Third Text

29 July 2024

The Materialist Unconscious

Nizan Shaked

It is known as the method: ’a close reading of the artwork’s signifying system’ (p 1). A unique approach to the widespread pedagogical framework of the group critique, developed by Mary Kelly and exercised since (roughly) 1987, the method has since reared generations of artists and professionals in the field. As this book demonstrates, Kelly’s pedagogy is an integral part of her development and ongoing significance as an artist-intellectual, whose contributions to the broader field intersecting conceptualism, feminism and theory are reflected in several epic bodies of work and publications. They are also reflected in the work of multigenerational circuits of students and colleagues whose work has been influenced by Kelly’s application of psychoanalytic theory both to the practice of art and its interpretation.

The standard mode of the group critique used in art schools calls upon the artist to explain their intention, or in a sense ‘defend’ their work. In contrast, the method assumes that the artist has already spoken through the work, and their role during a critique is therefore only to listen. As the group engages the work’s reading – identifying its material armature, indexicality, symbolism, iconicity, programmatic framework, etc – participants gradually see how the field’s ‘scaffold of signifiers’ (p 4) supports its given assumptions and interpretive tendencies, putting invisible or received knowledge into critical perspective, to show how: ‘art forms are inscribed within the social context that gives rise to them’ (p 74). A combination of conceptual, feminist, psychoanalytic, semiotic and Foucauldian analysis, the method teaches participants not only how to analyse the artwork as a visual proposition that poses an argument, but also how artworks are embedded in the discursive fields and paradigms that give meaning to modes of cognition. The ‘visual’, of course, includes all other modes of aesthetic appearance, such as sound, movement, and so forth. Rather than lead a critique, Kelly’s role is to restrain it – slowing down students whose overwhelming habit is to leap into interpretations and conclusions.

I know all this because I earned a Masters in Critical and Curatorial Studies with Kelly at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Deeper still, before and after, I worked with Juli Carson, the book’s editor, while pursuing my MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, and later when she administered my PhD exam in theory. Clearly, the insight offered here is not that of a disinterested critic, but that of a participant-observer. Nevertheless, this review is neither wholly descriptive nor nostalgic, although I certainly would have loved it to be the latter. The strength of Kelly’s school of art-engagement is that it teaches the student to identify what is not there – what is missing, or has been suppressed. While this review will first summarise the prolific richness of Kelly’s concentric (rather than phallocentric) pedagogy, and how Carson has organised the materials to reflect its exponential capacity, the usefulness of the method is demonstrated by my ability to identify the book’s elisions. Although spoken repeatedly throughout, a key proper name stands out in its absence from the book’s index. That name is ‘Marx’.

But first, let us look at what the book is and does. Divided into three sections, ‘Method’, ‘Project’ and ‘Field’, it moves from work commencing with the smallest visual unit that can be compared with the semiotic definition of the sign, through the political question that asks where an artistic interrogation comes from, to case studies of a ‘field’, the discourses of which defined an era. The dialogical movement between the three is described as a Borromean knot. It allows for a self-reflexive excavation of how a vocabulary shapes the artwork, which, in return, itself becomes shaped by the ‘driving force, ‘the event’, or what Kelly calls ‘the political primal scene’ (p 6). Kelly’s pedagogy extends from her project-based work, or ‘the discursive site’, as she calls it. The field is exemplified by several roundtable-type conversations that have been convened by Kelly, presented alongside image sections of her and her students’ artwork that are curated by Carson. Spanning Kelly’s career, individual collaborators are understood to also stand in for their practices or publications, further exemplifying the scope of the ‘field’. The selection demonstrates one complex example of the field’s formation. Most compelling is the inclusion of invaluable archival materials, which include lecture notes, syllabi and symposia posters that paint a wholesome picture of Kelly’s legacy.

