Marni Kotak’s baby will literally be born into the limelight.
Kotak is a pregnant performance artist in New York who’s performing an exhibit called “The Birth of Baby X,” in which she plans to give birth to her child at the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn. Roughly five weeks away from the due date, Kotak is spending her days in the gallery where curious art aficionados are told (or, rather, warned) that she could go into labor any minute. The New York Daily News reports that Kotak 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.
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“I have decided to do this because I want to show people that, as in my previous performances, real life is the best performance art,” she told the New York Daily News. Which, apparently, isn’t all talk on Kotak’s part, as her previous work has included “attending her grandfather’s funeral and losing her virginity in a blue Plymouth,” according to the gallery.
But where do you go once you’ve expelled another human being from your body in front of a live audience? Well, it seems Kotak already has that one figured out; she plans on continuing the performance with a work called “Raising Baby X”, where she’ll “re-contextualize the everyday act of raising a child into a work of performance art.” NewsFeed would worry for the well-being of the child, but then again, being raised in the public eye hasn’t harmed anyone before, right? Right?