Episode 46: Patty Chang’s “Melons (At a Loss)” (1998)

VOICE 1: So, it’s a video.

KID VOICE : It’s a video.

VOICE 1: Of?

KID VOICE : Somebody eating a melon. With a plate on her head.

VOICE 3: There’s a woman. She’s placed the plate on her head, and she’s taken a knife to her bra, and she’s carving through what… At this point, you don’t know what it is. But oh, there we are. It’s a melon. It’s not her breast. And then she reaches into the melon to start taking out the…

KID VOICE: The seeds.

VOICE 3: And she’s putting them where?

KID VOICE: On the plate.

VOICE 3: On the plate.

VOICE 4: She has a very good plate on her head, which I thought was impressive that she was balancing while she was, uh, aggressively spooning out what looked like a piece of fruit from breast. Classic woman quality, being able to multitask, balancing that, um, plate on her head as well as, uh, nourishing herself from her own breast there. That was, like, a feminine trait to support other people, to feel that responsibility. So, maybe, to me, it’s both to, you know… Reminding yourself to, like, nourish yourself as well. Um…

TAMAR: Like, your own oxygen mask first.

VOICE 4: Mmhmm. Yeah. That’s right.

TAMAR: On the plane.

VOICE 4: That’s right.

VOICE 6: We know she’s not being hurt, but it seems so close to being hurt that it’s an upsetting piece.

VOICE 7: It’s – it’s a bit disturbing to watch actually. There is pain and all sorts of just bizarre things that happened to the human body … In giving birth … and breastfeeding and how, like…

TAMAR: Yeah, man.

VOICE 7: … our bodies just turn into these things that are very unfamiliar to us. And yet, they’re… They nurture and end in kind of brutal ways sometimes.

VOICE 8: I wonder if many men can even stand in front of it and look it.

VOICE 9: The reveling in disgust. The – the fact that the woman is consuming herself, like, sort of making a mockery of, you know, you have to have elegant poise, you have to keep this plate on your head, you know. You’re supposed to be feeding babies. Well, you know what? I’m gonna take all of that, and I’m gonna eat it from myself. And I love that – that sort of cringe factor in just how much you can enjoy it.

VOICE 4: Oh.

TAMAR: What did she just do?

VOICE 4: She just threw the plate on the ground. All the pieces of melon flying everywhere. Has a … Hmmm. The slight smile. Very self-satisfied, it seems. Yeah. Digesting the bit of melon she had in her mouth. And then – then it goes to – to the [lack]. Yeah. Quite an incredible piece.

 [OPENING CREDITS]

[02:36]

[Clip from Friends:]

PHOEBE: Oh, I tasted Ben’s milk and Ross freaked out.

ROSS: I did not freak out.

CAROL: Why’d you freak out?

ROSS: Because it’s breast milk.  It’s gross.

CAROL: My breast milk is gross?

ROSS: No, Carol, there’s nothing wrong with it.  I just don’t think breast milk is for adults.

CHANDLER: Of course, the packaging does appeal to grown-ups.

CAROL: Ross, you’re being silly.  I’ve tried it, it’s no big deal.  C’mon, just taste it.

ROSS: [whimper laughing] That would be no.

PHOEBE: Come on!  It’s natural!  It doesn’t taste bad!

JOEY: Yeah, it tastes kind of sweet.  Sort of like…uh…

ROSS: Like what?

SUSAN: Cantaloupe juice.

There is a growing movement on the internet that is resolute in proving, one episode at a time, that the sitcom Friends has not aged well.  I’ve more or less slouched on the sidelines of this debate, not unaware of problematic lack of diversity and obscene apartment sizes, and fully aware that my gray millennial nostalgia gives it maybe a rosier tint than it deserves.  But then I re-watched this episode.  It was probably during a 4am feeding, and it made me sit up straight.  It’s titled, appropriately enough, The One With the Breast Milk, and while the rest of the episode is straight-up dated 90s puerile sitcom shtick, this B-plot is goddamn revolutionary.  If you haven’t seen it or, like me, wasn’t attuned to its glory when you first did, here’s a quick recap: Ben, who is Ross’s infant son, comes to visit, accompanied by Carol, Ross’s ex-wife.  Ben cries; Carol whips out a safe-for-network-TV boob, and suddenly I’m sitting with my laptop in the middle of the night with a baby on my breast, as blazingly woke as the actual honest-to-goodness breastfeeding real talk I’m watching play out.  Adults are comparing notes on what breast milk tastes like.  Each of the men in the group, including Ross, the quote unquote “sensitive one,” are called out for their discomfort.  The entire subplot takes up maybe seven aggressively laugh-tracked minutes of the episode, but, incredibly, it manages to tap into almost all the tropes of what makes breastfeeding the mundane, taboo, erotic, desexualizing, and empowering phenomenon that it is, the way that breastfeeding both reinforces and subverts everything a breast is supposed to be, and what an incredibly hard concept this is for the uninitiated to be comfortable with. 

ROSS: It’s the most natural, beautiful thing in the world!

JOEY: Yeah, we know!  But there’s a baby sucking on it!

I fully own that I’m coming at this from a personal place.  I breastfeed.  I am breastfeeding, probably even as you’re listening to this, which means that I have stopped what I was doing no fewer than eight times a day for the last seven months to get as comfortable as possible wherever I am, unclip the straps of my bra, and hit it.  This is the kind of thing you don’t know until you know, but to breastfeed is to breastfeed all the time.  I mean, think about how often you open a fridge door in a day.  And so I’ve had a lot of time to see my own breasts as agents of nourishment for my child, to get so used to the idea that I can’t actually remember a time when it was revelatory.  And I don’t expect this to be obvious to someone who hasn’t experienced it, especially since my own acceptance of it happened so slowly.  Parenthood – or, more accurately, the sleep deprivation that accompanies parenting a baby – has a funny way of making you forget epiphanies.  It’s all a blur, and suddenly you look backwards and realize that your compass has shifted, and your formerly sexual, formerly covered breasts have morphed into something else entirely, something you can’t control, something that, despite the good it does my heart, takes a lot from me – my time, my calories – to give to someone else, even if he’s not even there.  But even if I can’t remember it, of course there was a time this made me uncomfortable, at least a little bit.  Despite the tender age at which we’re introduced to breastfeeding, it takes a lot of life to get reacquainted.  To get comfortable using your body in this way; to be comfortable seeing a woman’s body in this way.  But plenty of people don’t want you to get too comfortable with it.  And I don’t mean the people, whom I won’t dignify here or ever, who tell you to put it away in public.  I mean the many female artists who have tackled this subject by squarely embracing everything that makes a viewer uncomfortable with the idea that being a woman means being owned by someone else, being consumed, the object beholden to someone else’s gaze, nourishing others until you’re empty.  You see this idea materialized over and over in the art of female performance artists – Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic – but rarely more pointedly, and more graphically, than in the art of Patty Chang.

The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith probably put it best in her first review of Chang’s work when she told viewers to brace themselves.  Which is to say, Chang is not an artist for the faint of heart.  If you thought Louise Bourgeois was a lot to take in episode 44, well, hold Chang’s beer.  She was born in San Francisco in 1972, and her work came of age in New York in the 90s through underground, Asian-American, super-8, LGBT, and experimental film festivals throughout the world, and defined itself by continually pushing boundaries.  The boundaries of endurance, the boundaries of taste, and particularly the boundaries of what a woman’s body, and really just the body itself, can, is, and should be able to withstand, “testing the borders of flesh to explore the physical and ideological ways in which women’s bodies are stitched, clamped, hooked, squeezed, and dismantled into femininity,” as critic Eve Oishi writes.  And she does this primarily with her own body, the use of some strategically uncomfortable props, and us.  We can’t help but engage, because it’s so grotesque you can’t look away, whether she’s putting eels down her shirt, shaving her crotch while blindfolded, sewing into her own prosthetic skin or, here, slicing off her own melon breast.  It’s a lot, sometimes it feels like too much, shocking for shock value’s sake – but you can’t deny its effectiveness, how skilled she is at throwing us off-balance.  And you can tell, just from her smirking expression as this video is playing, that she’s knows exactly what affect this experience is having on us.  Her art uses discomfort as a tool; she plays with it, she wields it like a knife, finding that line where it goes just a little too far, for just a little too long.  Because she knows she’s got us right where she wants us, rooted in place, watching a screen.

Let’s talk about that screen.  The experience of a video installation is different from almost every other art object, because there’s an actual sequenced narrative to follow.  Chang describes her films as time-based sculptures: you can come in too late, catch the video in the middle, and have to wait for it to start over, as opposed to, like with a static object, experiencing the work at your own convenience.  The act of art with a performed narrative isn’t new – we looked at performance art in Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece in episode 28 – but there’s something about the repeatability of a film that makes it feel more immediate.  Though Chang filmed this once, we can watch in play out endlessly.  And each time, it’s the art, as opposed to Yoko performing her art once and if you weren’t in the audience you missed it.  And the sequence we can watch endlessly is this: Chang, wearing a shapely brassiere, rests a plate on her head, which she then balances for the whole of the film.  She picks up a knife from somewhere below the shot and holds one breast steady while she slices into it, revealing that it’s not actually her breast, but a cantaloupe, which she then plunges her fingers into to rip out the seeds, which she then puts on the plate on her head.  She then picks up a large metal spoon and starts spooning the flesh of the melon-breast into her mouth.  She scoops and scrapes and eats, until she puts the spoon down, takes the plate from her head, and throws it onto the floor.  And throughout this sequence, she’s telling a story and maintaining intense, antagonistic eye-contact with the camera.  It’s completely mesmerizing and utterly perverse, both of which are intensified not just by the striking visuals but by the striking sounds.  Sound is the fourth dimension of performance art; we saw how important it was in Cut Piece, even as it hung quietly in the background – the waves of nervous laughter from the audience, Ono’s own description of the musicality of the cutting scissors.  Here, though, the Foley effects are in overdrive.  We hear the sawing of the knife into the melon-breast.  We hear the fabric ripping as she pulls the bra away.  We hear the wet, juicy squelch of the pulp as she plunges her fingers in.  We hear the metal spoon click against her teeth.  We hear the shattering of the plate at the end.  We hear her speak in measured pentameter, stiff-backed as a beauty queen so as not to drop the plate, and through a mouth full of melon.

Yet oddly enough, what actually seems to matter the least is the story she’s telling.  It’s pretty disconnected from what we’re watching, beyond starting and ending with a plate.  It almost feels like an intentional misdirect.  The monologue meanders, pulled along by overly specific associations and allusions, bordering on the nonsensical, and almost certainly too personal to have a lot of universal resonance:

CHANG: When my aunt died, I got a plate.

She begins by saying her aunt died of breast cancer and left her a commemorative plate

CHANG: It was the kind of plate with a color photo printed on it, in a poisonous ink that you couldn’t eat or else you’d die too. 

She talks about the saucer reproduction that she was given as a child, a small plate for a small person,

CHANG: back in the day when black and white meant photos and color meant paint.

And on that saucer was an image of my aunt, two years before she died, and with a smile so wide, her eyes disappeared into hairline slits, almost erased into her skin.  She was just like Saint Lucy.  Saint Lucy of Syracuse, eyeless, sightless, and carrying her baby blues on a platter. 

The story ends with the same smirking brazenness that we see in her face throughout – a weird achievement unlocked.

CHANG: And whenever I was punished for not doing something I was told to, I would gently take that plate from off its redwood display stand and lick that puppy ‘til her smile was erased.

The through line of the story evolves through its evocative and disarming imagery, a Chinese woman’s smile equated to St. Lucy, the patron saint of eyes, of the blind, prayed to during illness, and the idea of Chinese customs, symbolized, we’re meant to assume, by the commemorative plate.  But Chang has debunked any real meaning here in interviews; the story itself is made up, “to fill a lapse in emotional memory.”  Plenty of artistic narratives do this, attempt to articulate intense emotional experiences with a story, whether or not the story technically true – given the emotional weight, the story is, to quote Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “true even if it didn’t happen.”  But it’s a strategical artistic choice here, what Chang describes as “the act of juggling too much text and imagery” in order to immerse the viewer “in a third, imagined narrative” – in other words, to give you something so visually arresting and then distract you from it, but with something so convoluted that you find yourself more readily accepting what you see, because, in spite of itself, it makes sense.  Breasts are conflated with melons all the time – you know, jugs, tits, knockers, cue the wolf whistle – and breast milk’s gentle sweetness is often likened to melon juice, as Carol’s lover Susan helpfully suggested at the top.  What we’re seeing play out in this film, therefore, is not exactly subtle.  In fact, it’s completely direct.  A breast is sustenance.  And before it becomes that, from its first pubescent appearance onwards, a breast is an object that is so often sexualized by and for the benefit of an external gaze.  And yet, again, so often, none of these many jobs that breasts take on seem to directly benefit the woman they grow out of.  So why is it so revolutionary for a woman to take back ownership?  To nourish herself?