Carson’s framing of the book is felicitous to how Kelly’s pedagogy has been developed from the artist’s research-driven practice. It is important that the book’s structure resists canonisation and refuses to offer a how-to manual for applying the method. Instead, porous and dynamic, it allows for dialectical advancements, best seen in the words of Dont Rhine, whose proper name points to the impactful work reverberating from and around that of the international collective Ultra Red, of which he is a founding member.

Tracing the threads that weave through the contributions, I am particularly struck by the tremendous desire (and perhaps even melancholia) that’s being recounted in the shift from collective feminist and political activity to the powerful lure of theory. Does a ‘debate specific site’ ever return to its material conditions, and the organizing of struggles? (p 239)

Indeed, it seems that the passage from 1968 – a moment identified by Kelly as the primary scene of the field whose era was being defined following Stuart Hall’s passing – to the artistic output of the generation of my classmates, many of whom are represented in the book, is one marked by the transition from activism to analysis of the aesthetics of politics. While Marx, Marxism and activism are central in the memory of Kelly’s earlier intellectual circles, they (mostly) fade as we orbit toward the present. Sophisticated interrogation of modes of appearance, and how those are shaped by memory, translation, cathexis, desire, mimesis, returns, interpersonal relations, and so on, reveal an increasing focus on the vocabulary of politics rather than the synthetic propositions (p 240) that have ultimately led Rhine and Ultra Red ‘further and further away from art and theory as ends in themselves’ (p 241). While the ideas represented by Rhine may seem to be an exception, the book nevertheless contains within it the materialist potential. Today, as we rise with a wave of activist struggle, several years into the return of the hot union summer, and just in time for the global student Intifada, material conditions are high on the agenda. As an open-ended project, the book’s analytic thrust allows us to return to the political primal scene to salvage the lessons, and, even as they may have been negative, to learn from past failures and try again.

Crafted by Carson’s performative practice to not only do as it says, but to very precisely undo (that is, critique) what is being spoken, the editor has explicitly and self-consciously organised the materials in a circle that can be read backwards. Chapter 14, the final roundtable presented in the book, ‘On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time’ (several uses of which are placing this Situationist International signifier en abyme), traces Kelly’s journey from her early days in London’s New Left scene to the United States coasts, east to west – from her days at the Whitney Independent Studies program to UCLA. These programs have yielded scores of students-turned-professionals, whose contributions have forever changed the field. It is invaluable for us to now have maps of how these discourses and their actors moved forward earlier ones, including New Left Review, Screen, The Women’s Liberation workshop and its History Group with Sally Alexander, Rosalind Delmar, Juliet Mitchell and Laura Mulvey; the publications Shrew, Spare Rib, m/f, and many more. Here, we clearly see that, for the early generation, the work of Marx (and also Engels’s The Origins of Private Property and the Family) were central. These discourses intersect with another field of Marxist feminism that is anecdotally retold in Mark Nash’s memory of the 1970s, when he recalls: ‘I would cycle home with both Althusser and “Wages for Housework” literature in my bag!’ (p 226). A story yet to emerge in full revolves around the proper name ‘Marx’, as Kelly’s generation of feminist intellectuals of 1970s London had crossed multiple paths with the British and Italian feminist Marxists that developed ‘Social Reproduction Theory’, where Wages for Housework as concept and text framed the organising of struggles. The relevance of Sheila Rowbotham’s work to contemporary debates around universal basic income, especially as they pertain to the questions of wages for artists, would also lead us to consider the era of 1968 as an open, rather than closed, era.

Marx and Marxism are spoken again and again in Chapter 14, which reprints an intergenerational conversation convened by Kelly in 2015 to understand whether the era that took 1968 as an emblem has come to an end. The commitment of Kelly’s generation to materialist analysis and the road-map to its applications appears repeatedly. If ‘Marx’ were to be indexed, it would unearth the material conditions buried under the textual turn and its discursive site. Again, although submerged, inevitably the voice of the subaltern emerges, here in the words of Michelle Dizon (now Latipa), who writes:

By teasing out Karl Marx’s two understandings of representation, on the one hand as mimesis and on the other hand as proxy, Spivak unravels the transparency that the first world intellectual has in relation to the third world subject of which he writes and question the relations of power and knowledge that move across the global north and global south. (p 257)

Capitalism’s need to extract more surplus, the same material goal establishing the division of labour, is what drives the shifting of labour from the Global North to the Global South. Asked since the late 1960s in relation to sexual difference, the topic of the division of labour has much to tell us today about contemporary social relations of an imperialist economy where women are subject to super-exploitation.

