Alison Saar: STILL

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Frederick Merchant,
Blockade Stills, c. 1917,
Durwood Barbour Collection
of North Carolina Postcards,
North Carolina Collection
Photographic Archives,
Wilson Library, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“women [are] valued by the functioning body. When their bodies stop functioning then they are
[rendered] derelict and put up on the shelf.” Saar’s banishment of a woman’s body parts to a shelf
emphasizes the cultural devaluation of women as scientific specimens. The presence of defunct
burners endows the installation with an even more distressing sense of the laboratory where
clandestine experiments occur, which Saar enhances by reversing the order of a uterus containing a
pomegranate feeding coal-filled ovaries. Now in her mid-fifties, Saar presents the quiet dismay of
barrenness, of fertility run dry, while voicing a sharp critique of the commoditization of woman as
a life-giving machine and subsequent devaluation when this role ends.
Saar is known for highly personalized art that addresses her struggles with the contradictions
between an outwardly Caucasian appearance and personal identification with her mother’s African
American heritage. In the new sculpture 50 Proof, Saar tackles the painful realities of being
“half-black, half-white” through a rendition of “the tragic mulatto” stereotype, who seems to
be undergoing a kind of cleansing or purification through the mechanism of a still. In her usual
fashion, Saar’s sharp wit in titling this piece poetically plays with the unit of measurement for
alcohol content in liquor. Ironically, in the context of backyard stills, 50 proof would be considered
an extraordinarily weak distillation of moonshine, which is usually about 190 proof or 95% alcohol.
50 Proof is composed of a female head and heart made of clear glass. Ink feeds from the heart into
the lower half of the head. When activated by the squeeze pump, a slow trickle spills out of the
woman’s eyes, her black tears splattering into a white washbasin and indelibly staining two white
hand towels hanging from racks. Coal Tar and Ivory soap placed on a shelf offer up a metaphoric
cleansing: a choice between black and white. The irony of this soap selection is especially germane.
Ivory soap is popularly known in America for its catchy advertising of being so pure that it floats.
Coal Tar soap, on the other hand, has a more ambiguous nature. Derived from a liquid byproduct
of distilled coal, tar soap is an antiseptic that draws out toxins from the body and has therefore
been used or prescribed as a cleanser for a variety of skin disorders. However, it can also irritate or
redden the skin, cause increased sun sensitivity, and is cancerous. Hence, it has both purifying and
contaminating properties.iii
50 Proof evokes a turn-of-the-century domestic setting. Rigged to the still, the vintage washstand
has an eerie overtone of an old hospital lab. The copper tubing, with its varied dark blue, black,
and brown patina, contributes a sense of experimentation while implying also the passage of time
and history. The metal armature around the woman’s neck, which holds the glass head in place,
reinforces the notion of history, recalling images of slave chain gangs, their necks, hands, and feet
in iron shackles. The black tears running down the face into the basin—like indelible words and
splotches of ink on paper—seem to be spilling over this sordid episode of human history.
Mammy Machine and Black Lightning riff off “stills” and “distillation” to signify the reduction or
essentialization of humans into stereotypes. Mammy Machine includes a vintage washbasin and
a copper armature holding a cluster of nine glass bottles in various breast shapes and shades of
brown. Squeezing the rubber pump causes this literal “milking machine” to stream water out from
the nipples.
The “still” clearly references stereotypes of women of color as washerwomen, mammies, and wet
nurses, who take care of other peoples’ children while leaving their own behind. As Saar points
out, such stereotypes exist today. “Society still perpetuates them…a person of color is often
paid a fraction of the salary as a white nanny.” Society values the mammy, her milk, and labor as
commodities, thus demeaning the person. This makes the milk, Saar asserts, “like dirty dish water.”
While Mammy Machine draws attention to economic oppression of women of color and subsequent
consequences of poverty in America today, racism is also at the core of Black Lightning. The title
of Black Lightning places a racial twist on an alternate name for moonshine, also called white
lightning, mountain dew, mother’s milk, hooch, stump water, and Tennessee white whiskey. This
illegal clear liquid was historically distilled from corn into a very high proof spirit using small-scale,
homemade backyard stills usually made of copper. Although “white lightning” is popularly
associated with the Appalachian hills and Prohibition, it has a long history in America spanning
back to the Revolutionary and U.S. Civil Wars, when the government taxed liquors to pay for war.
Impoverished by the declined value of corn as food produce, many farmers turned to the illegal
distillation and distribution of this potent yet highly commoditized liquor.iv
Dis·till:
Condense; cleansing; purify; sanitize; decontaminate; refine; concentrate; abbreviate; reduce;
summarize; abridge; extract; glean; cull; collect; gather; remove; extort…