Mary Kelly - Post-Partum Document:
Documentations I-III at ICA, London (1976)
Mary Kelly 1976 - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
The ICA display recorded a uniquely female experience—motherhood, raising a baby boy from his birth to the end of his second year, when he was ready to leave the home and the intimate relationship with his mother for the outside world, that is, nursery school. It was a considerable achievement on Mary Kelly’s part to combine the roles of parent and artist, and it was an intelligent, pragmatic decision to make daily maternal experiences and tasks the subject of her artistic inquiry.
Historically, the mother/child relationship has been depicted in countless paintings of Mary and the infant Jesus. In most modern families such a record takes the form of a sequence of amateur snapshots, but in Mary Kelly’s case the documentation took various forms: baby clothes; a daily diary of notes (some typed, some handwritten) concerning food and drinks consumed plus resulting nappy-liner fecal stains; her son’s earliest scribbles and handprints; diagrams derived from a post-Freudian theorist; plus a text entitled Footnotes and Bibliography.
Hence there were physical samples of evidence, indexical traces and written discourses that were transcriptions of speech acts and also analyses of, reflections upon, those speech acts. The material was presented in terms of panels and footnotes organised in three sections representing different stages of weaning: (1) weaning from the breast; (2) (learning to speak) weaning from dependence on the mother’s completion of the child’s utterances; (3) weaning from the mother/child dyad.
What was also unusual about Mary Kelly’s work was the use of a theoretical framework mainly derived from the French, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan who is famous for his theory of the mirror-phase in child development. Lacan’s theories provided Kelly with a male, objective, quasi-scientific structure within which to analyse her own subjective experiences of motherhood and her son’s acquisition of a masculine identity. It enabled her to distance herself, to generalize from her personal biography— “the personal is political”—to that of all mothers.
The questions that Mary Kelly addressed were: “How does socialisation occur? How is consciousness/ ideology formed? What processes are involved in the reciprocal relations between mothers and their children? When and how do children become self-conscious, gendered beings, enter into the language and begin to make visual marks? And what desires and fantasies do mothers experience? What is their stake in the project called ‘motherhood’?”
Mary Kelly 1976 - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
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