Weird Temporalities: An Introduction

Figure 1.

Aneka Ingold, Postpartum, 72" x 48", Mixed Media on Paper.

Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Aneka Ingold's mixed media work, Postpartum, depicts a nude breastfeeding woman¹ sitting against a backdrop of floral yellow wallpaper.² She stares expressionlessly outward. Although she seems isolated, she is hooked up to a larger network: her arm disappears through the window and into the outside world, while wires indistinguishable from red yarn tie everything in the room together. One conduit from an antique radio-device dips into a pool of water where her feet are submerged, suggesting electroshock therapy. The woman is flanked by a pair of trilobites (another mother and child, perhaps) scuttling towards her back. She appears unaware of the bird perched on her head, and she ignores the snake wrapped around her neck. This is all the more surprising because the serpent marks a sharp distinction between her head and the rest of her body. Everything below the snake has turned strangulation blue, as if she has become lifeless or numb. The room is otherwise colorful and busy with interdependent though asynchronous forms of life, but she remains detached and fixed in dark reverie.

The work in part exemplifies certain temporal blockages we might associate with postpartum depression. Trapped on a baby's schedule, mothers often measure out their time in nursing sessions and naps, finding their world suddenly contracted to fit the intervals of care.³ Under these conditions, a mother might lose any sense of having a temporality of her own. As Sarah Manguso puts it in her memoir, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary,

Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time… In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

(53)

Postpartum expresses this predicament through the figure's fixity and listlessness, which stands out in sharp relief from the infant's animated and eager suckling. Although the room is filled with movement—the sinuous tendrils of fiber and cable, the rippling water, the activity of the other creatures—her body remains stiff and inert. In her reflections on depressive time, Kristeva suggests that the subject becomes captured in an impassible moment characterized by both the overbearing predominance of the past and the loss of any sense of futurity (60-1). Similarly, we might understand Postpartum's figure as mired in a melancholic attachment to the past with all of its frustrated potentials, reliving them in a present moment where no other action seems feasible.⁴

However, the painting also hints at other ways of inhabiting time. If we understand the resurrected trilobites as an image of her melancholic recollections returning to haunt the present, it is weird that they represent a fragment of history she never could have actually lived. Visited by freakish emissaries from deep time, Postpartum's human subject threatens to be pulled into the evolutionary past. The trilobites seem like they could be a metaphor—perhaps the paralyzed woman feels fossilized, an extinct trace of her former self—but this possibility is belied by the fact that the arthropods' front antennae are up and alert. These creatures burst forth inexplicably from the Early Cambrian period with a liveliness that exceeds that of the woman in the painting. Temporal scales clash as the painting joins together immense periods with the short ones. The vast spans of geological time conflict with the minute yet demanding tempos of caregiving experienced largely—but not exclusively—by women.

Across a number of Ingold's other works, including the cover image Permanent Anticipation, weirdness resides in the kinds of incongruous temporal juxtapositions that we hope to explore in this special issue on "Weird Temporalities." Permanent Anticipation features another portrait of a woman staring...