Tala Madani’s ‘Shit Mom’: the anti-hero we were waiting for

In 2019, eight months after the birth of her second child, Tala Madani returned to her studio and set about painting a mother and child – “just for the sake of getting it out of my body.”. But she couldn’t get the image right. Madani had spent most of her artistic career painting men, usually in unflattering, satirical poses, with oversized testicles and pot-bellies. She was used to taking aim at macho culture, and having fun with it, but when it came to painting women, she found she was on more slippery terrain. “I felt like it was really difficult to say something new with female imagery, to save it out of this space of capital where you’re projecting onto it,” she says. The image of the mother and child existed in a particularly ‘kitsch’ space which she couldn’t escape. In frustration, she wiped away the mother figure to the point that she became a soft-brown, gloopy pile of what looks like excrement. And so: Shit Mom was born.

It wasn’t the first time that Madani had painted shit. In her Rear Projection series a beam of light from the anus projects an image of poo, but it was the first time that a character had been born, so to speak, from shit itself. “When [the mother] was formless she suddenly became dynamic, falling, no longer stable and that felt more accurate to me. It felt closer to what female figuration was for myself at that moment,” she says. The child, by chance, survived Madani’s smearing, which allowed her to see the connection between the collapsing figure and her offspring who in other works crawls over, tugs at and literally consumes the mother. “I love chance in life as well as in the studio,” she tells me, bright-eyed.

Madani, who was born in Iran and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters, is speaking to me from her hotel in London. She has just arrived to install her latest exhibition ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’, at Pilar Corrias, which features the latest incarnations of Shit Mom with her newly adopted ‘children’, We were supposed to meet the day before, but jet lag got the better of her. When we finally connect, she spends the first part of our conversation apologising, then offering a disclaimer about her tendency to “miss a few words that could subtly change everything.” “Language is not my thing,” she says, laughing while using both hands to rake back her dark hair, “– that’s why I paint.”

By the end of our conversation, it’s hard not to argue the opposite. She speaks precisely and vividly, moving rapidly from one train of thought to the next and peppering her speech with questions that are sometimes aimed at me and sometimes just musings. It’s the language of an artist who thinks deeply and curiously about the world around her. When I venture to ask whether the emergence of Shit Mom also had something to do with her own maternal experience, she insists that she doesn’t think about the work in an “autobiographical way. I’m much more involved with the history of images and what I know as a global audience we’re seeing. If it becomes too narrow for me, it loses energy.”

But still there is a deliberate loadedness to the character’s name that taps into generations of ‘mum guilt’ and societal expectation. Madani counters this by suggesting, “It’s more about the expectation of the female entity to be a kind of caretaker. There is a projection of the maternal that’s there even if you’re not a mother.”

I first encountered Shit Mom in my early twenties, in the dark room of a museum, years before I would become a mother. It was the first animation work Madani made in the series. In it Shit Mom walks through a lavishly furnished house rubbing her dirty hands all over the nice, clean furniture, leaving a brown stain. She bashes her head against a table and tries – and fails – to masturbate. I didn’t look at the title until after the animation had finished so I wasn’t thinking of the maternal experience specifically, but I was captivated enough to watch it more than once. It was so unlike anything I’d seen in a museum or gallery setting before, it felt exposing, rebellious and sad. It reminded me of a story I’ve been told countless times by my siblings of when we were taken to dinner at one of my mum’s friend’s houses and were made to sit waiting in the fancy sitting room while the adults chatted in the kitchen. We sat in armchairs spread sparsely around the room, and something about the formality of it made us get hysterical giggles, which ended up with a five-year-old me peeing on the Persian carpet and then bursting into tears.

The tears, I suppose, were connected to a feeling of shame or wrongdoing, or perhaps I was just embarrassed to have my childishness so blatantly exposed. In the Shit Mom animation, her actions feel, for the most part, purposeful, a dirty protest against, as Madani puts it, “everything that has been built up as desirable.” What’s interesting though is that her rebellion is also an act of vulnerability, the substance she leaves behind is what she is literally made up of and so, as she leaves behind her slimy trail, she is also losing a part of herself. “[Shit Mom] is okay with breaking entirely,” Madani agrees. “That’s the thing: if you want to propose an antidote to [social expectation placed on women], it can’t just be a bigger and bigger force. I was looking for something antithetical.”

In ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’, Shit Mom’s contrary nature takes on a new dimension in relation to a series of femme bots, or so-called Daughters Born Without a Shit Mother titled after a 1917 watercolour of mechanical elements by the French artist Francis Picabia, whose drawings of machines were visions of what he thought was the future, all bearing feminine titles – including New Bride and Here is the Woman. For Madani, the idea of a daughter born without a mother was “a tease”, something to start her thinking about the future of our world and femininity, which, depressingly but perhaps not surprisingly, led her to AI girlfriends and robots

The bots in her paintings are all AI-generated, a necessity, she says, to prevent them from looking like “fantasy novel paintings of the 1940s”. Madani made a conscious effort to dial down their sexuality, but in comparison to Shit Mom’s brown shapelessness, they’re still slender female figures, of the kind generated for male consumption. In D.B.W.A.S.M (Teddy), Shit Mom becomes almost childlike, gripping a teddy and shedding excrement, in the face of the bot’s physical perfection, while D.B.W.A.S.M (Familial) depicts an unsettling embrace between the two characters where it’s difficult to know exactly what is or has taken place. In the latter, the bot is the one holding a shit-soaked teddy, but in a way that feels disdainful or redundant.

The teddy comes from Madani’s reading of texts by paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the notion of the transitional object which the infant is supposed to use as a kind of separation tool, to navigate the space between themselves and their mother. It’s an idea Madani is suspicious of – “Why do we as mothers accept this notion that we need a transitional object?” – but here it becomes a tool, deliberately kitsch and disregarded by the bot which has no emotional capacity, for the mother (and us) to navigate this new digital world. But any attempts to get to know or connect with the bot are ultimately shown to be futile, which makes the teddy a tragic addition. “[The bot] has a space that is ambiguous and unknown to us,” says Madani, speaking of her paintings in which the robot is blurred out. “But it’s also nothing. It’s only like one plug away from losing it all, right?”

As Madani points out, her Shit Mom paintings have never sat as easily within humour as her depictions of men and penises (a couple of giant dicks also appear in the show at Pilar Corrias) because they are too tied up with the history of women’s repression, but this latest series has a decidedly more melancholic edge.

In the animation Shit Mom Ascending, a reference to both Muybridge and Duchamp who borrowed Muybridge’s imagery to create Nude Descending a Staircase, Shit Mom is stuck, continuously going up and up, without ever reaching a destination. It’s a comment on the societal pressure to continually progress and improve ourselves (Madani was thinking, among other things, of Hilary Clinton talking about ‘breaking the glass ceiling’ throughout her presidential campaign). By the end of the animation, Shit Mom decides ‘fuck this’ and breaks the loop by sliding down the banister. It’s silly, joyous, and in the face of AI bots and all the other weird and devastating stuff we’re having to contend with right now, refreshingly human.