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What happened to the unconscious?

Pat Brassington: The body electric

Robyn Ferrell
Eyeline 88
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Whatever happened to the unconscious? Among artists and their critics, no one much uses the category anymore, to explain their work or to glamorise it. And yet, there was a time when art theory and criticism fizzed with passion for the uncanny, the abject and the oedipal. Has the psychoanalytic moment passed?


If anyone attracted that frisson earlier in her career it was Pat Brassington. She remains one of Australia’s major digital artists, but whereas her work was first claimed for women’s art under licence to psychoanalytic readings, it has more recently modulated into Australian Surrealism and even Dark MOFO. Regarding her work is a study in the changing fashions of theory.


Pat Brassington: The Body Electric at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), offered a potted history of Brassington’s work, put together from the Gallery’s holdings. It was muted and without some of her more flamboyant pieces. It nevertheless traced an itinerary.


At the time of Brassington’s retrospective, A Rebours [against the grain], in 2012 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, a Sydney Morning Herald article repeated what is commonly known about the digital artist and photographer: that she was influenced by her study of gender and psychoanalysis as a mature-age student in the 1980s at the then Tasmanian School of Art.


Anne Marsh’s monograph on Brassington (2006) utilised the critical tools of scholarship at the intersection of feminist theory, psychoanalysis and postmodern cinema, to make a detailed reading of the work.1 At the time, these tools would have been compelling as a way to address Brassington critically—no review would have been complete without reference to Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

In my mother’s house, 1994.

In my mother’s house, 1994. One of four gelatin silver photographs, each 52 x 35.5cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1996. © Pat Brassington. Photograph Ray Woodbury, AGNSW.

Drink me, 1997, printed 2002.

Drink me, 1997, printed 2002. Inkjet print, 100.2 x 80.2cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gift of Amanda Love 2011. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. © Pat Brassington. Photograph Nick Kreisler, AGNSW.