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Introduction
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Mary Kelly - Marking Time, Imaging Desire: The Other Perspective
The symposium Drawing across boundaries coincided with an exhibition at the Generali
Foundation (Vienna, 1998) of the entire Post Partum Document. All the sections of Kelly's
Document, held in various collections around the world, were exhibited together, and
English and German editions of the book were re-published. The exhibition was
accompanied by a presentation of documents and prototypes from Kelly's archive. The
exploration of her own archive for this presentation prompted the development of the
paper that Kelly presented in Loughborough.
Among the notebooks in the archive was a copy of Economy and Society (vol.5, number
4), the cover of which had been scribbled upon by Kelly's son. She noted that the first
article in the volume marked a significant challenge to Althusser's theory of ideology, and
was the starting point for subsequent work on representation. In particular, she referred to
the attempts of work informed by feminism to import psychoanalysis to address a different
object, that is the object of the unconscious. This marker of the arena within which she
was working at the time was reinforced by a brief review of some press clippings from the
period in the mid-1970s when Kelly exhibited the first part of the Document at the ICA.
The debate around issues of ideology was even reported within the tabloid press, who
quoted Kelly as saying:
I am trying to show the reciprocity of the process of socialisation in the first few years of
life. The sexual division of labour is not a symmetrically structured system of women
inside the home and men outside of it, but rather an intricate, most often asymmetrical
delegation of tasks which aims to provide a structural imperative to heterosexuality.
These references to the context of her work at the time also included mention of the
conference on patriarchy at the Architectural Association, and served to remind the
audience of the sense in which she usually talked about her work as 'debate specific'.
However, the paper being presented on this occasion was to be framed from a different
perspective, which could be described as a retrospective analysis of the means by which
she addressed a theory of the subject within her practice.
In her description of the first section of Post Partum Document, Kelly referred to the trace
of the child's excretions upon the nappy liners as the index that 'constructs the child ... as
Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author
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the mother's symptom'. The 'procedural tendency' of the section was set off by the
diagrams at each end of the installation. At the start was what Kelly refers to as her
'empirical scientific diagram' and at the end a series that borrows from psychoanalytic
discourse. While the piece was originally displayed with footnotes, these appear on the
same scale as reproductions of the work in the book form. The intention of the notes was
to pull the viewer out of the space of engagement with the proceeding narrative, towards
an investigation that referred to discourses outside the institution of art. As such, she was
taking a controversial position in term's of Kosuth's definition of art as an analytical
proposition. She framed it as rediscovering 'an introduction of the so-called synthetic
proposition' that would carry the interrogation of the object into its second stage - the
interrogation of the interrogation.
The second section of Post Partum documents the introduction of speech. From the
description given of the documentation that Kelly carried out for this part of the Document,
it would appear that she generated a work which not only provided a representation of a
linguistic understanding of speech development, but also allowed her the opportunity to
focus on the intra-subjectivity of the moment of separation. She described the child's
signifier, the single word utterance as a conceptually complete sentence, as positioning
the mother as provider of the signified. The utterance 'mama' meant different things
depending upon inflection and context: 'help me', 'see this', 'be there'. And then there was
a word that could not be understood by Kelly, 'weh'. She discovered that this is what
linguists call a 'pivot', understood to be introduced when the child has the propensity to
speak grammatically, so cutting the mother out of the picture still further. The word comes
to be because the mother is ceasing to be the sole provider for all need.
The moment of separation and the subsequent sense of loss could be seen as significant
in any discussion of drawing, as the loss of the object frees up the possibility of its
representation. Kelly referred to Lacan's explanation of loss and the failure to fully satisfy
need as setting the absolute condition of desire, with this being a punishment and a
liberation as it ensures that the object will remain lost.
In her discussion of the third part of Post Partum, Kelly developed a discussion of the
relationship of subject/object relations to a perspective schema. Documentation III, The
Analysed Markings and Perspective Schema, is formed from ten drawings which were
given to Kelly by her son when he started nursery school.
