Excerpts from Bearing Patriarchy: From Christ to Freud, 1986-87

Bearing Patriarchy: From Christ to Freud juxtaposes Renaissance paintings, organized in the form of a cross, with passages from Freud’s essay on femininity. The project is installed as a broken cross -- two images on the lower portion of a wall and the remaining ones on the floor. Representations of the Madonna and child are spliced and re-assembled creating forms that suggest the female body. Freudian psychotherapeutical science of fin-de-siècle Europe is seen to be complicit with the Christian legacy of the late medieval period in producing authoritative justifications for patriarchy.