Pink Lullabies
Pink Lullabies was a fantasy environment created by (Susan) Geraldine Taylor in Ottawa's Splash Gallery in 1980
Pink Lullabies asked a deceptively simple feminist question: Who gets to decide what is art? Presented at Splash Gallery, an artist-run alternative gallery in downtown Ottawa, Susan Geraldine Taylor's Pink Lullabies transformed the gallery into an intensely pink, girlish bedroom filled with toys, clothing, photographs and familiar domestic objects. The installation grew from Taylor's developing feminist conviction that the everyday creative work performed by women—arranging a home, making a bed, preparing food, raising children and creating beauty within domestic life—was worthy of being considered art. By transferring the intimate environment of a young woman's bedroom into an art gallery, Taylor challenged conventional distinctions between domestic labour and artistic production, and between women's private lives and the traditionally male-dominated public world of art. At the centre of Pink Lullabies was Taylor's investigation of the colour pink. She was interested in its psychological effects and in the way Western culture introduces pink to girls almost from birth as a marker of femininity, sweetness, passivity and acceptable female behaviour. Taylor used the overwhelming pinkness of the installation to question whether something perceived as innocent and comforting could also become a subtle means of conditioning women to conform, quiet themselves and accept prescribed social roles. The work was also deeply personal. Photographs and references to Taylor's daughter, Nina, brought motherhood and intergenerational experience into the installation. Taylor's own complicated relationship with the colour pink — including her childhood rejection of it and later reconsideration of its meaning — became part of a larger examination of how women absorb, resist and sometimes reclaim the cultural symbols assigned to them. Even apparently ordinary gestures became part of the work. Cookies stamped with the words Pink Lullabies brought women's traditionally domestic work into the gallery while simultaneously playing with ideas of consumption, commercialization and conditioning. The installation deliberately blurred the boundary between art and life. Some male visitors reportedly felt excluded or uncomfortable within the intensely feminine environment — a reversal that itself exposed assumptions about whose experiences and spaces were considered universal. At its heart, Pink Lullabies asked a deceptively simple feminist question: Who gets to decide what is art? By claiming the bedroom, motherhood, domestic labour, personal memory and the colour pink as legitimate artistic material, Taylor challenged an art establishment and broader culture that had historically assigned greater value to male forms of artistic production while overlooking much of the creative work performed by women. Pink Lullabies established themes that would continue through Taylor's subsequent practice: the elevation of everyday female experience, the transformation of domestic ritual into performance, the intersection of the personal and political, and the use of environments, hospitality and participation to challenge conventional definitions of art.
Interview in Fireweed Magazine: A Feminist Quarterly, Issue 8: Fall 1980 The installation The room (in the Splash gallery in Ottawa) smells of White Shoulders perfume. It's a pink gingham room with gold and white furniture. It has a French canopy bed with pink gingham canopy and gold & white pillars. There is pink gingham on the windows, both real windows and painted windows, and a dressing table. The surfaces of the tables are cluttered with jewelry, toy make-up kits, a collection of Virgin Mary statuettes, children's books. The cupboard is full of dolls, books, hats for playing grown-up in, toy cooking utensils. There is a small piece of paper pinned to the closet door with a drawing and words saying “I am a queen, my name is Nina.” Nina is Taylor's daughter. There are pink chiffon little girl dresses hanging on the walls, little girl's shoes on the pink rug. There are bowls with pink candies in them. A collection of saccharin-sweet “It's a Baby Girl” cards with storks and pink bows stapled on a wall is surrounded by yards and yards of pink toilet paper. In one corner, lit like an altar, is a white hanging piece, a gauzy veil, surrounding a table. On the table is a white toy bunny and a white box. In the pink satin-lined box are photos of Nina tied with pink satin ribbon. The photos express an extreme frustration. Under them are pink baby booties. This piece was done years before the rest of the project was conceived and was one of the seeds of the installation. Each drawer in the dresser had a mood. One is a “winter,” filled with vests with pink ribbon trim, a white