Excavating discursivity : Post-Partum Document in the conceptualist, feminist and psychoanalytic fields

Abstract

Post-Partum Document, a multi - media artwork made by American artist Mary Kelly from 1973- 1978 , was informed by and contributed to contemporaneous debates in the fields of Conceptualism, feminism, and psychoanalysis throughout the seventies. This dissertation addresses the project's "debate - specificity." The conventional art historical categorization and analysis of an artwork, one based upon its medium specificity, was a mode of modernist criticism that Kelly's work specifically interrogated. What therefore distinguished Post-Partum Document from other artworks of its period was an interrogation of the "discursive site," i. e. a specific site of debate grounded within a given discourse. Within the practice of art, Post-Partum Document begs us to think of the discursive site as a displacement of the "material" site. It's "multimedia" status thus indicates the manner in which it simultaneously addressed questions of aesthetics, semiotics, film, psychoanalysis, and activism within the visual field. Previous studies have engaged Post Partum Document primarily as an example of psychoanalytically informed feminist art. My dissertation traces its original debate within the broader history of Conceptualism, feminism, and psychoanalysis in Britain, followed by its American reception in the eighties, at which point PostPartum Document became a model for feminist critical art practice.