The division of labour was so central to Kelly’s epic Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) that it frames the project from the first paragraph of the project’s ‘Introduction’. In the second paragraph, Kelly tells us: 

The sexual division of labor is not a symmetrically structured system of women inside the home, men outside of it, but rather an intricate, most often asymmetrical, delegation of tasks which aims to provide a structural imperative to heterosexuality. The most obvious example of this asymmetry is that of women engaged in social production or services who are still held socially responsible for maintaining labor power (ie males and children). ^[1]

That Post-Partum Document makes a materialist proposition elicits the question whether this proposition’s lead has been suppressed or repressed. In the folds of Concentric Pedagogy lie the answers.

The anti-essentialist feminist legacy that emerged from a Marxist approach to sexual and all other forms of difference, resulted in groundbreaking theoretical insights. But as they travelled, like myself, to the United States, the approaches highlighted in Concentric Pedagogy, and the artists whose work manifested these inquiries, turned to the analysis of the realm of appearance. The question of the determining systems (and their historical emergence and course) was repressed in favour of poststructuralism, ontology and phenomenology. I say ‘repressed’, because this turn seems not to have been an act of intent, but rather an oversight born of a shift in focus, perhaps aided by fatigue with the obstinances of orthodox Marxism. In any case, revisiting this trajectory allows us to work through it again.

True to the analysis of signification as a path into the realm that determines appearances – whether it is the unconscious, or material conditions – it is ridiculously on cue that my recollection of the method was different before I read this book. Concentric Pedagogy both jogged my memory of what took place, and shed light on the fork in the road that would lead me back to London, for a return to a new reading of Marx.

In her interview with my classmate Kerry Tribe, the artist and her former teacher walk through the method to recreate for the reader an example. They work through code, sign, reception (the viewer), and the moving image, culminating in Kelly ‘Miming the Method’, which enacts how she would walk us through the process. Memories flood my mind’s eye: Dawn Kasper crawling dangerously on the 14-foot-high beams of the old Warner Studio building, hanging herself upside-down, chewing giant wads of bubble gum, then spitting them out into a pile that amassed a pink sculptural formation on the floor. Sharon Hayes performing the monologues of Patty Hearst, as a tripod carrying a video camera records her piece Symbionese Liberation Army that would later be exhibited as mute minimalist arrangements of labelled VHF tapes. It seems that I have entirely forgotten participating in a crit-class, as indeed my transcripts confirm. The story in my head colossally enlarged the stage to which Tribe and Kelly do not attend: the final section in an article that in the book is Chapter 4, ‘Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism’, which first appeared in Screen (vol 22, no 3, 1981) and was later reprinted in the widely-read anthology Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1984). Of course, since this article and the venues in which it appeared and reappeared are hugely important to developments of the later twentieth century, it is not entirely unique that they would play such an important role in my development as a scholar. Kelly turned the final section, ‘Exhibition and System’, into a class, where the method was applied to a museum exhibition, infinitely complicating and broadly opening the analysis. I remember it because it turned my attention onto the museum as system, and taught me to see the institution as a model of larger material structures and social relations, so complicated that it took me twenty years to put this totality into a book.

