I - The Umbilical Vein | 1990-2003 | memymom
If we define an artists’ collective as a close alliance between artists who jointly conceive, produce, and present works of art and who do so under a single name and signature, we find that collectives such as this have achieved some of the very best that the visual arts have had to offer over the past fifty years: Art & Language and Gilbert & George, for instance – to name two exclusively male duos; then there are Bernd & Hilla Becher and Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller among the male–female collectives; and the Chapman Brothers are an example of collaboration between relatives. Belgium’s memymom, who call Brussels home, is an artists’ collective that grew out of a transgenerational family relationship. The duo behind memymom describes itself as ‘a collaboration between two artists, a mother (Marilène Coolens) and her daughter (Lisa De Boeck)’. A mother–daughter artists’ collective is pretty unusual.
Back in the 1990s, Jo De Boeck, creative director at an advertising agency, and Marilène Coolens, physical education teacher, encouraged their three children (Lisa and two sons) to be creative and playful. Their dressing-up and improvised sketches did not materialize out of thin air. Marilène was a keen photographer, her camera always close at hand, and she took pictures of her children just like any other mother, motivated perhaps by a conscious or unconscious desire to capture them for eternity – a habit possibly reflecting a desire for immortality. Whatever the case, a game began around 1990, when Lisa was 5 years old. She certainly wasn’t camera shy; as time went by, she even began to play roles and invent situations to get her mother to grab her camera and take a photo. Lisa recalls: ‘I was like a cat – I knew exactly what to do to get myself a saucer of milk.’ Between 1990 and 2003, Marilène took more than a thousand analogue photos of her daughter. The first pictures show her as a child, later ones as an adolescent and a teenager, and the most recent as a young woman. Looking back, Lisa stresses that she always gets a double feeling from the photographs: she’s playing a part, yet also revealing something of herself. What she’s doing, moreover, is something she can produce only in Marilène’s presence.
The images make no attempt to conceal their playful staging, with the occasional detail testifying to its hastily improvised character: colourful sheets taped up as backdrops or visible electrical sockets and cables. Lisa’s eyes are made up, there is lipstick on her mouth, she sometimes wears a wig and often jewellery, and she holds a handbag or a revolver as a prop. She wears dresses and gowns, many of them leaving her shoulders bare, and stockings – which aren’t normally a childhood accessory. When she’s not barefoot, she has on oversized ankle boots or high-heeled sandals. Around her neck, a skilfully knotted bow. In some pictures she looks into the camera, while in others her eyes are fixed on something outside the shot. There are also times where the shutter catches her unawares. The girl in the pictures is playing with – and playfully exploring – various typological manifestations of womanhood, something she does innocently, faux innocently or knowingly, and using all sorts of props. There’s no way a child or adolescent could have achieved these mises en scène without another’s complicity, although it can’t be inferred from the content of the images or from their titles precisely who it is that is complicit with the realization of these scenes. The first and sole accomplice here is in fact the mother. She goes along actively with her daughter’s play and perpetuates it photographically. Without her, there would have been no photographs at this early stage. Mother and daughter ‘work’ together, entirely innocent in moral terms and wholly free of any awareness other than of the game. Mutually complicit and symbiotic. As if the umbilical cord had never been cut.
The special bond between mother and daughter did not go unnoticed by the father. One day, Jo De Boeck (nomen est omen – his and Lisa’s surname means ‘the book’) suggested out of the blue that mother and daughter ought to publish a book of the many photos they had produced over time. For Lisa, the suggestion was an epiphany. The realization that they were engaged in something that might be physically shared (in a book or exhibition) and also have some meaning for others struck both women loud and clear. They externalized this recognition in 2004 when they adopted the name ‘memymom’. The game would no longer be played entirely unconsciously. With the creation of memymom, mother and daughter brought an end to the innocent phase.
Jo De Boeck never got to see his wife and daughter’s artists’ books. He died in 2002, and the playing, posing, and photographing of his soul-mate and daughter understandably ceased for a while.
In 2013 memymom exhibited at De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam under the title ‘The Umbilical Vein’. For the very first time, the show presented the public with a selection of eighty analogue photographs from the period 1990–2003.
II - The Digital Decade | 2010-2015 | memymom
memymom’s first, self-published photo book appeared in November 2015. Entitled The Digital Decade, it contains photographs – all of them now shot and processed digitally – from series such as ‘The Baby Blues’ (2014), ‘Dusting off the Memory’ (2013), ‘La petite princesse’ (2012), ‘The Nurse’ (2012), and ‘Nunsense’ (2011). Lisa and Marilène frequently worked in series at this point; a reflexive awareness of their own practice had opened up, and they now approached projects for new photographs with a heightened degree of intent. One of the clearest examples in terms of this dimension (‘now we’re saying something about ourselves’) is the picture memymom Channels the Blues (from ‘The Baby Blues’ series), in which the women express the emotion that overcame them when they were unpacking photos for the 2013 exhibition that had been taken when the family was still complete.
When they compiled the book, though, Coolens and De Boeck did not stick to the series. Working in series did not mean that the individual images had lost any of their autonomous value and could not be shown separately; all the photographs in the book were included because of their own intrinsic worth. A different sequence of photos creates a different visual story and allows other meanings to emerge. This may be a detail, but it shows that memymom also work in a conscious way when publishing their oeuvre. What began as a casual game gradually developed into a conscious practice and a visual study in which not a single detail is left to chance – in other words, into art.
