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Tales on Love and Separation
Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document" was a seminal work of the seventies in which the mother-child motif was addressed in manner unprecedented in contemporary art history. In the project Kelly has conveyed a conceptualist process of documentation to introduce an interrogation of one of contemporary art’s central and most symptomatic blind spots: the woman as artist and mother. Her seven-year process of reflection and visualization of that relationship was highly influenced by theoretical psychoanalysis, in particular by its linguistic reformulation by Jacques Lacan, which is frequently referenced to in the work.
Namely, Kelly has used her relationship with her infant son as raw material, worked on to simultaneously construct a material archive of her mothering experience, produce a work on the social and psychological construction of motherhood, and redefine the role of an artist as producer in the frame of production, reproduction and re-articulation of gender roles and questioning divisions on the line between the public and the private, insisting on the issue of art/life connection, as quite some experimental artists of the times. In that respect, she drew subtle, but traceable relations to the procedures and works of then actual artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, On Kawara, Art & Language and Douglas Huebler.
She has been gathering and cataloging, researching, interpreting and re-interpreting material on stages of separation of the child from the mother, not in a strict frame of producing an objective documentation on the process, but as interrogation of her own preoccupation with it. That did mean monitoring and archiving traces of a search for her own identity as a mother and that of her child, in a specific relation that was on one hand completely idiomatic, and on the other rendered to form an art performans. The whole project had a situational feature - use of commonplace environments, occurrences and customs, a structural feature – dealing with the cycles of natural life, and a self-referring or feedback feature – related to things or events which talk about/reflect themselves, which were all essential constituents of art practices that were prominent at the time.
“Thinking Bad Girls”, by Margareta Jelic, is a clean and quite dematerialized homage to this work, rid of all the vests, dirty diapers, hand imprints, and insect specimens that in Kelly’s work stand for the mother’s memorabilia and how she makes sense of separation from the child. Margareta Jelic’s work also avoids the systematic structuring of direct experiences of the process and of quasi-scientific data that are in Kelly’s work presented by the visual diagrams. Margareta Jelic goes more into the field of fantasy and fiction.
Installation by Margareta Jelic is a result of her research into the structure of relations between the mother and the child in the pre-Oedipal period, conducted simultaneously on three different levels: the level of personal, fully embodied, emotionally heavily loaded experience of motherhood, level of meta-discourse on the work of Mary Kelly, and the level of experimentation with models of representation in contemporary multimedia art practices in order to use them in producing an interactive media based installation that would materialize the research in the manner that is fully lens-based and fictionalized.
As to the structure of the spatial display of the project, it is being realized as an ambiental installation comprising of a video work, projected onto a wall, then of two digital prints showing some aspects of the mother-child relation, a work in which audio recordings of children songs, reinterpreted by the author of the project, control the speed of the flow of images of the drawings of her daughter, and an interactive book, made of thick plastic coated cardboard, upon whose pages the frames of other three video works of the author are being included, in a manner which is, powered by programs such as Max/MSP and Jitter, enabling interaction of the book with the viewer, who is, by browsing through the book, triggering the beamed projection of the respected video works onto the wall. These works all together make one project and their relation in respect of content, media, and the dimension provide with an atmosphere of an installation in whose range the viewer is not passive, but is being navigated around to actively experience and reflect them.
While Kelly has also realized her work through different media, they were all avoiding direct representation of the participants in the process, and the strategies of documenting it were focused on collecting material evidences of its abject corporeality, such as shitty nappies, the scribbles over heart-felt diary writings, and its reflective impact on the very formation of both subjects in the process, constantly tested by and testing the Lacanian frame of interpreting it. Margareta Jelic, even though making a homage to the project of Mary Kelly, mainly insists on the completely opposite, except in the segment with the drawings flowing by the rhythm of reinterpreted children songs, which is the most direct experiment with Kelly type of work. What we see in other segments are the direct representational images, still and moving, of the daughter with the mother (present either in the frame or behind the camera, but still intervening into the frame by her voice), and those images are played with in either a documentary or quasi documentary manner.
The other important characteristic of Jelic’s work is interactivity. One can say that Mary Kelly had also rendered her work being quite interactive, but that was on the level of the direct corporeal response to it’s abject content, and as well as on the level of inducing a kind of direct reflection on what is to be shown as the life world of a female artist in the project in which she equates art with life (motherhood was never up to then treated in such a manner in that context). Jelic decides for advanced media as the means for making the relation with the audience interactive and for their experimental, not conventional use.
The visual and narrative content of all but one segments of the project is fully focused on the exploration of daily rituals, small intimate festivities and other ordinary life moments through which the complex relation of the mother to the child is being depicted, in its full emotional color and structural ambivalence coming from the urge to keep the unity with it, on one hand, and the attributed task of total relinquishment of the child to society, in order to make it into a social subject, on the other. The only narrative line that seems at the first glance to shift the focus of the complete work is the one on a total destruction of the city, caused by the evil clown, appearing incidentally in the scene in one of the videos in which the author plays herself as leaving the office of a psychoanalyst, and is spotted only by her, who suddenly realizes that the only way to escape the disaster is to run cross the bridge, while explosions burst the city. It strongly destabilizes and reframes what one could take for an idealized harmony of the represented mother-daughter relation.
This “extimate” segment of the project, as still being partly intimate, in constructing the setting for the scene by drawing from some real life content of the author, who is engaged with the methods and practices of psychoanalysis both as passing through the analysis with a psychoanalytic therapist, and as an artist researcher into the methodologies of theoretical psychoanalysis, and partly external to her, as not fitting fully into the mother –child relation theme, actually points to the very kernel of the problem addressed by it. It functions as what Lacan calls the point de capiton (the quilting point) by rendering what was taken for a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation to be fully denatured, even loaded with horror and threat. A small supplementary feature, in this case the appearance of clown in the office of a psychoanalyst, a detail that is not expected, that is out of place and makes any sense within the frame of the scene, intervenes and reframes everything.
In relation with the figure of the clown in the Lacanian frame of references, it is worth mentioning the paragraph in his 1974 Lecture in Rome, when Lacan calls himself a clown, as an analyst involved with a practice that relies on establishing a relation of transference with the patient, playing the subject supposed to know, the one who is to, in one hand, provide with an illusion of providing the patient’s inner life with full meaning, and, on the other, to enable him to get behind that illusion and realize the constituent lack grounding his personal existence and his identity. The clown does not simply entertain; he uses entertainment to tell the truth, which is always traumatic, which shows the ‘desert of the Real’, behind the veil of harmonious images and symbolic constructs around them. The appearance of the clown behind the analyst in the video visualizes the double feature
On the other hand, in Seminar VIII, from 1960-61, on the relation of Transfer, when he is discussing the role of Aristophanes in Plato’s Fest, in telling tales on love, he (Lacan, in his lecture) names him (Aristophanes, a famous comedian of the times and key person in the dialogue), a clown, but only to state that precisely because Aristophanes is a “clown”, he is “ the only one who is worthy enough to speak of love”. It is only the comedian who can state that one loves just in order to leave, and that one has constantly to leave what and whom one loves, and make this paradox acceptable, and even laughed about, or taken without what Nietzsche has named as the ‘spirit of heaviness’, as a simple fact of life. In the mother – child relation, that is being thought through in this project the supreme act of love is accepting different stages of separation with joy, even though they are doing away with certain shared life-worlds whose destruction may be experienced as a total catastrophe and a treat to one’s identity.
Stevan Vukovic
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