And I should say that, despite Chang literally feeding herself from her own figurative breast, she never actually mentions breastfeeding, either in the monologue or her artist’s statement.  So I admit, again, that this is largely my personal projection onto this artwork.  But she does talk about breast cancer – remember that her aunt’s death from cancer is the catalyst for the story – which evokes similar language: if breasts are so crucial in defining a woman’s sense of her own womanhood, why is it so easy to lose ownership over them?  There are so many ways, she seems to be saying, that women relinquish control of her breasts – to the male gaze, to the hungry baby, God, they can even go rogue and try to kill you.  And this brings us back to the idea of reclamation.  If these melons are going to be consumed until they’re gone, she’s saying, it’s going to be by me.

Chang has often explored the concept of self-nourishment, questioning how much, if any, is permitted for women before it becomes self-absorption and even self-destruction.  Her piece “Fountain,” not un-ironically sharing a name with Marcel Duchamp’s famously subversive urinal from episode 17, is a film of Chang on her knees, lapping water off a mirror, “like a self-devouring Narcissus” in the words, again, of critic Roberta Smith.  Like with “Melons,” she’s wrestling with the idea of women having permission to drink themselves in in the same way they’re devoured externally.  But even as she’s giving herself this permission, the question then becomes, to what end?  The melon is still eaten; the water is still drunk.  When we looked at Louise Bourgeois, it was Chang herself who equated Bourgeois’ work to a sea cucumber, who empties itself with the goal of regenerating as something more resilient.  But here, the vessel seems emptied without any promise of a refill.  The snake has consumed itself into nothingness.  The only redemption is the fact that, as we’ve said, she is the one doing the devouring, the consuming, upending all the societal expectations of womanhood by replacing erotic selflessness with unapologetic, gluttonous cannibalism, and leaving nothing behind but a smirk.

And yeah, make no mistake, this makes people really, really uncomfortable.  Not just the immature season two Chandlers of the world, but all of us.  This film incredibly hard to watch, the slicing, the digging in with a spoon.  You know it’s a cantaloupe, but still.  I stood in the gallery and watched people walk by it, stop, react, make a face, move to leave, and then just not be able to.  And this brings us back to where we started, the art of discomfort.  There are many artists, several of whom Chang has cited as influences, who use their bodies with the explicit purpose of causing discomfort.  Some focused on hurting themselves for the sake of their work, and not just – as Chang does – metaphorically.  The artist Chris Burden, for example, made a name for himself with his particular brand of controversial endurance performance art when he had his assistant shoot him in the arm at close range with a 22-caliber rifle in his 1971 work, the aptly named “Shoot,” which explored just how far it was possible to take personal danger as a form of artistic expression.  Meanwhile, plenty of artists focus primarily on making other people uncomfortable, like we see in almost all of the art of Vito Acconci, a New York performance artist who used, his words, “existential unease” the way that, you know, Monet used paint.  He was known for “Following Piece” from 1969, where he followed random people around New York for as long as possible, and, in his most famous work, “Seedbed,” from 1972, where he lay under a ramp in a gallery, masturbating audibly as visitors walked over him.  And then some artists do both, creating discomfort for both their audiences and themselves.  There’s Marina Abramovic and Ulay standing naked and vulnerable on either side of a narrow museum doorway, but forcing visitors to make a flash decision as to whom they’re going to face as they squeeze their way past, in “Imponderabilia” from 1977.  And then, of course, there’s Yoko Ono, sitting on a stage, inviting uneasy audience members to cut her clothes off.  And while Chang doesn’t make her audience complicit in the same way, she does force us to watch what she’s doing to herself.  Discomfort is the medium, how she both takes and takes back ownership of our gaze and makes us confront the message, even if it’s incredibly hard to watch, and even if the real thrust of her message doesn’t come from her actual words.  It’s a message everyone, of every gender, needs to hear.  It’s a message of empowerment, even if it comes at a loss.

“Melons” was filmed in 1998, and in the years since, Chang has continued to create work that pushes boundaries, although with a greater emphasis on cross-cultural boundaries in her filmmaking, with less of a focus on performance art.  At age 48, she’s moved away from using her own body, claiming that it was too emotionally exhausting, and as a nursing mom, girl, I hear you.  There’s only so long you can be expected to do it.  She now sees her role as an artist not as one of endless repetition but of evolution, not unlike Louise Bourgeois, whom Chang cites as an influence, and one she hopes to follow in the footsteps of: continually evolving, creating work that looks like something else entirely as the decades go by.  And thinking of her work as an evolution allows for her growth, for her own opportunity to age well.  Maybe a little bit puerile and shocking at the outset, but also goddamn revolutionary.  And, moreover, a brazen example of how, when you get your audience right where you want them, you can leave them with so much more than a smirk.