Mommy Dearest

An essay on Robert Melee’s work
The Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel
July 2003

The protagonist in Robert Melee’s photographs and short films is his mother, Rose Melee. A relatively well-preserved woman of about sixty, heavily made-up, wearing a flashy wig and seductive, provocative clothing in her role-playing persona. Her garish appearance defies every ‘warm and fuzzy’ notion commonly associated with the term ‘mother.’ Obviously drunk, in garters and feathers, she appears on screen and in the photographs as an over-the-hill drag queen, parading her aging grotesque body for her son. The camera documents her ostensibly casual acts: going up the roof to sunbathe, dancing to exhaustion, going out to stroll naked in the snow, posing on all fours in the kitchen, exercising in the living room, eating popcorn, vacuuming, or bathing. This bizarre mother and son relationship provides the raw material and inspiration for Melee’s work. Rose’s eccentric appearance and inescapable alcoholism contribute to the perverse impact, making her the attraction and sensation of his work.

On the opening night of Melee’s recent exhibition in Chelsea (2002), his mother posed in a glass display cabinet at the gallery’s entrance wearing only fishnet pantyhose and a feather boa. As in Amsterdam’s red-light district she sat perched on a folding chair on a raised transparent platform and mugged for the audience. Throughout the evening, she smoked, drank beer, and occasionally flashed her buttocks and breasts to the crowd. New York’s art critics wrote that she looked like a Kabuki demon, that she combined all the freaks ever photographed by Diane Arbus, dubbing her a rare cross between Betty Davis, John Walters’s Divine, and Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra.

Indeed, outlandishness and voyeurism are an integral part of the experiential package Melee offers his viewers. In one of the films, the mother dresses her naked son as if he were still a child. In Mommy Drinking, she drinks herself unconscious. In Upstairs Mommy, she is dragged up the stairs totally drunk. InPopcorn Mommy, (1998), she exercises stark naked in the living room, while wearing a cosmetic facemask. InFace Lift Mommy, (1998), Melee helps his mother squeeze the make-up layer off her face onto a transparent plexi sheet. Almost always, through style, humor and radicalization, the wretched becomes circus-like, the mundane becomes grotesque, and the camp becomes abject.

Stylistically, Melee’s short subject Super-8 films bring to mind slapstick flicks, underground films or amateur home movies of the ‘outtakes’ genre. Most were shot in black and white, and often out of focus, rendering them grainy and jumpy. One can discern the influence of Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman. Originally, the films were integrated in furniture-sculpture pieces reminiscent of 1960s living room buffets – the films are screened on old TV sets, and the framed photographs are displayed on faux wood Formica shelves.

Like his contemporaries Melee operates within the so-called ‘discourse of the abject’ – addressing extreme situations, radicalized contents, anything considered contaminated, taboo, perverse; anything that exceeds good taste and threatens boundaries. His works challenge proper cultural labeling, endeavoring to blur stereotypical bourgeois distinctions that foster the permissible and exclude the forbidden. One of the major concerns of this discourse of the abject is the sick, aging, disintegrating, dead body. Robert Melee’s mother thus embodies a body that has ceased to be an object of passion and has become abject – an aging, flabby, grotesque body at its basest, rejected, portrayed in its loathsome and pornographic aspects. Her appearances in his films, photographs and installations violate the fabric of public order, by showing us a rather embarrassing reflection of the limits of our permissiveness. In this respect, Melee’s works are deeply rooted in the post-feminist artistic discourse. They defy and undermine universal stereotypes regarding the female image in general and the mother’s status and image in particular.

In his provocative way, through the gutters, Melee offers us an alternative maternal model that subverts every archetypal cultural convention and ridicules the image of the good, containing, compassionate, gentle, caring mother. Nothing is left of the image of the mother as a positive symbol of decency, purity and sacrifice. On the contrary – Melee pushes it to the limit, reifying her (especially in the kitchen scene with the pans), activating her like a marionette, making her pose the most quintessential stereotype of whorish, seductive femininity for him, virtually acting as her procurer. At the same time, paradoxically, he would like us to love her as he does, to be empathetic, once we have recovered from our initial malaise.

This ambivalence is especially conspicuous in the filmBath Time Mommy presented here, where Melee performs a purification ritual of sorts: he undresses his mother and washes her in the bathtub. As in Pedro Almodovar’s movie Talk to Her, there is something ritualistic, bizarre and eccentric about this intimate moment. The fact that he is a homosexual adds a kinky aspect to this celebration of femininity. It is hard to imagine a woman who would do the same thing for her mother. This intimacy is interrupted, however, when we find out that he bathes her with rubber gloves. On the one hand – he doesn’t really touch her, perhaps out of respect; on the other, perhaps he is simply disgusted. Despite the intimacy, it is rather the sense of estrangement that stands out in the relationship. The rubber gloves render the act of bathing technical, and Melee looks more like a social worker or an orderly in a home for the aged than a caring, loving son.

This ambivalence is evident in almost all of his works: it is not clear who is the abuser and who is the abused, who is the oppressor and who is the victim. It is a perfect symbiosis of voluntary victims; a combination of sadism, exhibitionism, affection, aggression, revenge, control, abuse, and compassion. The role reversal (a son bathing his mother) attests to the distortion of the traditional relationship within the family, to dysfunction, thus generating tragi-comic situations that poignantly expose this bizarre relationship. Melee defines his work as “confessional-autobiographical,” which begs for a psychologistic interpretation. He takes the theme of mother-son relationship to Oedipal psychosexual taboo areas, addressing them with humor and fantasy. One may read his photographic act as a type of self-protection combined with revenge, and the works – as a radicalization of childhood memories and their sublimation via alienation and theatrical exaggeration. Melee exposes secrets on camera that were well concealed behind the family facade, thus challenging the familial order.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most conspicuous element, within the strange relationship mirrored by the works, is the fruitful collaboration between the two. He has given her a role she never had a chance to have in her ‘real life.’ She is his star now (for the photo shoots and performances, Melee chooses her clothes and does her makeup himself) – a role most mom’s would like to play in their kids’s lifes. The fact that she takes an active part in her son’s career, that he continues to depend on her, that without her he has no ‘theme,’ that she accompanies him everywhere, even performing at the opening of his show – all these make her the ultimate mom that any Oedipal son would have dreamed of having forever; a mother who is everything –at once: a friend, a whore, old, young, alive, dead, real and fake, an impossibly irresponsible, but lovingly malleable, caretaker.

Melee’s films are featured here under a wide contextual canopy of ‘domesticity’ or ‘family.’ Even though most of the actions presented in them take place inside the home between a mother and her son and they are part of the domestic routine, it is hard to ascribe his films distinctively to the theme of family, certainly not the traditional nuclear family. His movies are closer to a documentation of a camp performance or a parodic carnivalesque spectacle than a standard domestic reality. Indeed, the grotesque, comic treatment, the exaggeration, the style and the humor blur the critical edge, yet sharpen the piercing contents. The ‘family’ context transforms them into a moving documentary about life in America’s dystopian suburbs, those suburbs so familiar from David Lynch’s and other American films made in recent years, such as Happiness andAmerican Beauty, which refute the pat image of the American dream. The idyllic tranquil surface of New Jersey’s suburbs has been breached, and the hidden passions and buried desires spring up like a plague of weeds from beneath their perfect grassy cover. In the guise of engaging drag fantasy, Robert Melee’s mother’s alcoholism, boredom, emptiness and dysfunction are presented here as an intense and disconcerting personal testimonial.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky