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Abstract
This article revisits Mary Kelly’s 1992 installation Gloria Patri after the spectacle of masculine violence at the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. Whilst Gloria Patri has received less art historical attention that the major works that immediately preceded it, I argue that Kelly’s sophisticated handling of the interactions between masculinity and military technologies in the televisual coverage of the First Gulf War resonates strongly with questions surrounding the digital mediation of gender in our present moment. Addressing a lacuna in Gloria Patri’s critical reception, I introduce the French psychoanalyst André Green’s work on narcissism to explore how his conceptual vocabulary is activated by Kelly’s installation. The article concludes by considering how Kelly’s work creates a historical, aesthetic, and theoretical context for the events of 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol building, which might enrich attempts to track the dynamic interrelations between masculinity, militarism and contemporary media.
I would like to thank Mignon Nixon and Mark Offord for their generous advice and comments throughout the development of this article.
Notes
1 ‘I was interested, first of all,’ writes Kelly, ‘to present masculinity as something that becomes pathological predominantly in the historical and cultural context of war.’ Mary Kelly and Margaret Iversen, ‘Mary Kelly in Conversation with Margaret Iversen’, in Mary Kelly, ed, Imaging Desire, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p 190.
2 Mary Kelly and Klaus Ottman, ‘Interview with Klaus Ottmann (extract)’, in Margaret Iversen, Homi K Bhabha and Douglas Crimp, eds, Mary Kelly, Phaidon, London, 1997, p 143
3 Kelly, ‘“Not Enough Gees and Gollies”: Mary Kelly explains the thinking behind her latest project “Gloria Patri”’, Women’s Art Magazine 52, 1993, p 5
4 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p 222
5 See, for example, Kelly, ‘Not Enough Gees and Gollies’, op cit, and Kelly and Iversen, ‘Mary Kelly in Conversation with Margaret Iversen’, op cit
6 See Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, October 56, 1991, pp 64–97 and Kelly and Klaus Ottman, ‘Interview with Klaus Ottmann’, op cit, p 142
7 See Kelly, ‘On Display’, in Imaging Desire, op cit
8 See Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a ‘Masquerade’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10, 1929, pp 303–313, and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques-Alain Miller, ed, Alan Sheridan, trans, W W Norton, New York, 1978, p 107
9 Ibid. The passage is quoted by Kelly in ‘Not Enough Gees and Gollies’, op cit, p 5.
10 Silvia Kolbowski, Mignon Nixon, Mary Kelly, Hal Foster, Liz Kotz, Simon Leung and Ayisha Abraham, ‘A Conversation on Recent Feminist Art Practices’, October 71, 1995, p 68
11 Quoted in Kelly, ‘Not Enough Gees and Gollies’, op cit, p 6
12 Ibid
13 Kelly and Iversen, ‘Mary Kelly in Conversation with Margaret Iversen’, op cit, p 192
14 Pertinent here is the involvement of members of the incel communities amongst the insurrectionists. On the masculinist misogyny asserted by these groups see Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017, and Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere’, Men and Masculinities, vol 22, no 4, 2019, pp 638–657.
15 Homi K Bhabha, ‘Mary, Mary Quite Contrary: On Gloria Patri’, in Iversen, Bhabha, Crimp, Mary Kelly, op cit, p 91
16 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, op cit, p 67–119
17 Bhabha, ‘Mary, Mary Quite Contrary’, op cit, p 96
18 Ibid, pp 95–99
19 Mary Kelly, ‘Desiring Images/Imaging Desire’, in Kelly, Imaging Desire, op cit, p 128
20 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, op cit, p 93
21 Bhabha, ‘Mary, Mary Quite Contrary’, op cit, p 97
22 Kelly, quoted in ibid, p 91
23 See Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition, Penguin Press, London, 2000
24 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psycho-Analytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision’, 1910, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol xi, James Strachey and Anna Freud, eds and trans, Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1957, p 212
25 André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism [first French edition, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1983], Andrew Weller, trans, Free Association, London, 2001, p 5
26 Ibid, p 37
27 Ibid, p 44
28 Ibid, p 10
29 Jacques Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34, 1953, pp 11–17, p 17. The text is referenced numerously in the literature on Gloria Patri’, including in Mary Kelly and Josefina Ayerza, ‘Mary Kelly interviewed by Josefina Ayerza. “Gloria Patri:”’, Flash Art, May 2, 1994, available at lacan.com/perfume/kellyinter.htm. See also Margaret Iversen, ‘Visualizing the Unconscious: Mary Kelly’s Installations’, in Mary Kelly, op cit, pp 32–85.
30 Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, op cit, p 17
31 Ibid, p 16
32 Ibid
33 Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, 1921, in SE xviii, James Strachey and Anna Freud, eds and trans, Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, p 100
34 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, Barbara Bray, trans, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1985, p 3
35 Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, op cit, p 10
36 Mary Kelly and Douglas Crimp, ‘Mary Kelly in conversation with Douglas Crimp’, in Mary Kelly, op cit, p 29
37 Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, op cit, p 6
38 Ibid, p x
39 Ibid, p 17
40 Ibid
41 André Green, ‘A Dual Conception of Narcissism: Positive and Negative Organizations’, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly LXXI, 2002, p 637
42 Kelly, ‘Not Enough Gees and Gollies’, op cit, p 5
43 Ibid, p 6
44 Ibid
45 Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, op cit, p xxiii
46 Norman Bryson, ‘Géricault and Masculinity’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1994, p 239
47 Ibid, p 243
48 Ibid, p 248
49 Ibid, p 244
50 Ibid, p 244–245
51 Ibid, p 245
52 Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, op cit, p 69, n 8
53 Rye Dag Holmboe, ‘Stone Angels, Saintly Hypochondriacs: On Desire, Asceticism and Deep Time’, Angelaki 23, 2018, p 30