About

Pop-Up Condom Shop is a temporary art installation featuring M.A.M.A.’s "DISRUPT THE SPERM - ERUPT RESPONSIBLY” custom condoms. The project addresses the disparities between female and male-focused contraception and redirects the responsibility for birth control and unwanted pregnancies from ovulators to ejaculators.

Pop-Up Condom Shop was on view April 28-29, 2023 as one of 70+ artistic projects created by alumnx and current students to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of CalArts. The projects were known as "Happenings."

Materials

Custom-designed condom packages, dispenser, retractable banner, name badges, video, flatscreen.

Project Content

M.A.M.A. (Mother Artists Making Art) is an interdisciplinary, mother artist group that formed in the late 1990s to support each other in representing our invisible or taboo experiences of being mothers. Our early art works examined breastmilk and breastfeeding. We are all CalArtians.

In our latest project, Pop-Up Condom Shop, M.A.M.A. continues its exploration of bodily fluids related to childbirth with semen.

The genesis of this project was the discovery of Gabrielle Blair’s powerful new book, Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. Through extensive research and documentation, Blair makes the case that men cause all unwanted pregnancies and that men must step up and take individual responsibility for their sperm, especially now, in a post-Roe v. Wade world.

Our installation borrows heavily from Blair’s findings. As mother artists who benefited from a time in the U.S. when abortion was a choice, we now recognize the onus has always been unnecessarily imbalanced against ovulators. We see ourselves as accomplices to change the zeitgeist. Our intention is to disrupt the hierarchy of male comfort to one that is in tune with a more equitable arrangement where women’s safety is at the center.

Aesthetic Choices

The “branding” design of our Pop-Up Condom Shop centers on the obvious, over-the-top metaphor of volcanic eruption as a phallic replacement. The molten lava (sperm and semen) spew violently and flow in rivers down the vertical volcano.

Perhaps most importantly, we choose to GLITCH the eruption

and DISRUPT the sperm.

Resources:

Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

Highlights:

Men are 50 times more fertile than women.
Ovulation is involuntary, ejaculation is not.
Birth control for women is hard to access and hard to use.
Birth control for men is is easy to access and easy to use.
Society clings to the idea that men hate condoms.
Vasectomies are less risky than tubal ligations.
We expect women to the do the work of pregnancy and prevention.
Men cause all unwanted pregnancies.
Sperm are dangerous.
Men can easily prevent abortions but choose not to.

M.A.M.A. (Mother Artists Making Art) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, mother artist group. Two of the original founding members of M.A.M.A. are the co-creators of this project and we are also CalArts alumna: Lisa Mann, CalArts, MFA ‘92 Experimental Animation, School of Film/Video and Lisa Schoyer, CalArts, MFA ‘91 Art, School of Art. A third founding member, Karen Schwenkmeyer, CalArts, MFA ‘92 Photography, School of Art, contributed to the original concept of Pop-Up Condom Shop.

Lisa Mann is a Professor of Cinematic Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Expanded Animation Research + Practice MFA program. Lisa Schoyer is a former studio art lecturer at UC Irvine and Occidental College. Karen Schwenkmeyer is an Adjunct Instructor of Photography at Cerritos and El Camino Colleges.

Pop-Up Condom Shop was sponsored by a CalArts 50th Reunion project grant as part of the "Happenings" events for the CalArts 50th Reunion on April 28-29, 2023. The installation was set up in the hallway in front of the Main Gallery on the CalArts campus in Valencia, CA.

Contact:

lisa@lisa-mann.com

lisa@rasopathies.org