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Perspective as a form of pictorial thinking, as a language reflecting on the problematics of
the subject, was seen as clearly emphasised by Leonardo. Kelly used his schematic
within the third document not as an historical code but, concurring with Damisch 1, as a
paradigm (from the Greek 'to show'). Kelly described this model as allowing reflection on
the problematics of the subject, enabling the 'study of the structures of enunciation in the
visual arts'. The point of view, the vanishing point, the distance point, all examining the
subject of representation.
method
Kelly rejected the RenaissanceLeonardo's
notion ofperspective
perspective
as something that categorically
distances the spectator from its object, by introducing the possibility of infinite spatial
extension. As opposed to taking on an exterior point structuring representation, she saw
the eye in projection in that system as erased, with the subject being tied by its point of
view and the vanishing point. Referring alternatively to this as the gaze, with the subject
viewing the image as fixed into a place where 'he infinitely recedes', she presented
perspective as a schema which might be revealing about 'our unconscious implication in
the picture'. This understanding of the viewer as being the point of infinite recession
brought Kelly back to the question of representation precisely as the representation of
loss.
When discussing Document II and the acquisition of language, Kelly had alluded to the
mirror phase. Her reappraisal of Document III included an appreciation of a spatial
dimension in that phase, where she saw procedural development in the placing of forms
1 Hubert Damisch. The Origins of Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995.
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on the paper by her child. The subject could be seen as a function of space, and 'the
space as a space of projection'. She referred to the mirror phase as having introjection,
through the mother's voice, and projection, 'the gestalt of the body image'.
An exploration of Leonardo's and Durer's schemata of artificial perspective brought Kelly to
revisit Kosuth's position on the propositional nature of art. What intrigued her about
Leonardo's contribution to artificial perspective was its elucidation of information about the
position of objects in space by using perspective backwards, by measurements taken from
paintings and drawings. The Durer schema, published in 1525, demonstrates
emphatically the privileging of the spectator, who decides where he will intercept the visual
rays to converge upon his retina. As Kelly said, 'here is where the problem begins, with
the idea of the fixed spectator point'. In relation to Kosuth's search for a perfectly denoted
language of art, where its objects express definitions or formal consequences of definitions
of art, Kelly sees the empirical material of the Post Partum Document as possibly less
relevant than the work on the perspective schema. However in the layering of the empiric
material, or at least now in unpacking it, the symbolic serves to figure the relationships
between, and exploration of, the shifting between subject and object, self and boundary.
In looking at the drawings of children, Kelly reminded the audience of the graphic evolution
that takes place upon the discovery of what she termed 'emotive visual symbolisation'.
Scribbling, by the age of two years, is usually placed in a total configuration of shapes.
Diagrammatic marks, crosses, circles, squares, triangles and odd shapes, sometimes
aggregated and sometimes alone, become, Kelly suggested, the signifying system of
written language or develop into a kind of signifying practice that we call art.
Kelly used the terminology of developmental psychology to describe the drawings that had
been produced by her child, the configurations of scribbles massed on the surface of the
paper within or across quadrants and axes. She showed examples of a 'three-cornered
arch, a 'diagonal axis', a 'two-sided balance' and 'centred' drawings. One of the 'centred'
drawings she considered particularly intentional, and felt indicated a certain developmental
procedure. However, of more significance here, she indicated, was the link to the
'derealisation of space'. Lacan, referring to a study by Roger Caillois, had commented on
the 'dihedral fate of the human being' - that is our reality of standing vertically on a flat
plane. She suggested that this structure of opposition simply indicated, in its most
embryonic form, the most elementary form of perspective. What it meant for her then to
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write over the drawings, the effect upon the space, had implications for understanding the
acquisition of visual and spoken language as parallel.
Several other images from her archives were considered as significant to the development
of the third part of Post Partum. Leonardo's analysis of the senses, in which he says that
the five senses are activated by the organ of perception, privileges the eye. The
invocation of the affective force of the field of vision was related to Lacan's reference to the
giving up of the eye as an organ as akin to castration in the field of vision. And also in
Leonardo, the emphasis on the imprinting upon memory invoked for Kelly again the notion
of the ideational representations of the drives in the unconscious. So again there is a
return to the importance of the relationship of subject to object. In looking, following
Leonardo's diagram, three things must be considered; the position of the eye which sees,
that of the object seen, and the position of the light which illuminates the object.
Illustration from Leonardo's notebooks
Kelly contemplated Hal Foster's confinement of the inversion of perspective to artwork of
the 1990s.2 Looking through her own archive, she was reminded of the influence of
particular works seen while she undertook graduate work in Rome. The reversal of
perspective, of finding how to give voice to the woman, to the mother's desire, led to the
absence of the figurative image of the woman in her work. While working on the Post
Partum Document, during the moments of so-called separation or loss, Kelly had asked
herself 'well, what is it that the woman actually fears losing?'. This same image by
Leonardo, of the Virgin and St Ann with St John the Baptist, led her to see that it might be
the identification with her own mother, something about the incestuous 'having' of the first
object, the pleasure of the body of the other woman, 'that persists and perhaps constructs
a rather anxious relation to the process of sublimated pleasure for the woman'.
2 Hal Foster. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1996.
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Returning to consideration of the Analysed Markings and Perspective Schema, Kelly noted
another dimension to the construction of the intra-subjective moment. She had referred to
Dan Graham's two-consciousness projection of 1972, which seemed to take into account
the problem of the gaze as being out there in the world, not as something that could be
literalised as coming from one place to the other. This was framed as being like a
paranoia of never being able to see yourself from the place the other sees you.
The drawing, the found object given by her son, had superimposed on it the section ABCD
from the Leonardo artificial perspective schema. But this superimposition included
fragments from tape-recorded conversations and transcriptions of what she was thinking at
the time she made the recordings, overlaid across the drawing. Elements like Kelly saying
'why does he insist on doing this', or retorts from her like 'I'll tell your daddy'' were used,
which served to situate the child within the triangle, the seeing, seen and illuminating.
These fragments were referred to by Kelly as the distance point, that is the 'distancing
function in this symbolic relation' of the first triad. A metaphorical relationship is set up
between the mother's desire and the reference to the father that pins the subject in a
symbolic place. She considered that the superimposition of the schema showed that the
lack of object, being the separation from the child, is caught up in a relation which is more
about the subject of representation than it is about the child as an object. The projective
perspective made it possible to cross that boundary of the mother's desire without
recourse to the conventional schema of a figurative image.
A method of dealing with the empirical data from which Kelly constructed her work allowed
for another type of exploration of the material that did not resort to figurative schema. The
'why is he/she like that' algorithm, was seen by Kelly as enabling her to represent the
transgressive moment of not doing what is wanted. She likened her exploration of Lacan's
schema to generate this algorithm as itself an object of desire. So through her sketching
out all the possibilities of the schema, she represented the surfeit of desire, which stated
the problem of wanting to be what the other wants you to be, but of not being the cause of
desire. It was the problem of subjectivity which she saw as the object of the quest to
diagnose or diagram, and the experimentum mentis diagram is used at the end of each
section of the document to refer to this schema.
Kelly expanded on the relations as set out in the schema, presenting its signification of the
endogenous and exogenous aspects of the Oedipus Complex. Within the inner part of the
schema, there could be seen to be a representation of the becoming of the child, but this
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must be seen in relation to what is outside of that, the context in which this part of the
schema is placed - there is something which comes to the child from the outside, which is
firstly the mother's desire for it and naming it to become part of that order of language and
culture. A certain confusion is admitted by Kelly at this time. A portrait was taken of Kelly
with her son, as a parody of Michaelangelo's Madonna and Child with St John. She felt it
demanded some sort of interruption to its mimetic quality and, when she rediscovered the
image in the archive, she recognised that she had originally superimposed Lacan's
schema, recalled his suggestion of the impossibility of the recovery of the real. Going
back again to the schema, the recovery would demand a cut from I to M, and what falls out
is this gap which is, according to Lacan, precisely the object that we are trying to
represent. And this on that an attempt was being made to be represented was the real,
'which is always vanishing because it is simply what is real for the subject'. And we come
back to the perspective schema, as Kelly referred again to Hal Foster's position that the
current generation of artists are attempting to address the real by positioning themselves
on the other side of the perspective schema, to 'tear at the screen'.
Illustration of Schema R from Jacques
Lacan 's Ecrits (1977). (Reproduced by kind
permission of Tavistock Publications.)
This confrontation with the real, reinforced for Kelly by Michaelangelo's Pieta, verged on
the unrepresentable. Her response to this problem, or opportunity, of how to figure a
tremendous affective force between the objects of her attention without invoking the
iconicity of the Michaelangelo, was her intuitive drawing on the folded vests of the
introductory section of Post-Partum Document (1973).
Picking up again on the Hal Foster notion of the return of the real, and Lacan's use of the
perspective schema, Kelly proceeded to the final focus of her presentation. The
fundamental focus on the gaze and the subject, on the interrelatedness of looking both
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ways, was used to build towards the position whereby a notional third schema was
introduced. Instead of the iconicity of the object viewed, or the intra-subjectivity informing
the object made, Kelly presented the spectatorial experience, that is, the phenomenon of
the objects presented to their audience, and the potential 'narrativisation of space'.
This argument proceeded by invoking the combination of ('real' and artificial) perspective
schemata. Opposite the subject of representation we should find the artist's eye, but
Lacan, according to Kelly, would have another gaze coming back at you which starts on
the other side of the screen. So in one direction you have the geometrical point, the image
and the object, and the other way you have the gaze, the schema and the subject of
representation. The avaricious appetite of the human eye to devour, to have something to
look at, to play with the mask has, as Lacan has suggested, resulted at the point of the
screen in the machinations that we call art.
Illustration from Jacques Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis (1994). (Reproduced by kindpermission of
Hogarth Press of The Random House Group Ltd.)
And the gaze, that which looks at the looker, is present in all bodies. Referring to
Leonardo again, Kelly quoted the passage:
I say that the power of vision extends through the visual rays to the surface of nontransparent bodies, while the power possessed in these bodies extends to the power of
vision. And likewise each body pervades the surrounding air with its image, each
separately and all together do the same. And not only do they pervade it with the
semblance of the shape, but also with that of their power.
And then also Lacan seemed to take up a similar position with his example of the sardine
can in The Four Fundamental Concepts. When out on a fishing boat, the sun shone on a
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sardine can floating on the surface of the waves. He recounts Petit Jean saying, 'You see
that can? Do you see it? Well it doesn't see you!'. Lacan continued to consider the
meaning of this, and wrote, '… in a sense it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking
at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is
situated'.3
Kelly then appeared to dispute, to some extent, Hal Foster’s schema in relation to her own
work. He had suggested that the textual models of the 1960s and early 1970s gave way
to what he called a 'conventionalisation' of the image in the 1980s. The 1990s generated
what he called 'reactive models', which were comprised often of violated bodies, traumatic
subjects or a kind of return to the referent, which is where Kelly saw herself as
categorised. But by pointing to the earlier texts, Kelly had sought to raise questions about
the problem of perspective in the sense of its more fundamental and psychoanalytic
dimension, as well as its historical manifestations. She felt it useful to think of space in
three ways, along the lines of LeFebvre.4 The first of these would be representations of
space which are conceptual abstractions of spatial practices such as those in linear
perspective. The second might be called representational space, which is compatible with
the psychoanalytical analysis of the space. Kelly described this as 'that domain of the
imaginary part objects, images and their negotiation of the real in the symbolic system of
language, including perspective'.
What she felt was left out of Foster's argument was the third way of thinking about space,
which she termed the notion of spatial practices, or the material expression of the
relationships that can happen in the gallery. She returned to show the audience an image
from an early installation of the Post Partum Document. She referred to a subversion of a
certain kind of perspective in the serial organisation of her work at this period. The work
organises the viewer to move through it, not just by the reading of the narratives contained
within the images. Having left out the body at one level in her work so as to avoid
iconicity, the presence of the spectator's body negotiating the absence becomes
important. And in the photographic image of the installation, 'the operation of perspective
produces the object as hidden and you just have to organise the picture plane around a
hole and stitch it up.'
3 Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press,
1977.
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In closing her presentation, Kelly quoted Walter Benjamin, who called memory 'the staging
of the past, and something that turns the flow of events into tableaux'. 5
Judith Mottram
Acknowledgments
Illustration of Schema R is reproduced from Ecrits, Jacques Lacan (1977), by permission
of Tavistock Publications.
The second Lacan illustration is reproduced from: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis, Jacques Lacan (1994) by permission of Hogarth Press of The Random
House Group Ltd.
4 Henri LeFebvre. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
5 Walter Benjamin. One Way Street. London: New Left Books, 1979.
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