Photos – memories of Semiotics of the Kitchen – Star casts, Amma and reflections.
Many of you will know I spent a long time making star shaped casts of people’s nips. There are some people who’s nips Zuck gets upset seeing for free on the internet so they need to be censored or you’ll get banned.
I decided to make casts of nips so that people could censor their nips with casts of their own nips.
I love reflection and this shot of Amma wearing her casts as she used them to do various chores, was a struggle that I won in a way I’m v pleased with.
She’d stuck them on with tape and nips have minds of their own – fiddle about with them and sticky and they become e r e c t .. and fall off repeatedly.
Anyway – twas fun and the intentional woman-in-kitchen set-up, alongside the obvious subversion and rejection of the sexualisation of nips (which were, unexpectedly, having a physical, sexual response) made it both a giggle and, for me, a reminder of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
It’s a reminder that protest is important and a serious matter – it’s the patriarchy, stupid – but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it. Nipple Stars, alongside Free the Nipple, do make nips the stars but even though they can be pointy, they aren’t the point. That is the sexualisation and commodification of bodies bound up with what, later, Bateman referred to as the modesty cult (Naked Feminism.. it’s not an adequate book btw) and the whole fuck-off-with-it campaign to stop telling women what to wear.
Tbh – rather obviously, I greatly miss being able to discuss (health) radical feminism and our shared experience of rejecting the gender norms applied to each of us because of our genitals.. friends dying is a bummer.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 