rabbit fur muff with a doll's head on it, little white gloves. Another has “best” clothes in it, lace and silk and pink hankies. Growing up female Interviewer: Can you tell us something about the response to the installation? Susan: Some men find it hard to deal with that room and I think it's because they're left out. A couple of men said to me, “I feel as if I'm exploring my sister's bedroom” and that was an opportunity they weren't allowed. There was a comment from one of the visitors to the show who said, “Let's have a little boy's room.” I think that there is a little boy's room and it's just as severe, it's just as conditioned and just as strong as the little girl's room, but it's not for me to make it. I grew up as a little girl. I was the middle girl with an older sister and a younger sister and both were very feminine. I somehow got pegged with the masculine role of the family. I was the tomboy; I was never sick; I was the strongest; I was bigger than both of my sisters. So I grew up with the thought that if I liked pink, I wouldn't be strong anymore; I wouldn't be capable of helping my father move the fridge down the stairs. My two sisters couldn't; I was supposed to. I had to come to terms with the colour pink. I had to discover the pink in me and realize that it wasn't bad. Working with the colour made my daughter Nina aware that having her drawers neat and tidy wouldn't necessarily make her live “happily ever after.” She doesn't need pink the way she did when she was four years old because she's had her fill of pink. Somebody said, “What you're doing to your daughter is really cruel,” and I said it's no more cruel than getting a pink greeting card or birth announcement that telegraphs the information “There's a girl in this house.” Explore it, put all that pinkness in one room and you realize how absurd it is. But when you get that one card, you say, “isn't that cute?” You don't realize how serious it is and how strong it is. Pink is very beautiful, and it's very magical. Making your house nice and pretty is wonderful, and you can close yourself in. You start in your bedroom, and keep it neat and tidy, and then you go out and get married and make a home like that, but it doesn't allow you to acknowledge that just around the other side of the world people are dying of starvation. It blinds you to that; that's what is frightening. I find the room frightening. You could be very comfortable in that room if you were lulled into it. Psychologically, they've discovered that pink can be used as a sedative. They are painting the walls of solitary confinement cells pink, because it has a pacifying effect. In the past we've found little control methods, and pink was one of those methods. For me it's a very dead room. Sometimes I walk in there and think this reeks death, of stagnation, and when you go in there you go back into the mirror. This is the world I was supposed to love. And of course I've always wanted to be protected and sheltered. Wouldn't you like to live in a perfectly controlled little world where everything is lovely? It's like my friend Mary says, “everything lovely in Lovely. They don't break windows or hurt people in Lovely” — talking about surburban Toronto. “Of course the children are happy in Lovely. Of course their drawers are neat. Of course the little girls are wearing clean white socks and pink underpants. Parents never argue; there are no single parents in Lovely.” And Mary's a single mother with three kids. You walk up the stairs, a white staircase and then you're in a hall with a pink light, you go down the hall and there's an audio-visual installation of my daughter, Nina, in a park with a blossom tree, and she's dancing. She's searching for the pink fairy. It's me playing with her fantasies…We sat in her bedroom and she started making these faces and asked me to photograph her, and when I looked at the slides, I saw how stereotyped and preconceived ideas of different emotions were. And I wondered where they came from. It doesn't come from me: it comes from the things around her — school, tv. I'm not your typical housewife and mother with a clean spotless house. She brings out memories of my past, and she sparks them off, and how as an adult, I can accept them and respect them. Interviewer: How does Nina feel about Pink Lullabies? Susan: She loves it. But she'll give it up for a bicycle. Interviewer: Was the idea of giving it to her one of inoculating her against what the room represents, that if you withheld it, she'd never get it out of her system? Susan: She's always liked pink. Interviewer: But didn't it start with her liking pink? Susan: …and me rejecting the fact that she liked pink? Yes. Interviewer: And part of it is that we now think we should give kids the right to choose their own environment, and then they choose something we don't like, something we've