Facebook Sucks, But Not Milky Breasts It Seems

Facebook is apparently deleting some photos of mothers breastfeeding their kids, according to this here article 'Facebook ban incurs 'lactivist' wrath'! And not only that but 'In addition to removing particular photos from the site, Facebook has permanently revoked the membership of some of the mothers.' Blah blah blah, something about them being 'obscene', blah blah blah. Grrrr!

Inducing Endurance Piece

Am thinking of upping the ante with the induced lactation project, and see how far I can push it. Its hard to find time to pump and drink milk thistle and take meds on time when working on other things- always having to sneak into toilets in your lunchbreakwith your pump in your backpack is difficult and irritating to manage. So, I am proposing that I undertake the following endurance piece. Here's a very rough sketch:

Two weeks locked in a gallery space. The first week will mostly be about the inducing itself, but hopefully by the second week I will be producing enough milk to start using the time inbetween inducing acts to make other objects and interactions.

Inducing
Pump every four hours 24/7, for 30 minutes at a time.
Take maximum amounts of motillium (2 x10mg) at six-hourly intervals. Plus fenugreek tablets.
Drink one pot of fennel tea a day.
Drink one pot of milk thistle tea a day.
Consume at least 2 litres of water a day, on top of the tea intake.
Change to SuperLacto Diet, including large amounts of foods believed to be beneficial to milk production. Such as porridge, and beer.
Public can watch at any point during opening hours.

Other possible acts
Invisible Ink- see if breastmilk can be used as invisible ink. Write with quill/brush: Jeanette Winterson quote re milk-ink, Helene Cixous' 'white ink', or thoughts that have occurred to me during project. Let dry. Iron to reveal text. Record all of this in a series of black and white photographs.
Audience participation- Not sure how this will work. Can't actually feed it to them because of hygeine issues. Perhaps I can make a series of 'milk blots' to give people, or seal it in small glass capsules, like some sort of religious relic? Refer to the medieval (?) milk relics, especially the cave where folk would scrape the chalk from the walls and mix with water and claim it to be The Virgin's Milk.
Random milk art- eg Milk Graffitti (When released on last day, run around back streets and spray 'tags' on walls etc) and Milk Mirror (Using milk to trace my features on to a mirror).

Documenting
Measure and weigh breasts daily at same time. Photograph?
Make a chart of amount of milk produced.
Photograph any colour changes or unusual occurences.
Freeze milk specimens for analysis (if can find someone to analysise it): end of first week, colustrum- if produced again, end of project.
Keep diary- mood changes, physical changes etc.

Other points
Should I be costumed, or just in everyday clothes?
Will I be 'on stage' all of the time, or just at the points where I am pumping or doing something specific? Would prefer as much time as possible, want to highlight the banal moments as well as the obvioulsy interesting ones.

Requirements
Suitable gallery space- access to water, electricity, toilet, shower, space to sleep.
Futon/air mattress and blankies.
Tape measure and kitchen scales.
Comfy chair for pumping, preferably a rocking chair.
Digital camera.
Motillium, fenugreek, milk thistle and fennel teas, kettle, teapot and teacup.
Beer, porridge, and other 'milk making' foods.
Art supplies, as projects dictate eg iron and iron board, blotting paper, mirror.

Presentation
Scrapbook of journal entries, photographs, ink blots, invisible ink texts, milk chart, chart of breast measurements and weight, milk analysis reports, motillium prescriptions etc.

Flow Shows

This is a series of performance pieces I sketched out for a project in my honours year, and have not done much with yet. The Isadora piece is one I will hopefully be working on with a friend from UTS, to realise it as a short film by the end of this semester. Have posted them as they originally appeared:

Performance piece for Chapter One. This piece is a bit confusing to me still. Basically it ties to permitted/ forbidden uses of milk.

A woman is seated at a writing desk, penning a letter with quill and ink. Her breasts are full, spilling over her gown and leaking milk into the inkpot. She continues to write, and we see that as her pen flows across the page the words disappear underneath her hand. In the next scene a housewife is doing the ironing with a baby at her feet when there is a knock at the door. She takes delivery of the letter, opens it and stares at the blank page. Returning to her post she places the letter on the board and runs the iron across it. The message appears, and the audience reads it: 'Please burn after reading'.

