Smash-a-thon: Failure and Women’s Art
by Melanie Dennis Unrau
It must have been around the time of my high school graduation that I began, unintentionally, to collect Willow Creek figurines. My first was probably a graduation gift from a thoughtful family member.
From the beginning I despised these knick-knacks, mass-produced in China but made to look as if they were hand-carved. Yet, my loved ones kept going to the mall to purchase more and I felt obligated to display them.
Jean Baudrillard writes in The System of Objects (1968) that collectors in consumer culture amass objects in order to collect an acceptable self. It was what my collection wastrying to say about me that chafed the most. After years of people assuming I liked the figures—first of a lone young woman, then later of a heterosexual couple and a young family, in a clichéd mirroring of the trajectory of my life—I realized there was only onething to do: get rid of them.
Banishing the ornaments sent a clear message: no one buys them any more. But lately I’m wishing I had kept just one, so I could smash it.
You can find the title of Toronto filmmaker and writer Ann Shin’s poetry book The Family China (2013) tucked inside a short poem near the bottom of a page. The speaker tells the story of her wedding, when the “sambuca shots / came out” and the guests threwthe wrong plates,
breaking the family
china your mom
shrieked, your dad
grabbed another and
smashed it,
to life!
On the cover of the book is a photo of a blond-haired angel figurine, captured right after her head has been shattered with a hammer; her intact face falls in front of her body in agrotesque shrug.
At the book launch, Shin held a “smash-a-thon” where she invited guests to break somechina. Afterward, she produced a short stop-motion film of smashings, which I watched last fall at the Winnipeg Writers’ Festival (see www.youtube.com/user/annshin1 and www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=255).
In consumerist, patriarchal, racist, classist, ableist, heterosexist culture, we attribute personal and cultural meaning to things (material or immaterial) that become fetishes or, as feminist theorist Sara Ahmed calls them in The Promise of Happiness (2010), “happy objects.” When we refuse to be made happy by what is supposed to make us happy—when we take out our literal or metaphorical hammers and start smashing—we become killjoys, “leaving happiness for life.”
The breaking of the family china while shouting “to life!” is an example of how an oppositional, even negative, politics can bring a sense of exhilaration or joy. After the jolt of regret when the plate hits the floor comes the realization that things needn’t be the way they are and that in fact we want something other than the lives our families and our cultures pass on to us.
In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Judith (now Jack) Halberstam observes the devastation caused by the drive for success and proposes instead that “under certain
circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” Halberstam observes a feminism of failure that is characterized by “gaping holes, empty landscapes, split silhouettes,” and broken things. He points in particular to collage: “By maintaining a constant tension between the elements of the work, the collage asks usto consider the full range of our experience of power—both productive power, power for,but also negative power, or power to unbecome.”
Collage is a popular medium at the meetings of the Artist-Mothers at MAWA, once known as the Mothers Who Refuse to Choose. The Artist-Mothers come together around what might be seen as a negative politics: our refusal to be completely satisfied through our caring labour (to be “happy housewives,” as Ahmed would say). We commiserateover the struggles of performing two kinds of undervalued labour—art-making and mothering—but we also have a lot of fun and inspire one another. And taking our scissors to cooking, knitting, fashion, and parenting magazines to create something new is almost as good as smashing.
While writing this essay I paused to select a mug from the cupboard, an already chipped wedding gift. It landed on the ground with a tink rather than the thud I expected. Finally, I’d done it: to life!
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a Winnipeg writer and editor. She’s poetry editor for Geez magazine.