[…] Like his contemporaries, Melee operates within the so-called ‘discourse of the abject’ – addressing extreme situations, radicalized contents, anything considered contaminated, taboo, perverse; anything that exceeds good taste and threatens boundaries. His works challenge proper cultural labeling, endeavoring to blur stereotypical bourgeois distinctions that foster the permissible and exclude the forbidden. One of the major concerns of this discourse of the abject is the sick, aging, disintegrating, dead body. Robert Melee’s mother thus embodies a body that has ceased to be an object of passion and has become abject – an aging, flabby, grotesque body at its basest, rejected, portrayed in its loathsome and pornographic aspects.

[…] In his provocative way, through the gutters, Melee offers us an alternative maternal model that subverts every archetypal cultural convention and ridicules the image of the good, containing, compassionate, gentle, caring mother. […] In the film Bath Time Mommy, Melee performs a purification ritual of sorts: he undresses his mother and washes her in the bathtub. As in Pedro Almodovar’s movie Talk to Her, there is something ritualistic, bizarre and eccentric about this intimate moment. The fact that he is a homosexual adds a kinky aspect to this celebration of femininity. […] This intimacy is interrupted, however, when we find out that he bathes her with rubber gloves. On the one hand, he doesn’t really touch her, perhaps out of respect; on the other, perhaps he is simply disgusted. […] The rubber gloves render the act of bathing technical, and Melee looks more like a social worker or an orderly in a home for the aged than a caring, loving son.

In Melee’s works it is not clear who is the abuser and who is the abused, who is the oppressor and who is the victim. It is a perfect symbiosis of voluntary victims; a combination of sadism, exhibitionism, affection, aggression, revenge, control, abuse, and compassion. The role reversal (a son bathing his mother) attests to the distortion of the traditional relationship within the family, to dysfunction, thus generating tragi-comic situations that poignantly expose this bizarre relationship. Melee […] takes the theme of mother-son relationship to Oedipal psychosexual taboo areas, addressing them with humor and fantasy. […] He has given his mother a role she never had a chance to have in her ‘real life.’ She is his star […] – a role most moms would have liked to play in their kids’ lives. The fact that she takes an active part in her son’s career, […] even performing at the opening of his show, makes her the ultimate mom that any Oedipal son would have dreamed of having forever; a mother who is everything at once: a friend, a whore, old, young, alive, dead, real and fake. […]

Excerpts from Tami Katz-Freiman’s essay “Mommy Dearest” in Robert Melee’s exhibition catalogue

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