Artist's statement

Abstract

1972. A new mother lives in a communal household. The group thinks that the state will wither away, capitalism too. When the group asks the mother to wean her baby, the better to share equally the responsibility of childrearing, the mother cries. The mother does not want to wean her child. The mother wants to be the primary caregiver. For the mother, this is the moment when the psychoanalytic enters the discourse, no Marx without Freud, no Lacan without Kristeva: in the new world, universal childcare will be necessary but not sufficient. The mother is Mary Kelly, the artist whose early career would cohere around soiled diapers, and whose practice has always been profoundly on the side of the maternal.