Menstruation Art: Why?
The answer is pretty good, actually.
The German band Deichkind, in a thematically entirely unrelated song, rapped a brilliant line that stuck with me ever since I first heard it. The translation goes something like this: “The experts can confirm it, they’re finally sure/it’s been discussed at length and thought about a lot/they finally have the question to all the answers.” This lyric perfectly wraps up a politically charged song about information validity, but it works brilliantly in a different context as well.
It struck me that the idea resonates perfectly with (menstruation) art.
Where is the point?
After the initial emotional reaction of witnessing menstruation displayed out in the open and called art (and this is usually shock, disgust, embarrassment), the cognitive part kicks in. Viewers who aren’t versed feminist scholars will most likely wonder, appalled or curious, what on earth these artists were trying to accomplish. This was my first reaction to menstruation art as a beginner in gender studies. This is the first reaction of anyone I’ve ever told that I was so mind-blown by it once I understood it that part of my PhD now focuses on it.
The core question is why this art is made. All menstruation art is provocative and confrontational. It’s meant to provoke you into asking “Why is this art necessary?”. The answer to that question is meant to confront you with your own preconceived ideas about periods and female bodies.
Breaking the Code of Silence
At some point, we as a society have agreed on the idea that menstruation should be kept a secret. Imposed social etiquette turned a natural, involuntary physiological process into taboo. Everyone knows that menstruation exists: it’s directly tied to our ability to reproduce and all healthy human females experience it. Still, we decided that it’s “culturally inappropriate”. Current predominant religions view it as a sin: the blood is dirty, polluted, ungodly. The patriarchy has weaponized it against women in an attempt to fully discredit them: the blood makes females weak, vulnerable, emotional, irrational. Men are raised to be frightened of it, not to ask questions about it, and view it as “gross”. Women are raised aware of all of these preconceptions and the same ideas are instilled in them as well — they are taught to view the menstruating experience as something inconvenient, unhygienic, extremely private; a ritual that must remain hidden and kept a secret, even from other women. Menstruation is to be lived, but never mentioned.
In the 1970s, feminists from different academic fields organized around the topic of menstruation for the very first time and created The Society for Menstrual Research. Their mission was to take menstruation out of the shadows and bring it into the limelight of scientific and medical research, academic research, and everyday discourse. While definitely stirring the pot, the movement didn’t initially achieve what it set out to do. The topic of menstruation and the importance of people being educated on it stayed on the outer rims as a “crazy feminist thing”. And the most eye-catching of all was the art that was inspired by this new idea: admitting menstruation existed.
To Illustrate the Point: (My personal) Top 5 in the Menstruation Art Category
5. Menstruation Bathroom by Judy Chicago. No account of feminist art can go without mentioning one of the early pioneers: the brilliant Judy Chicago. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro created a feminist art installation with their students called Womanhouse in 1972. They both taught at the California Institute of the Arts. Womanhouse was exactly what it sounds like: a house in which every room was an art exhibition, installation or performance dealing with women’s issues. The Menstruation Bathroom is still considered a bold piece today, so one can only imagine the shock effect it had in the early 70s. The all-white, sterile-looking bathroom was overstocked with menstrual products (both used and boxed). Blood stains blazed off of the white flooring. The centerpiece (although not literally) was the trashcan — overflowing with used pads and tampons. The piece is very layered, addressing several issues at once. The bloody pads which are hung up are a woman’s dirty laundry — the dirty little secret of menstruating — out there for the whole world to see. The abundance of menstrual products are a comment on the rise of the menstrual industry at the time. The industry was making billions with campaigns making promises that no one would ever notice you were menstruating if you used their brand — your secret was safe with inadequate, unsustainable products that focused on keeping you “clean” instead of “healthy” (don’t forget about the deadly Toxic Shock Scandal in the 80s). The overflowing trashcan can be interpreted in many ways: the overwhelming nature of menstruation, the stress of having to “deal with it”, an exaggeration designed to make sure you can’t look away and pretend menstruation isn’t there — take your pick.
