‘Milf is a state of being’: this show takes you inside the Milf universe

The MILF has become a stock figure in the landscape of popular culture. As a relative to the bimbo and the hun, the “mum I’d like to fuck” is an archetype that hangs on the architecture of excess – a perceived too much-ness of lips, breasts, perfume, and carnality. From Stiffler’s mom to Lisa Rinna, the MILF is a caricature of femininity that promises consummate sexual initiation to adolescent virgins everywhere. 

An immersive exhibition by artist, curator, writer, and filmmaker Molly Wurwand (at Junior High Los Angeles and co-presented by THNK1994) reconceptualises the Milf as a queer icon. Inspired by “performances of genders, plastic surgery, pseudo-celebrity, and the hypnotic discomfort of being alive inside a body”, Wurwand invites visitors to inhabit their “new definition” of this cultural archetype characterised by them as “the patron saint of Los Angeles”. Featuring original paintings, film, performance art, carefully curated artefacts, a sensory perfume experience, and the chance to encounter a vision of your Milf alter ego, Wurwand lovingly (and with what they themself describe as “deranged reverence”) explores, celebrates, and queers the Milf archetype.

Born and raised in Brentwood, Los Angeles – the “headquarters of the Milf spirit” – Wurwand, founder of the Milf Museum, became obsessed with this icon of ripe, abundant womanhood. “I don’t know if you know Brentwood,” Wurwand tells me over Zoom, leaning closer to the screen and dropping their voice conspiratorially, “but it’s where Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered by OJ Simpson.” We talk about this duality of Los Angeles – city of angels and perpetual summer, bathed in golden light and lined in palm trees, yet built on a perilous faultline. “The way LA looks is so sparkly and magical, but there is this mixture of darkness and light,” they explain. “I think my first fascination from being little was LA itself. And I think if LA were personified in some kind of form it would be the Milf: stunning beauty, confidence, and a lust for life, but then there's a darkness under the surface.”

With its emerald lawns, turquoise pools and put-together housewives, Brentwood appears like a glimmering idyll. But the illusion of eerie perfection was shattered in 1994 when, in a story that could be straight from the pages of a Hollywood film noir, Nicole Brown Simpson [along with her friend Ron Goldman] was found brutally murdered by her estranged husband, American football hero OJ Simpson. The world watched, captivated, as his flight from police custody on the city’s freeways reached its dramatic denouement in the driveway of his Brentwood home. For Wurwand, it was a formative childhood moment of awakening – a horrifying yet compelling glimpse of their neighbourhood’s shadowy undercurrents; a confirmation of the young artist’s suspicion that, inside the immaculate gated residences, all was not as it seemed in sunny Brentwood. 

“I think if LA were personified in some kind of form it would be the Milf: stunning beauty, confidence, and a lust for life, but then there's a darkness under the surface” – Molly Wurwand

As we’re talking, it occurs to me that Marilyn Monroe was also living in Brentwood when she died. “It just gave me chills that you said that because I feel Marilyn in the air in Brentwood,” Wurwand says. “People might be looking for the glitz and the glamour of Marilyn, but I prefer to think of her in a scarf and sunglasses, shopping at the Brentwood  Country Mart. Marilyn is totally present in all of this.” Discussing dark tourism and Monroe’s hacienda bungalow on Fifth Helena Drive, Wurwand says, “I discovered that Anna Nicole Smith had rented the house for a period of time. I’m not trying to say that [Brentwood is] a totally haunted place because I think it's also a really peaceful place…. But there is something baked into the energy of this geography.”

