»Später baut sie Atomschiffe« – Muttermilch als Zeichenmaterial [»Later She’ll Be Building Atomic Ships« – Breast Milk as Drawing Material]
Installation | 2011 - 2014
Funded by the Equal Opportunity: Scholarship for Female Artists / Designers
Since 2011, the artist Lisa Glauer has been exploring the use of breast milk as a drawing material in the course of her artistic research work entitled, »Später baut sie Atomschiffe – Muttermilch als Zeichenmaterial« [Later She’ll Be Building Atomic Ships – Breast Milk as Drawing Material]. For the works she will display here, Glauer used the »invisible ink« to paint and sketch technical drawings of nuclear power plants which she found in the children‘s magazines »Hobby« (West Germany) and »Jugend und Technik« (East Germany) from the 1960s and 70s. Through the drawings, she explores how the strong polarisation of nature and culture manifests itself, in particular with regard to the use of atomic energy and the representation of military vehicles, such as submarines and aircraft carriers.
Glauer‘s work searches for potential shifts in the naturalisation processes based on the binary categories of nature/feminine and culture/masculine, or which continuously re-establish these categories. A recurring pattern emerges in the reactions of the audience. First, they react to the material with ambivalent-emotional distance – shock, revulsion, fascination – only to dismiss the work as »actually completely natural (feminine)« and relegate it to the private sphere of non-art.