4. Television Lounge by Poppy Jackson. A simple performance art piece which aims to turn menstruation from something invisible to something visible. In 2014, Poppy Jackson performed this piece at the Spill Festival of Performance. She stood naked in the abandoned Ipswich Police Headquarters former Television Lounge, in the corner, facing the wall, and simply bled for seven full hours. Free bleeding publicly quite literally showed the viewers what menstruating looks like. On a more symbolic note, choosing the police headquarters and facing a corner as a punished child indicates the “wrongness” of what she’s doing and illustrates the punishing nature of being female in today’s world. The television lounge location adds to the idea of the female body being nothing but an objectified spectacle. In defying this notion, she stands completely still and uninteresting, letting her body perform nothing but its biological process.
3. Casting Off My Womb by Casey Jenkins. Casey Jenkins went a step farther than Jackson by performing an astonishing 28 day live performance at the Darwin Visual Arts Association in 2013. Jenkins inserted yarn into her vagina every day for the 28 days that are a span of their cycle. They pulled the yarn out daily and knitted. The knitting changed color as the menstrual cycle went through its phases: the white yarn was clean at first, then bloody, and then clean again. This created a direct, explicit and accurate illustration of the menstrual cycle, the visuals emphasizing the cyclical nature.
2. Red is the Colour by Ingrid Berthon-Moine. Ingrid Berthon-Moine discovered that certain Australian tribes considered menstruation sacred (like most pagan religions did) and they venerated the blood by rubbing it on their lips. What some argue was the invention of lipstick was actually an announcement: women proudly marked their faces with their blood to announce that the holy ritual that connected them to nature had begun. Berthon-Moine’s 2009 work Red is the Colour is the result of her contemplation on this fact and the stark contrast in the status of both menstruation and make up in contemporary society vs tribal society. She created a series of 12 portraits of 12 different women wearing their own menstrual blood as lipstick. The series is to act as a calendar, representing the 12 months of the year. The months, however, are named after lipstick brands. Although difficult to understand without the artist’s statement, Berthon-Moine created a powerful piece which shows the meaning we give to the phenomena around us is completely manmade — cultural, not natural. Views on menstruation throughout history, as well as throughout different cultures in today’s world, are a direct testament to that.
1.Beauty in Blood by Jen Lewis. A completely subjective “winner” on this list is the ongoing project Beauty in Blood. I’ve already written a love letter to the project in a previous article. Jen Lewis collects her menstrual blood by using a menstrual cup, and with the help of her partner Rob Lewis, spills the blood into a well-lit toilet bowl which is then quickly photographed using a macro lense. The images that are the result of this well-rehearsed process are nothing less than bewildering. The elegance of the blood flowing and colliding with the marble and the water of the toilet bowl is quite mesmerizing. One simply can’t look away — which is exactly what Jen wants. On the project’s website, both the technique of creating the photographs as well as the vision and mission behind them is elaborated in as much precision as it takes to make these beautiful shots. Lewis manages to create something exquisitely beautiful out of something condemned — making you question whether its ugliness is natural or constructed.
What are the questions?
To circle back to the quote that I started this article with: menstruation art is the question to all the answers.
I’m happy to be able to write that today, although not destigmatized, menstruation is much less of a taboo than it was back in the 70s when the art trend first started. Thanks to activists, the Internet, and an updated education system, a lot of people in the developed world are now more aware of why discussing and fully understanding the menstrual cycle is crucial for a female’s well-being. The need for safe spaces to discuss menstruation and reproductive health has created entire online communities dedicated to the topic. Period poverty and sustainability of the menstrual product industry are making headlines. Representations of menstruation are no longer as scarce as they were, and menstruation art now arguably has a broader definition — it’s not just the performative, “highbrow” art that destigmatizes menstruation, it’s digital art, drawings, photography and comic books that achieve delivering the same message even by just illustrating menstruation and the female anatomy without actually using it.
Due to the current social status of menstruation, we have been given wrong answers: about the biology of the process, the importance of the cycle for overall health, the cleanliness of the blood, female reproductive health, what the natural female body actually looks like, what role capitalism has in commodifying the period. Menstruation art came up with a question for all those answers, and the question quickly dismantles them and proves them simply wrong and destructive. That question is: Why?
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