Re-presenting the body

on interim, part I

Mary Kelly

pp. 59-67

in: James Donald (ed), Psychoanalysis and cultural theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

Corpus concerns the body — how it is shaped socially and psychically in the interim moment of ageing. Importantly, though, it does this in the specific form of an exhibition.¹ As such, the work involves a process of simultaneously visualising and theorising which, in a way, resists interpretation. In the context of this discussion, then, what I would like to do is take up some of the questions that give perspective to an underlying argument, stressing of course that this is not an explanation, but a parallel discourse, something unsettled, hopefully exceeded, by the art itself.