Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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ognitions.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Phase as Formative ofthe Function ofthe I,” New
Left Review 5, vol. 47–52 (1968), pp. 71–77.
9. The sexual division oflabor is not a symmetrically structured system ofwomen inside the
home, men outside it, but rather an intricate, most often asymmetrical, delegation of tasks which
aims to provide a structural imperative to heterosexuality. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document,
“Footnotes and Bibliography,” (ICA New Gallery, 1976), p. 1.
10. See Julia Kristeva, “Signifying Practice and Mode of Production” in La Traversée de Signes
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), trans. and intro. Geoffery Nowel-Smith, Edinburgh Magazine
1 (1976).
11. In “Art and Sexual Politics” I defined the forms/means of signification employed in women’s
art practice in terms ofthe underlying structures of“feminine narcissism,” based metaphorically
on Freud’s description ofnarcissistic object choice in “On Narcissism: An Introduction”
(1914), Collected Papers 4, p. 47. See also “Women’s Practice in Art,” Susan Hiller and Mary
Kelly in conversation, Audio Arts 3, no. 3 (1977), and “Women and Art,” Studio International
3 (1977).
12. Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject,” Times Literary Supplement (October
12, 1973), c. f. the splitting of the subject, Marcelin Pleynet, “de Pictura,” trans. Stephen
Bann, 20th Century Studies (December 1977).
13. See Stephen Heath on fetishism and “representation” in classic cinema and popular photography,
“Lessons from Brecht,” Screen 15 (Summer 1974); see also Laura Mulvey, “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Autumn 1975).
14. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of the Self (London: Hogarth Press, 1973),
p. 200. For Freud, the idea/presentation/representation is to be understood as what comes from
the object and is registered in mnemic systems, and not as the act ofpresenting an object to
consciousness; ibid., p. 247, memory trace/mnemic trace is used by Freud to denote the way in
which events are inscribed upon the memory, they are deposited in different systems and reactivated
only once they have been cathected; ibid., p. 62, cathexis is an economic concept pertaining
to the fact that a certain amount of psychical energy is attached to an idea or group of
ideas, a part ofthe body, or an object.
This text was written for a seminar entitled “Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” held at the Institute
ofContemporary Arts, London, during the exhibition ofPost-Partum Document (PPD) I-III
(1976). It was first published in Control Magazine, no. 10 (1977), pp. 10–12.