The difference between the ‘work’ in the first chapter, ‘The Umbilical Vein’, and that in the second chapter, ‘The Digital Decade’, goes beyond the differences between analogue and digital or single and serial work. Marilène – who, unlike her daughter, doesn’t like to be photographed and prefers to be shown unrecognizably – has now also become one of the dramatis personae. Brûlant Secret (from ‘The Baby Blues’ series) shows her from the back, while reading Stefan Zweig’s 1911 novel Burning Secret on a tablet. In the story, the 12-year-old Edgar befriends a man who wishes to seduce his mother in the hope of holding onto her attention. Lisa can now be found behind the camera too, or else she is no longer photographed alone. Mother and daughter, both unrecognizable, appear in the same image in Den Deugniet (Rascal, 2013). It goes without saying that a picture such as this generates a dramatic dynamism that wasn’t present in the images in the first chapter.
The locations used are another substantial change. All the images in ‘The Umbilical Vein’ are set in undefinable, fairly enclosed and improvised interiors, whereas the view in ‘The Digital Decade’ zooms out a little to reveal recognizable locations: a bedroom, a garden, a hotel room, a cemetery, a landscape. There is room on this broader stage for several characters. In The Bedroom (from the ‘Whodunnit’ series, 2012), for instance, Lisa appears up to five times in different guises, thanks to the possibilities of digital image manipulation. The second group of works is also wider thematically, with an explicit focus on motherhood, among other things. We see Lisa with a cuddly toy tied to her front, as if pregnant with her teddy bear, and as a veiled mother breast-feeding one of her four Liberty-clad dolls. Works such as this are memymom’s artistic, ironic responses to the clichéd questions posed by disconcerted people at the time of the first photographs, regarding what they saw as a collaboration between a mother and her daughter that went too far: ‘Won’t it take matricide to keep your relationship healthy?’
The reality is that we badly need memymom’s highly imaginative fiction. As Philip Roth put it: ‘The world of fiction ... in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the [artist] and the [viewer] to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living. We may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we have come into contact with the work of fiction.’
III - Somewhere Under the Rainbow | 2016-2021 | memymom
All the images from the third chapter, ‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’ (2016–21) – which is still being developed and of which a selection is currently being shown and published as a preview – are even more multi-layered in terms of their iconography and content, if such a thing were possible. In its most recent work, memymom has added further dimensions and strata of meaning. It moves freely within the space–time of the route it has followed previously by, for instance, creating an image that echoes an earlier one. What’s more, it opens up the time in which the two have been collaborating – there is work here that focuses on Marilène’s memories from the 1960s – or else each of them separately uses props or locations that refer to Marilène’s ‘back story’. Certain images are flashbacks to plots they developed at an earlier stage, such as The Hitcher (2017), which harks back to Hitch in 1996.
Today, memymom rightly and implicitly positions its production between other art forms. Ici Tati (2017) the film language of Jacques Tati; La Vérity (2016) is an overt tribute to Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat (1793), while Closing in on David (2017) is set at the house of David Lynch, whom memymom explicitly cites as a general source of inspiration. Referring to or drawing on other art works or practices shows first and foremost that memymom has grown aware of the aesthetic, artistic potential of its own work.
It comes as no surprise that memymom is able to justify every detail in every photograph. It wouldn’t be appropriate and would take us too far from here to analyse and explain every photograph in ‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’ iconographically. Nor is this crucial to the viewer’s reading of the images. But it is typical of how memymom works to construct an image that is then left entirely to the viewer’s personal interpretation.
Although anyone viewing the photographs from the third chapter won’t be able to tell from the visual language alone who is playing the character depicted and who is the photographer (assuming it’s not a third person or an automatic shutter), this strand in the two women’s work includes a variety of self-portraits. In hers, in which Lisa has no hand whatsoever, Marilène makes ample use of masks and old-fashioned tapestries, table-mats, and rugs. Lisa’s self-portraits, by contrast, are primarily determined by the spaces in which she shoots them – the genius loci, the attributes, textures, and structures. The viewer is aware only through extra-artistic information that these are self-portraits. It would be just as possible to read them as images produced by mother and daughter as it is to view them as individual works that are by Marilène alone or Lisa alone. The conclusion that follows from this is an obvious one: Marilène Coolens and Lisa De Boeck unfailingly demonstrate in ‘Somewhere under the Rainbow’ that they are working as two equal partners and that their mother–daughter bond has given way to an equally close and unconditional artistic collaboration between two women. Over the past twenty-eight years, memymom have developed into a professional artists’ collective.
Just like the American artist Cindy Sherman (1954) – known for her countless photographic portraits of herself in ever-changing guises (which Sherman insists are not ‘self-portraits’ as such) – memymom uses the camera to achieve a final photographic result that doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with the camera or the medium of photography. memymom works intuitively and organically, as Sherman does: ‘My way of working is that I don’t know what I’m trying to say until it’s almost done.’ There is no carefully formulated programme. An idea arises, Coolens and De Boeck research it, pick out the necessary props, and set up their shoot. Ideas mature as they are worked on, within their world and within their work. The story of memymom arose in tempore non suspecto and is utterly authentic.
memymom’s images never resolve into total clarity; there will always be something elusive. That’s what keeps us looking and asking ourselves what is really going on between the artists themselves, between mother and daughter, and between their photographic images and us, their viewers.