, but if feels as if it contains so much of contemporary existence -- its comforts, its loneliness, its self-deceptions -- suspended in wintery amber.
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
This collection of archetypal horror, fairy and ghost stories, all about young girls, comes lushly decked in Carroll's inky black, snowy white and blood-scarlet art. A young bride hears her predecessor's bones singing from under the floorboards, two friends make the mistake of pretending to summon the spirits of the dead, a family of orphaned siblings disappears one by one into the winter nights. Carroll's color-saturated images can be jagged, ornate and gruesome, but she also knows how to chill with absence, shadows and a single staring eye. Literary readers who cherish the work of Kelly Link or the late Angela Carter's collection, "The Bloody Chamber," will adore the violent beauty on these pages.
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