Sculpture as Monitor, or Automating the Mothering Machine

One of the more rarely explored domains of mid-century automation, although no less involved in streamlining a production process, was found far from the factory floor. In nurseries across the west, the rearing of children increasingly became the target for technologies of automating the tasks of mothering, even as mothers themselves came to be seen by social scientists, psychoanalysts, and doctors as exclusively responsible for the manufacture of the modern subject. Perhaps the most enduring of these technologies began, in fact, with a collaboration between the Zenith Radio Corporation and a sculptor: Isamu Noguchi’s1938 Radio Nurse with Guardian Ear, the first baby monitor. This paper considers several oblique offshoots of Noguchi’s monitor—Lee Bontecou’s forays into freestanding sculpture, Simone Forti’s Platforms (1961), and Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961)—in which concealed sound or its intimation suggests what Paul Christopher Johnson describes as the “doubled thing,” a trope for an unseen force acting within a body, and that binds the automaton to the fantasies of automatism, and “nearhuman” (almost always gendered and racialized) figures of incomplete agency to perfected agents—such as those mortal “mothering machines,” in Hannah Zeavin’s terms, who exercise exquisite, unbroken attentiveness and care. I explore how these works, none of which take mothering as a subject but all of which pose questions about the formation of subjects, both engage and alienate viewers’ attention, mirroring concurrent technological efforts to automate what seems most human, that solicitous surveillance of the mother.