Performance piece for Chapter Two. This piece draws its inspiration from the film La Strada. In this Anthony Quinn plays a carnival strongman, with a specialty of breaking himself out of the chains that confine his chest by flexing his muscles. I will attempt to draw the correlation between the strength inherent in these two monstrous bodies- the traditionally 'strong' body and that of the lactating body. I have deliberately made both characters in the piece male, as to either show a lactating woman or a gender-swap is not only rather obvious but defeats the notion of sameness/aberrance in the one body. This will be echoed later when discussing Bakhtin's carnival's 'sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low' and so on. These links may be made more blatant in the final piece if I feel that they are not easily readable.

The setting is a freak show of the old Barnum and Bailey kind. In scene one, we are shown a strongman standing in front of his audience. His arms are behind his back and his torso bound in chains. Huffing and puffing he flexes his chest, and the links begin to break one by one until he frees himself and the chains lie ruined at his feet. We then move to the next tent, another man is bound in exactly the same predicament. His chest is bare, and his nipples poke through the restraints. Huffing and puffing, he flexes the muscles in his chest. Milk begins to pour from his breasts, and as he writhes against the chains the lubrication allows him to slip from his shackles. The chains lie on the floor, intact yet defeated.

Performance piece. This piece is based on the Isadora Duncan anecdote quoted earlier, and also the 'money shot'/climax device in pornography. It is intended to provide some cohesion and summary of the three key themes of the paper.

A woman is on stage, or perhaps not, as we cannot see the audience or surrounds. She is wearing a 'classical' tunic-type dress, and she dances slowly. The music is either Patti Smith's 'Summer Cannibals' or an African drum piece. As she dances, stains begin to appear at her breasts. The music becomes faster, her dancing more furious. The dams burst, her milk courses in rivers down the front of her dress, makes the fabric cling, forms puddles on the floor, she slips and slides but still keeps dancing until the music stops. She collapses, her resources spent. Dried up.

White Tears

(From September 8th 2007)

Woke up this morning with a microdyke in my bed (not like THAT, promise) and the stirring of a hangover and the horrible realisation that I had to be at work in about half and hour. Arrgh! Microdyke left, I tried to make coffee but we had no soy milk, and no butter to put on my toast, and so I had some quick Hitachi fun to wake myself up and crawled to the bus stop looking like death with no makeup and bloodshot eyes and starving hungry and seriously lacking in caffeine.Turned up to work an hour and a half late shaky and clutching a double shot soy latte with two sugars from the new cafe on the corner. I swear, sometimes I feel just like a baby sucking on a tit when I wrap my lips around the plastic lid and fill my mouth with frothy warm milk- VERY satisfying!

Started crying on my way to the shop, and had to hide out the back and look for sympathy from my workmates for half an hour before I could face doing any real work. Couldn't work out why, was just SAD. Everything black and weird. Thought maybe was simply exhaustion and hangover and latent grief combined, but when the fog cleared later a few things occurred to me. 'Close to the water' Zoo+ breaking out adolescent skin Zoo+lumpish strangely bloated Zoo+ horny all the time Zoo might just = LACTATING HORMONALLY HAYWIRE ZOO. Tits are achy, and hurt when I pump, a real ready-to-burst feeling, but frustrating as hardly any liquid to show for it yet. Hopefully it will come soon, its like waiting for blood or orgasms or ... 'It's torture, but I'm almost there' (The Cure).

Stinking Hearts

(From August 20th 2007)

Puppy me, I was loathe to lose Nathalie's scent, her muddy hair and the bitter grapes behind her ears, the tart fresh-cut cactus taste she left on my hands.

- Felicia Luna Lemus
'Like Son' (152)

It seems to be that when I am lactating I become more accutely alert to scents. Everything is heady and thick, the sickly sweet deodorants signalling the first sign of spring and the adolescent aftershaves of first year undergraduates. I can sniff out the diets of fellow commuters on my morning train, detect the contents ofplastic grocery bags and crumpled trousers. Its a state I associate with pregnancy, a hyper-sensitivity, the regular fragrances of life suddenly making the expectant one gag and swoon.