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Home Post-Partum Document, Documentation 1: Analysed Faecal [Fecal] Stains and Feeding Charts.

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Post-Partum Document, Documentation 1: Analysed Faecal [Fecal] Stains and Feeding Charts.

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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/820/827-25.jpg
Title	Post-Partum Document, Documentation 1: Analysed Faecal [Fecal] Stains and Feeding Charts.
Creator	Kelly, Mary (American conceptual and installation artist, born 1941)
Date	1974
Cultural Context	American North American
Style/Period	Conceptual
Theme	Mixed media Conceptual art Texts (document genres) Charts (graphic documents) Symbolism (artistic concept) Symbols Mothers Women Parents Maternity Children (people by age group) Infants Sons Fetishes Diapers (underwear) Feces Excrement Phallic Genetics Biological sciences Biology Discrimination Sex discrimination Sex Sex role Gender issues Identity Male Female Boys Girls Language (verbal communication) Feminism Psychology Social psychology Social issues Social status Social structure
Subject	Mixed media Charts Feeding Symbols Mothers Women Children Infants Child rearing Domestic life Diapers Feces Biology Discrimination Sex Sexism Girls Boys Language Feminism Social aspects
Description	Post-Partum Document, 1983 [book]. From Documentation I, Analysed Faecal [Fecal] Stains and Feeding Charts (prototype), [work produced] 1974. "One of the oldest themes of Western art, mother and child, was ironically made compatible with Conceptualism's iconophobia in Kelly's complex, multi-part work. As in [Marcel] Duchamp's Large Glass, the textual component of the work was of equal importance to its visual appearance. In this respect, Kelly's book, Post-Partum Document (London, 1983) is an indispensable resource for appreciating this work." (Caption, p.187); "Her Post-Partum Document, produced between 1973 and 1979, was concerned with recording her relationship with her son during his weaning, but pointedly renounced corporeal imagery in favor of 135 framed items such as diagrams, texts, and traces from the body (faecal [fecal] smears on nappy liners). Polemically countering the 'essentialist' view that gender is biologically determined, Post-Partum Document grew out of Kelly's participation in a London women's group dedicated to examining the sexual division of labor. With child-rearing as her theme, she became deeply affected by Juliet Mitchell's book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which introduced English speakers to post-Freudian accounts of the dawning of gendered subjectivity. Most influentially it explained how the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had reinterpreted Freud's unconscious 'rite of passage', the Oedipus complex, as allegorizing the unequal accession of boys and girls to patriarchal language. He had thus made socializing forces of Freud's notorious anatomical markers of sexual identity - penile 'possession' and 'lack'. The phallus became symbolic rather than literal. Using such ideas, Kelly produced a painstaking record of maternal separation. After a pre-Oedipal phase during which mother and child were united, her son's linguistic initiation gave him a 'positive' relation to the phallus while she was returned to the condition of 'lack' originally inscribed by her gender. […] Kelly's work brilliantly tracked gender's linguistic basis. One of the six sections of the work records early 'conversations' between mother and child. Shown his own reflection in the mirror, the child introjects the paternal position: 'da/da-/da-da'. Elsewhere the work raises fascinating questions about the relation between creativity and procreativity. Interrogating the psychoanalytic platitude that, in raising babies, women compensate for their phallic lack, Kelly hypothesized a form of female fetishism, turning her child's imprints, clothes, or gifts into compensatory tokens which were exhibited in taxonomic style. These fetishes asserted that, far from succumbing to imaginary identifications, women could attain symbolic distance from procreation, becoming cultural as well as natural producers." (Excerpt, pp.184-185)
Material	Mixed media Perspex units, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper, ink Paper (fiber product) Ink Plastic (organic material) Feces Excrement Perspex Diapers (underwear)
Measurements	28 x 35.5 cm
Inscription	Feeding chart beneath fecal stains reads: JANUARY 5, 1974 / 09.00 HRS. 7 OZS. SMA / 13.00 HRS. 4 OZS. SMA / 17.00 HRS. 4 OZS. SMA / 19.00 HRS. 3 OZS. ORANGE, 2 TSPS. CEREAL, 2 TSPS. APPLE / 21.30 HRS. 8 ½ OZS. SMA / TOTAL: 26 ½ OZS. LIQUIDS 4 TSPS. SOLIDS"; Text beneath chart, bottom left: 5 JAN 1974; Text beneath chart, bottom right: 03
Work Type	Mixed media Conceptual art
Repository	Generaldi Foundation (Vienna, Austria)
Source	Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.187, fig.95)
Rights	Photo Kelly Barrie. Collection of the Generaldi Foundation, Vienna. Reproduced in Hopkins courtesy of the artist. © DACS, 2000.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 827-25.jpg
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Post-Partum Document, Documentation 1: Analysed Faecal [Fecal] Stains and Feeding Charts.

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