Imaging Desire (Writing Art)

by Mary Kelly

Imaging Desire, Mary Kelly's long-awaited collection of writings from 1976 to 1995, asks fundamental questions about the analysis of current practices in art and makes rigorous arguments for a criticism informed by semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Few artists have made such a strong contribution to critical discourse and art as Mary Kelly, who for more than twenty years has pushed the boundaries of the visual, the textual, the sexual, and the political in her writing and her art. In the 1970s, Kelly's transgressive projects helped to instigate conceptual art's second phase; her daring critiques of the female body as a fetishized, allegorized, commodified site were debated long after they were first seen in galleries and discussed in catalogues, and long before the debut of the "bad girls" in the 1990s. In fact, the debates currently surrounding Kelly's work are a necessary and defining element of theoretical discourse about art today. Imaging Desire is essential to that debate,