Blog Post #2 The Lonely Palette Episode 46, Patty Chang 1986 Melons(At a Loss)

 Blog #2 

The Lonely Palette Episode Episode 46- Patty Chang’s “Melons (At a Loss)” 1986

Episode 46: Patty Chang's Melons (At A Loss) (1998) — The Lonely Palette Podcast

This episode of The Lonely Palette comes from a series that discusses motherhood with the many complexities of this experience, and how artists talk about it in their work. This is an important topic that needs to be talked about more by artists. As someone who has yet to experience motherhood, I hadn’t fully thought about or explored art that discusses this sentiment. Specifically, this episode is about the artist Patty Chang, and her 1986 performance piece “Melons (At a Loss)”. 


The performance begins with a monologue, Chang begins to tell a story about her aunt who passed away, and the plate she inherited from her loss. She puts the plate on her head and balances it all while continuing to tell her story. She pulls out a knife and begins to slice off her right breast. When she pulls off what she cut, it reveals a melon in place of where her breast should be. She begins fishing out the meat of the melon with her fingers and putting it on the plate that’s still on her head. She pulls out a spoon and begins scooping out the melon and eating it. All the while she keeps balancing the plate and holds intense eye contact with the viewer.

Patty Chang’s art came to a rise in New York in the early 90s and defined itself by continuously pushing boundaries of what a woman’s body is expected to withstand in society (Avishai, 2023, 10:30). Her work is vulgar, raw, twisted, shocking because she wants the viewer to feel just as uncomfortable in their bodies as she does, or as women do. The horror of her work is what makes the audience not want to look away, which makes them pay attention to what she has to say, and she uses this discomfort to get her message across.

So how does this relate to motherhood? How does this relate to the general experience of womanhood and femininity? An art critic described Chang’s work as “testing the borders of flesh to explore the physical and ideological ways in which women's bodies are stitched, clamped, hooked, squeezed, and dismantled into femininity” (Avishai, 2023,10:52). Although breasts are sustenance for life, they become sexualized, objectified by an external gaze. Breastfeeding becomes sexualized, just having breasts in general can make you feel like an object. This is something that I talk about in my own body of work. As a feminine person, I constantly feel like I am something to be consumed. In Patty Chang’s, Melons (At a Loss) she challenges this concept head-on and begins to literally consume herself.


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