Breast

Breast, Palazzo Franchetti, Venice 18th April–24th November 2024

https://breastsartexhibition.com/about/

Across the world, the question of what it means to be a feminist, and of who or what feminism is for, is being weaponized and polarized in a myriad of dangerous and divisive ways. So-called “difference feminism” (see Cavarero, 2016; Cavarero and Guaraldo, 2024) claims and exalts distinctive characteristics of womanhood rooted in a supposedly binary and natural sexual difference, foreclosing the possibility of gender multiplicity, including in relation to what it means to be “breasted.” In their recent work, Butler (2024) refers to this as “gender extremism,” noting alliances with far-right movements and ideals. In the latter, gendered bodies are often reified, “anatomised” to borrow from Dale (2001), as essentialized parts are posited as representative of some notion of a “whole” (often in specifically binary terms).

The art exhibition Breast, curated by Carolina Pasti, made its debut during the opening of the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, held from April 18 to November 24, 2024. It proffered a deep immersion into a gynocentric world, where everything is filtered through a pervasive deep pink hue that envelops the works on display and the lens through which these are perceived and experienced. If not for glimpses of the Venetian lagoon beyond the windows, one might feel transported to one of those placeless places that seem to exist everywhere and nowhere—a decontextualized reimagining of the world in pink (Figure 1), wherein pink signifies a particular set of associations with the nurturing and nourishing capacity of the breast as the epitome of womanhood. ¹

Figure 1.

Entrance to the Breast exhibition (authors’ own photograph).

A kind of “difference feminism” HQ, this pink world posits femininity as specifically and exclusively a cis-woman’s trait. It centers on “the breast”—a term that potentially opens doors to a multitude of interpretations, yet from the very first image we encountered—a photograph of a woman in a bra framed in a pink curtain—one dominant reading of what the breast represents and how it should be viewed became clear.

In English language discourses that promote breastfeeding, the phrase “breast is best” is widely used, signifying an idealization of the breast as the ultimate life-sustaining object. In this exhibition, the primacy of the breast stands for an imagined gynocentric future in which the breast is very firmly a woman’s prerogative. In a twist on the Fordist mantra, we can have any color as long as it’s pink.

“This is not a feminist exhibition,” clarified the Italian curator, formerly the Director and Curator of the Schulhof Collection in New York—where she specialized in Post-War and Contemporary Art—as well as other private collections (see Fuksas, 2024). Yet this seemingly non- (or even anti-) political assertion reveals an underlying tension, reflecting polarizing debates within contemporary feminism. Recognizing the political character of this exhibition foregrounds its articulation of a particular position within these debates, one that reaffirms sexual difference, and the breast as epitomizing femininity as the preserve of cis-women. In this sense, the curator’s reference reduces feminism’s complexity to a single, homogenized vision. The exhibition focused on one dominant version of gender, exalting an essentialist view of biological capacity and its associations with being an (actually or potentially) reproductive, hence youthful, body as the ultimate sign of ideal womanhood (Butler, 2024).

In this sense, and despite the curator’s intent, the exhibition feels distinctly feminist, but in a very particular way. It emphasizes that art and the way it frames gender is inherently political, capable of reinforcing or challenging specific ideologies and interpretations of lived reality. Curation is a process of organizing not only artifacts and experiences but also the ontologies to which they relate. Key themes recur throughout the exhibition: motherhood, breastfeeding, illness, and (hetero)sexuality. Moving through the exhibition’s historical narrative, Bernardino del Signoraccio’s Madonna of Humility (c. 1460–1540) leads to Dalí’s surreal transformation of breasts into snails and to Duchamp’s daring invitation to touch (Priere de Toucher, 1947).

The exhibition was notable for what it omitted rather than what it displayed. Exploring the idea that many bodies are breasted, in multiple ways, could have offered a compelling challenge to its binary essentialism. Even Jacques Sonck’s provocative artworks, which hint at the breast belonging to a man dressing as a woman or a man who was once a woman, are stripped of their deconstructive potential within the exhibition’s context. Instead, these works seemed, to us at least, to have the effect of reinforcing the very binary that frames the breast as exclusively cis-female. In this sense, an opportunity has been missed to explore how nonbinary and trans people potentially embody an ethics that disturbs and recodes dominant ways in which gender is organized and embodied (Moulin de Souza and Parker, 2022).

