Search results
5 Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document ‘[L]ittle girls are told their future is caring for people … ’ Sheila Rowbotham in Nightcleaners (1975)1 Post-Partum Document is an archive of objects that represent the pleasures Kelly’s maternal figure takes in caring for her child: infant clothing; soiled nappies; scribbled drawings; words, dialogues, and stories; letters and typesetting materials; pieces of blankets; and small gifts the child found in nature. These objects are marked by imminent losses, however, making the mother
In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.
Conclusion Across the arc of this book, I have made the case that the visual and textual manifestations of language were significant parts of art practices aligned with feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. I narrowed in on the work three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – who deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. I argue that by doing so, these artists identified three crucial mechanisms for keeping that sign ideologically
that endowed artistic language and 115 116 The synthetic proposition strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Analytic in its structural interrogation, their work added the synthetic, referring the viewer to political subject matter outside the realm of self-referential art. Feminism was a major catalyst in this transition. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labor and gender
, language, visual systems of signification, the operation of cultural hierarchies, and the formulation of a political sense of being. These artists did not assume the existence of any inherent or essential identity, they instead established identity politics as a mode through which to consolidate political and aesthetic agency. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines, based their practices
Introduction: addressing the other woman In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. I became interested in the way women artists engaged with text and writing when I saw WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoMA PS1 in New York City in
This book examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas. The book traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics. The central concept is a reversal of the qualitative assessment made by artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth in 1969. The book overviews the 1960s-1970s shift from disciplinary-based Conceptual Art to an interdisciplinary conceptualism, crediting the influence of contemporaneous politics dominated by identity and issue-based politics. It offers a survey of Adrian Piper's early work, her analytic conceptual investigations, and her transition to a synthetic mode of working with explicit political reference. The book explores how Conceptual Art is political art, analysing several works by synthetic proposition artists. It then surveys several key 1980s events and exhibitions before taking in depth the 1993 Whitney Biennial as its central case study for understanding the debates of the 1980s and the 1990s. Examining the ways in which Hans Haacke's work referenced political subject matter, simultaneously changing the conception of the processes and roles of art-making and art, the book argues against critics who regarded his work to be "about" politics. It also looks at the works of Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, and Andrea Fraser.
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
interaction. Because the female embodies the threat of castration in the unconscious of the male symbolic, the formal devices of mainstream filmmaking consistently highlight her as a controllable and reassuring phallic fetish within the narrative structure of the film, thereby encouraging all viewers to identify with the male gaze, and by extension the masculine symbolic order. British artist Mary Kelly also drew upon psychoanalysis, and the social processes by which the male and female subject enters the patriarchal symbolic order in Post-Partum Document (1975). Consisting
of an increasingly unequal American society and pounding ode to flight from the deadening constraints of the suburbs of one's birth had special resonance for Kureishi. Kureishi drew on a culture of provocation not only from the Royal Court Theatre, but also from the Institute of Contemporary Art. In October 1976 the ICA featured feminist conceptual artist Mary Kelly's exhibition Post-Partum Document . Her exploration of the mother–child relationship, informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, alternately adopted the voice of the mother, the child