Léa Lublin, Mon fils, 1968
Léa Lublin
Mon fils

Léa Lublin (*1929 †1999, Argentina) graduated in 1949 from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and initiated her artistic career as a painter. During the mid-1960s, interested in exploring different materials and media, she became associated with the Centro de Artes Visuales of the Institute Torquato di Tella, an important centre of Argentinean experimental and avant-garde art. In 1968 Lublin performed “Mon Fils” in Paris: during the exhibition hours the artist took care of her baby at the museum, acknowledging gender and social life as major materials of her work. During the end of the 1960s, Lublin also created a number of participatory sensory environments in Chile and Argentina. In “Terranauts” (1969), the visitors experienced smells, tactile sensations, music and found written signs such as “art will be life.” Deeply influenced by French feminism — she eventually moved to Paris where she died in 1999 — Lublin was interested in de-conditioning perception and normative modes of relation both in art and in everyday life. Her critique of artistic representation can also be seen as a commentary on dominant forms of representation regulating everyday life, particularly gender and sexuality.

In Mon Fils (My Son), one of her first performances, Lea Lublin took care of her seven-month-old son Nicolas at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris throughout the whole exhibition. Art, daily life, motherhood and conceptual and political issues were all combined in Lublin’s performative displacing of domestic labour to a museum. EF

Courtesy Nicolas Lublin

Document media
Photographs

Issue date
1968

Tags
housework/carework, maternity, labour