ABSTRACT
Gisela Ecker's account of a feminist aesthetics aptly describes the work of Mary Kelly whose first major installation Post-Partum Document. The complex discursivity of allegory with its horizontal accretion of meaning demands interpretation. Allegories are elusive and intransigent 'because they are concerned with a highly complex kind of truth, a matter of relationships and process rather than statement'. This chapter focuses on how allegory, which has been reintroduced into art criticism at least in part through the revived interest in the work of Walter Benjamin, is of particular significance for feminist aesthetics. For Benjamin, melancholia is a function of the problem of knowledge, that is, the problem of the arbitrariness of meaning. Julia Kristeva likewise interprets women's depression as a problem of signification, emphasising the daughter's insufficient differentiation from the mother. Kelly's use of allegorical signification reveals this lost similitude encoded in the child's runes.