rejected. So what do you do? Susan: Exactly. And in a way it's sad, sad for me to see her destroy that room — now that Nina is using it as her own, in our home — because I'm still affected by it. I look at the bed and say, “There's a magic marker on this beautiful pink bedspread,” you know. My first reaction is the conditioned one, but then I say, “Wait a second; it's okay, go ahead, wreck it!” She's really an aggressive girl. It's very charming for me to have an aggressive daughter who knows what she wants, and is determined to get it. I like to see that in her, and don't discourage it, but after she'd been in the pink room for a while, I noticed she'd become much more pleasant. And then, well I don't know if it was the excitement of the show and the fact that she was more or less the star of the show in the slides, but when we took it away she was very agitated, and the next day she wore black jeans and a black T-shirt to school. Art and money Interviewer: Do you question that Pink Lullabies is Art, or that it should be in a gallery? Susan: First of all, women do art all the time… Interviewer: But it's never acknowledged? Susan: Right. Some of the comments about my show were: “Why are you transporting the whole room to a gallery?” “Why can't you just make something that represents the room?” “Why are those objects important?” You see, as soon as you take what a woman is doing all the time and put it into a painting or a drawing, you're making men's art, you're doing what they want you to do. You're doing something that isn't relevant to your life. Interviewer: No, it becomes a separate thing. “This is what I do in my house, and this is what I do in the gallery.” Susan: When people go into the room at the Splash Gallery, and they sit on the bed, I say to them, “You know you're sitting on a piece of art.” If that was a painting on a wall no one would dare to touch it, but because it's a bed that I've just made, and put the sheets on, nobody has that respect for it: it's just a bed. But women make beds continually, every morning. To me that's an art — the way I put everything there, very consciously considering the aesthetic value of whether the flowers were tall enough, what should go next to what, judging the way the light falls on certain objects — to see if it's balanced — is the same way one would decorate a canvas. Interviewer: But isn't one of the reasons it's not recognized as Art the fact that you can't price it, it has no price in the commodity market, the art market? The market needs to think in terms of the “ten best.” One of the constructed pieces in the room is the glass box filled with cookies cut out in the shape of little girls, painted and hung by pink ribbon. Susan: There are three hundred and fifty in that box. They're all made with the same stencil (cutout). They're made out of flour and water and salt and that's basic playdough, with “Pink Lullabies” stamped on the back. I baked them in the oven and hand-painted each one of them individually. Interviewer: Where did the inspiration for that come from? Susan: I went to the bank and got a bank loan for the show to buy all the things and said, “Now what I'm going to do to pay back this loan is to sell cookies. They're going to be stamped with the name of the show on it, and I'm going to sell them for three dollars each, and I'll sell a thousand of them and I'll cover my costs.” I got a bank loan because of that, so I was more or less obliged to do it. And there I was doing it, and stamping them, and making every one unique in the baking and face-painting. But when it came to the opening night, it was so confusing and there were so many people I just couldn't bring myself to say “Well, why don't you buy these?” All of the things in the room are bought from Simpson-Sears, which is why that credit card is displayed in the room. That medium, the Sears catalogue, has such an overwhelming effect on Canadians. What you buy in the Northwest Territories is what you can buy in Montreal and Newfoundland. You just phone in, or write in and “here's my order.” Any girl in this country can have that bedroom set. Not that anyone would want it. Interviewer: I'm sure there are a number of girls who would love it. Why the canopy bed? Susan: Well, that's the princess. People think I've pinked right out. They don't know that the pink dress I wore to the opening was the first pink dress I'd ever bought in my life. Women and Performance • Interview with Laura Sky, feminist filmmaker • Excerpts from D. Ann Taylor's The Bible As Told To • New poetry by Robin Belitsky Endres, Rosemary Aubert and Susan Glickman • Interview with Elizabeth Chitty, video artist • Ann Cameron's Legends of the Copper Woman • Marie Claire Rouyer on Women's Theatre in Great Britain • Kate Lushington interviews Linda Griffiths of Maggie and Pierre • Interview with Karen Malpede, playwright
