02_Kadie Salmon
Fred Mann and New Art Projects are delighted to launch the second of our series of artist publications, conceived as a critical reaction to the restrictions of lockdown. This beautiful book is a monograph of the work of Kadie Salmon, and fully illustrated. We are very grateful to the authors of the supporting essays: Emma Wilson of Cambridge University and Maria Walsh of Chelsea College of Arts. This book continues in our aim of matching the best in critical dialog with the artists we support. We would also like to thank Christian Kusters and Barbara Nassisi of CHK design for their beautiful and sensitive design.
Fred Mann and New Art Projects are delighted to launch the second of our series of artist publications, conceived as a critical reaction to the restrictions of lockdown. This beautiful book is a monograph of the work of Kadie Salmon, and fully illustrated. We are very grateful to the authors of the supporting essays: Emma Wilson of Cambridge University and Maria Walsh of Chelsea College of Arts. This book continues in our aim of matching the best in critical dialog with the artists we support. We would also like to thank Christian Kusters and Barbara Nassisi of CHK design for their beautiful and sensitive design.
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Hysteria has long been a metaphor for artistic fantasy, its production
of bodily contortions and gestures simulating the possession of the self
by spirits or others. Hence the ancient theory of the wandering womb
whose animalistic travelling through the female body was thought to be
the cause of a bodily and psychic excess deemed irrational by patriarchal
culture. Moving away from this mythology, Charcot, the scientist, used
photography to classify the poses of female ‘hysterics’. He also used
drawing to supplement the static capture that gives lie to the body in
motion. Such a diagnostic gaze looks at the pose from the outside, cutting
it off from its labile interiority. While not referring to this history directly,
Salmon’s performative poses and her methods of reanimating stasis
nonetheless recall it to mind, but here, the one who looks and captures
is one and the same, and the one who looks does so from within the
voluptuous interiority of a generative female body.
Feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray proffer the idea that if this
generative body could be symbolized, it might reorient the phallocentric
logic of self and other by which the other is considered an inferior or
feared object. The generative female body implies a different kind of self/
other relation in which they are always in intimate correspondence with
one another, being mutually constitutive rather than oppositional entities.
It is from this place of interior intimacy that Irigaray calls ‘self-affection’
that Woman might go out to meet the other of herself. However, according
to Irigaray, the voice of self-affection, neither active nor passive, but
in-between, has been colonised by a masculinist imaginary which categorises
Woman as a passive object or a revolting hysteric. By contrast, to other
herself on her own terms would be to enact a self-affection in which
‘[s]ensation would have neither an object nor a moment but it would take
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