onceptual art rarely commands an audience of 200 million. It’s an eye-watering figure that exceeds even Marina AbramoviĆ’s world-famous staring contest at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet in 1987, the feminist art duo Polvo de Gallina Negra (“Black Hen Powder”) took over live television in Mexico for a performance about the depredations and empty flattery of motherhood under the patriarchy. The artists in this collective, Maris Bustamante and Monica Mayer, made use of their guest appearance on the popular talk show , by expropriating standard armchair pitter-patter to stage a live performance, an act of fathomless chutzpah. Over the hairsprayed coiffure of Guillermo Ochoa, ’s tentative host, the artists slipped a flowery yellow apron made tumescent by a styrofoam belly, crowning Ochoa (“Mother for a day”) with a regnal crown of pipe cleaners. Ochoa gamely play-acted being pregnant, while the artists offered him different pills to induce empathy and simulate the travails of gestation. When the studio audience leered and cat-called, the artists advised Ochoa to ignore the lacerating envy of patriarchy’s evil eye. “Mother for a
