Thursday, March 3, 2011

Wet Nursing in Europe

European Aristocracy

By the 11th century, the aristocracy and royalty of Europe used wet nurses almost exclusively. In taking the baby from the mother, they prevented her from experiencing the birth control effects of producing milk and nursing. This allowed the women to stay fertile and produce more babies. It also left them open to sexual activity with their husbands as having sex with a nursing mother was considered taboo and harmful to the health of the baby. In France, the custom was to send infants to the country for wet nursing. However, by the end of the 18th century in France, the urban poor had also begun to send their babies out of the city so that the mothers could work. In fact, in 1780, only 700 babies out of 21,000 born that year nursed from their mothers. This high demand for wet-nurses caused quality to go down and infant mortality to rise.

Wet Nursing and Bourgeois Values

Because the Netherlands didn't have a court life like other European countries, their cultural ideals tended to revolve around the bourgeois lifestyle. This included a rejection of the aristocratic advocacy of wet nursing. Instead, the Dutch promoted an ideal focused around an immaculate household centered around the nursing mother as a part of civic responsibility. In fact, Pieter de Hooch and other Dutch painters documented these values burgeoning in the 17th century. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution then introduced some of these same ideas to the rest of Europe in the 18th century. Jean Jaques Rousseau himself denounced wet nursing in favor of nursing by the mother. However, only some people in the upper middle class changed their habits, and, despite the critiques of a few political radicals and women's rights defenders, wet-nursing remained popular in England through the Victorian Era and in France until World War I.

Decline of Wet Nursing

At the beginning of the 20th century, a comprehensive study by the French government showed that wide spread wet-nursing was contributing to infant death rates. This empirical information, which coincided with the development of new technology, initiated a change towards bottle feeding. The inventions of the rubber nipple, the bottle, pasteurization, and canned milk all made this new method of feeding possible and helped seal the decline of wet-nursing.

Breast Pump

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

rousseau

wet nurses

breast pumps

copper

armour

Yves Klein- Fire Paintings

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Siobhan Hapaska (and James Turrell)

What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?

When I was a child, I lived in a Victorian house with a high-walled stone yard that never really got much light. I was standing in the yard one day, looking up at the sky, which was contained as a perfect blue square by the perimeter of the walls. Seconds later, a high altitude aircraft entered the blue square precisely at a corner and I watched it slowly make a diagonal white line to exactly the opposite corner and then it disappeared. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

(http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/siobhan_hapaska/)

Friday, February 4, 2011

POLYGRAPH

A friend recently told me about a lie detector test he voluntarily took, to proceed further in his job. It was not necessary for the job he had, but if he wanted to earn more money he had to take the test. He deals with investments, so he is sometimes responsible for information worth a lot of money, therefore, he must be trusted. The test took place over two days, the doctor examining him had 25 years experience using a polygraph. My friend told me about all the different pieces of machinery attached to him; a clip on his finger to measure heart rate,one to measure perspiration. A contraption across his chest which measured breathing rate, and a sensor pad on his seat to detect any tiny unusual movement. I found it fascinating, not exactly the question of 'truth' and 'trust' but the attachment of wires and synapses to the human body. And the fact that this machine was painstakingly designed in the first place, and it still, in 2011, takes 2 days to conduct the test. I am interested in the apparent delicacy of the human body's slight changes influencing this incredible machine, the any other machines that attach to the body, hospital equipment, intravenous drips, dialysis machines...

Jefferson's Polygraph

Cardiff & Miller

Partly inspired by Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony' and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, the piece is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur with leather straps and spikes. In the installation are two robotic arms that hover and move- sometimes like a ballet, and sometimes attacking the invisible prisoner in the chair with pneumonic pistons. A disco ball turns above the mechanism reflecting an array of coloured lights while a guitar hit by a robotic wand wails and a wall of old TV’s turns on and off creating an eerie glow.

In our culture right now there is a strange deliberate and indifferent approach to killing. I think that our interest in creating this piece comes from a response to that.

willard wigan-small things

"On average it takes Wigan about eight weeks to complete one sculpture and there is an enormous personal sacrifice involved in his working process. Because the works are so minute, the pulse of the artist's finger could easily destroy the entire work. Wigan therefore has to control his nervous system to ensure he does not make even the tiniest movement. Wigan, when working, enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce any hand tremors and work between heartbeats.

To carve his figures, Wigan uses surgical blades or hand-made tools, (some of which are custom made out of a sharpened microscopic sliver of Tungsten), which he makes by attaching a shard of diamond to a pin. The sculptures themselves are made of a wide range of materials. Wigan uses for instance nylon, grains of sand, dust fibres, gold and spider's cobweb, depending on the demands of the piece he is working on. To paint his creations, Wigan often uses a hair from a dead housefly, whilst making sure no flies are killed during the artistic process"