MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Since 1998, Maria Marshall, a Bombay-born British artist has exhibited a series of videos featuring her children engaging with cultural taboos such as smoking and endless consumption. Marshall features these acts not only as a commentary on the transformations from childhood to adulthood, but also as a means to confront and expose the constructions of ideal parenting and family values. In particular, I will examine two works by Marshall: When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Cooker (1998) and President Bill Clinton, Memphis, November 1993 (2000). The former is a compilation of three shots showing her two-year-old son smoking a cigarette, causing quite a controversy when first exhibited in New York. Though the child’s smoking was digitally manipulated, Marshall emphasizes the anxiety of children growing up “too fast” and embracing bad behaviors. The latter video features her two sons unwrapping presents in a large light-filled room as a young boy’s voice reads fragments of a speech given by the former President Bill Clinton in Memphis on November 13, 1993. The selected fragments of the speech emphasize work and family values as the basis of a productive society, yet paired with the endless unwrapping of boxes, Marshall creates a contradictory vision of what childhood and the American family—she seems to suggest childhood has been corrupted by consumption and capitalist society. These works shall be compared other women artists such as Mary Kelly and Sally Mann, who made works highlighting their children in ways that confronted accepted norms of child-imagery. Like these artists, Marshall investigates how the American public articulates notions of an ideal childhood and family. She reflects upon these notions through her work and reveals the tensions between popular beliefs about childhood and reality.