The vision of the Milf that emerges from Wurwand’s work was born, in part, from their childhood proximity to the extravagances and tragedies that came to embody, for them, a particular strand of Milfdom. Having dedicated their practice to delineating and explicating their ideas of the Milf, they have evolved its original notion into a much more inclusive concept. For Wurwand, the Milf – with their intentional and committed performance of gender – is a queer icon who thereby transcends gender. “I never use all caps – like MILF –  because I don’t see it as connected to the acronym. ‘Mum I’d like to fuck’ is inherently objectifying, but [in my work] the Milf is a persona or a quality; an adjective.” Here, the Milf goes way beyond being a hot mum, it’s not even a state that Wurwand describes as being conditional on motherhood. “Milfdom is such a heightened performance of gender. And what is the queer community without considering, battling or embracing performance and gender? But I think [the Milf] also breaks free of that, it’s a way bigger spirit than just being contained in one body or one aesthetic. Being a Milf is a state of being.”

Their Milf ethos was also profoundly affected by the trauma of puberty. “I developed very early and, by fifth grade, I suddenly looked like a cartoon character. It felt so dissonant,” they recall. “At the time, I thought there were only two genders. I didn't know that there was infinitely more. I was like, ‘Well, I’m not a boy. And I’m not a girl.’ It was really hard and it got really dark and sad for a lot of years. My gender dysphoria was like this horrible, rotten soup inside of me.” 

“Milf is a state of being” – Molly Wurwand

The conflict between exteriority and inward identity was personified for Wurwand in figures such as Princess Diana, Lola Ferrari, and Whitney Houston. “I idolised these people who were judged so harshly for how they look – or so much was assumed about them because of how they look– but they were different inside.” It’s this dissonance between surface and interiority, performance and privacy that recur throughout the artist’s queering of the Milf archetype. 

It’s not easy to pin down the precise tenets of their “new definition” but that is perhaps an integral part of its inclusivity and expansiveness. It’s constantly evolving to embrace ever more tropes and details. But there are certain unmistakable Milf artefacts that make the Milf world legible, enshrined by Wurwand in their Milf Museum – Tivo remote, Starbucks cup, and Motorola Razr cell phone (metallic pink, of course). 

Another throughline is the tension between artifice and verisimilitude. We discuss the allure of Disneyland – another natural denizen of California – and Wurwand’s fascination with the hyperreal. “At Disney, they leave no stone unturned. If you pick up an old-timey telephone on Main Street, there are people talking. Nothing is there by accident.” Inspired by this “commitment to making the not real real”, the exhibition aspires to this same attention to detail. “I think it's maybe the closest approximation of a Milf Disneyland,” they tell me. At a vanity mirror that enables you to see yourself reflected back in Milf form, you can pick up a telephone and listen in to a series of voicemails impregnated with revealing details and clues about the identity of an imagined 90s Milf. “If you pay attention, you might figure out why the Milf can't come to the phone,” Wurwand tells me. 

“Milfdom is such a heightened performance of gender. And what is the queer community without considering, battling or embracing performance and gender?” – Molly Wurwand

Alongside the screening of My Imaginary Life for Someone (M.I.L.F.S.) (a film made by Wurwand and Ryan McGlade), visitors can experience a sunbathing deck inhabited by ‘real Milf’ performance art, complete with faux grass, set to a soundscape of sprinklers and Los Angeles radio stations. The show also offers the chance to be intoxicated by heady Milf scents. Wurwand worked with photographer and fragrance expert Elizabeth Renstrom (aka @basenotebitch) to present a selection of Milf perfumes. With her “archaeological knowledge of defunct fragrances”, Renstrom curated a series of still-life shots with “peak-Milf era” ephemera anchoring each scent in a time and place. Set amid an arrangement of historical Milf artefacts, the perfume bottles “look like candy”. In keeping with the powerful slightly too much of everything-ness that characterises a vital component of Milfhood, the fragrances are suitably potent. “You’re tasting it. It’s kind of stinging your eyes. You feel a bit nauseous but also excited,” says, Wurwand, describing the overpowering sensory experience of the perfumes but also, for me, encapsulates something of the formidable and abiding Milf spirit: “They stay with you.”

Milfs by Molly Wurwand (co-presented by Thnk1994 and Junior High LA) is running at 603 S Brand Blvd, Glendale, 90214) until June 11 2023.

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