Unreliable matriarchs

Milk’s fluidity and ostensible purity belie a complex array of industrial and regulatory processes, and a thick web of social and cultural associations, and provokes a language for emotion and thinking.From the milk of human breasts to industrialized cow’s milk, milk combines with social operations and is invented anew, malleable under the pressures of law, fashion, science and economy. Fantasies of milk’s powers recur, from the medieval lactating Virgin Mary to the contemporary promise of raised I.Q. through formula or enhanced milk. On account of its opaque properties and evocative associations, milk enjoys a particular relationship to photographic representation. This relationship is extended through CGI imaging, which finds novel ways to represent the drama inherent in milk, a play off between self-forming agency and capture of a supply for siphoning into profitable ends. Milk acts as a spectrometer that can reveal to us the defining characteristics of an epoch