Like Dont Rhine, I remained obstinate in my need to synthesise the analysis of appearances with concrete struggle. To attend to the materialist question, I travelled in the opposite direction, back to London, where another legacy of the New Left lives on in the circuits of the journal Historical Materialism and conferences, and in the continuous foci of Third Text. As the former realised that materialist analysis would be greatly strengthened by considering the connective tissue between the base and the ideological superstructure, Third Text would go on to publish a special issue in 2017 focusing on the application of Marxist-feminist social-reproduction theory to art analysis. Summarising a tendency that was originally broad and since has expanded, the editors explain:

While ‘social reproduction’ has historically referred to processes concerning the replenishment of labour power as well as the maintenance of human life traditionally performed by women for free in the home, recent theorisations have offered a more expansive account to stress the concept’s value in elaborating non-reductionist accounts of capitalist production more broadly. ^[2]

Concentric Pedagogy carries the social reproduction concerns that framed the work of Kelly’s circle from the late 1960s, as her colleagues recall how sexual difference shaped the politics of reproducing labour power and capitalist relations, as well as the survival of the above by social and cultural ideology. While Marx was clearly aware that the sphere outside the realm of production was essential for capitalism’s ongoing existence (reproduction), his major focus was on unpacking how the extraction of surplus in production was the basic determinant organising capitalist society. But his method of historical materialism, as it aimed to reveal the forces that drive history, is necessary if we are to understand the role of sex and gender in the division of labour, then and now. This is how and why Kelly and her collaborators became so important for Marxist feminist art historians who have focused on social reproduction in a totalising (meaning: joining the dots) analysis. We see this in the towering work of Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024), a trailblazer of social reproduction theory in art history and theory, where Kelly’s work appears and reappears in the analysis of women and labour not only as an example of theme or subject matter, but for making distinctions necessary for understanding how labour is defined, and the concomitant consequences of the economic classification of activities traditionally designated to women.    

[T]here is a synthesis between the kinds of work done by women (repetitive, devalued, invisible) and abstract labour as the condition of capitalist work (and art) in general. The latter was articulated in Mary Kelly, Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison’s ‘Women and Work’ exhibition at the South London Gallery in 1972, where Conceptual art formats, with their formal mimesis of the stultifying repetitiveness of administered life, were correlated to documents testifying to the stultifying rhythms of factory work and domestic care for working-class women. Such materialist practices have been prescient for analyses of the contemporary inscription of subjectivity or self into economic processes, of the erosion of boundaries between production and reproduction, and the blurring of production and consumption with the expansion of the value form. The gendered and racialised division of labour that ensures a permanently squeezed and underpaid labour force is merely an extreme case of the modus operandi of all labour relations in capital, once work has been rendered invisible. (The hidden work of women in the home always partook of this invisibility.) ^[3]

These were key concerns in Kelly’s early collaborative art and intellectual work. Art history returns to them as their implications are relevant for today’s intersection of labour issues with anti-imperialist politics. As the book can be read back-to-front, as we not only read the later developments through the early concerns, the significance of the question of social reproduction and its relation to labour politics rises again. What the book also exhibits is that an artist’s significance is measured not only by their artwork but by the sphere that surrounds them, which includes their other activities and the networks of individuals they influenced, or with which they have crossed paths. Concentric Pedagogy offers a thorough record of Kelly’s major fields. Without it, we would not have a full picture of her ever-expanding significance.

Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy: Selected Writings, edited by Juli Carson, is published by Bloomsbury, London, 2024, in the ‘New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts’ series, 336 pp, 100 colour illustrations, ISBN 9781350352438

^[1]    Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1999, p 1

^[2]    Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd, ‘Social Reproduction Struggles and Art History’, Third Text 144, vol 31, no 1, 2017), pp 1–14

^[3]    Marina Vishmidt, ‘Situation Wanted: Something about Labour’, Afterall, no 19, 12 May 2008, accessed 14 June 2024

Nizan Shaked is author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) and The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017). Her article ‘Museums After Value-Form Theory’ is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Marxism in Art History. Select articles include ‘American Monument: Race and Class’ (Oxford Art Journal, 2022), ‘Getting to a Baseline on Identity Politics: the Marxist Debate’, in the Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019), and ‘Propositions to Politics: Adrian Piper’s Conceptual Artwork’, in Adrian Piper: A Reader (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018). She is a professor of contemporary art history, museum and curatorial studies at California State University, Long Beach.