Brooklyn Artist Plans to Turn Birthing Process into “Performance Art”

While there is no denying that the miraculous process of child birth is a beautiful thing, one pregnant performance artist is taking the experience to a whole new level.

According to the New York Post, Brooklyn-based artist Marni Kotak is turning New York’s Microscope Gallery into her personal “birthing room,” where she’ll be spending time every day until her baby arrives within the next five weeks.

During the “performance,” which she calls “The Birth of Baby X,” Kotak, 36, will have her husband, a midwife and a doula to provide support by her side when she does give birth. An unknown number of gallery inhabitants will be there too, of course.

“I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art,” Kotak explained.

The Birth of Baby X isn’t the first shocking performance from Kotak – whose résumé includes “staged re-enactments of her own birth, attending her grandfather’s funeral and losing her virginity in a blue Plymouth” – and it certainly wont be her last, according to the art gallery’s website.

Following the live birth performance, Kotak will reportedly move onto another performance titled “Raising Baby X” in which she “re-contextualizes the everyday act of raising a child into a work of performance art.”

“The long-term project will ultimately encompass the overall span of the child’s life from birth through attending college and developing an independent life,” says Kotak.

“I believe that our most intriguing performances occur when we are not aware that we are performing. It is only in these moments that we are capable of transcending the issues of spectacle that have come to dominate performance art and much of contemporary culture.”

What are your thoughts on Marni Kotak and her live birth performance? Is she going “too far” in her artistic endeavors?

via CNN