Also, notably missing was any recognition of breastfeeding as labor. This contrasts markedly with accounts by feminist organizational scholars of breastfeeding as an “embodied, relational practice” (Lee, 2018: 77), highlighting also that the body that breastfeeds is largely incongruent with the embodied ideals of organizational life (Giazitzoglu, 2024). In this sense, van Amsterdam’s (2015) auto-ethnographic reflections on breastfeeding provide an important counter to the idealized portrayal of breastfeeding that Pasti has curated. It’s unfortunate that, in one particular scene depicted in Oliviero Toscani’s famous photograph featured in the exhibition, a white infant is nursed by a Black breast; the impact might have been more provocative in reverse. ² Here, in another lost critical and reflexive moment, an historically embedded image of enslaved Black wet nurses is seemingly replicated rather than interrogated.

Engagement with the breast as subject to enhancement and sexual objectification is also missing (Reiss and Dahlman, 2024); instead, these processes are arguably part of the curation (a significant example is the artwork Soccer, 2024 by Chloe Wise where a woman’s breast hangs over a soccer ball, evoking two “male” passions). Absent, too, is the breast as a political and collective symbol. Instead, the breast of this exhibition belongs to a private, intimate, pink-shaded world, distanced from the political, public spaces of feminist protest where bare breasts have proclaimed “the personal is political.” There was no bra burning here, especially as the whole exhibition was sponsored by Italian lingerie retailer Intimissimi. Instead, bras made by the company hung in dedicated areas of the exhibition space, blurring the lines between art and marketing. This marriage between corporate lingerie and artwork opens up not only a reflection on the role of art vis-à-vis corporate power and the fashion industry’s role in reproducing highly normative societal beauty standards; it also hints at a broader feminist querelle regarding the extent to which emancipation is linked to the “performance of femininity and female sexuality” (Wood, 2016: 22).

The breast at the heart of this exhibition is an individual rather than relational embodied phenomenon, which gains collectivity solely through generational and gynocentric continuity. It seemed apt, therefore, that a feminine reimagining of the nativity scene in Prouvost’s Four for See Beauties (2022) closed the show. This video installation depicts the breast as a representation of the maternal body’s abject nature—its capacity to evoke both attraction and repulsion as it perpetually, almost relentlessly, reproduces. Even the title of this final exhibit plays on the idea of “foreseeing”—reimaging a more beautiful (i.e. gynocentric) future in which cis-women’s reproductive capacity is valorized as the basis of ethics. Central to the installation is a woman nursing a girl (notably female), conjuring a vision of a world sustained by women alone. This video emphasizes the continuity among womanhood, nature, and reproduction as continual regeneration, echoing themes explored by feminist philosopher Cavarero (2023), particularly in her work, Women who nurse wolf cubs: Icons of hyper-maternity. ³

In sum, this pink world materialized a specific (and largely commercial) imagination of what the breast stands for, affirming a binary, essentialist understanding of gender and sex. Consequently, an opportunity for artistic exploration that could have sparked new and unexpected visions of the world was missed. Instead, Breast reiterated a version of feminism rooted in gynocentrism in ways that are not unreminiscent of “managing diversity” discourses that, like the corporate sponsorship on display throughout the exhibition, are fairly ubiquitous; powerful in their apparent banality. Yet the exhibition also mirrors the ways in which such practices and disputes within feminism itself continue to open up critical potential, including for interrogating how art(efacts) opens up new possibilities for exploring the ways in which hegemonic spaces “sponsor” dialogs on gender, and for questioning who and what belongs where. In this sense, the pink, corporate world view of Breast sums up how the organized and organizational spaces we inhabit continue to landscape ways of imagining how gendered, racialized, and sexed bodies might be lived and experienced that are both reificatory, but also, potentially, more critical and reflexive.