Feminist Artist Mary Kelly Fights the Patriarchy by Smearing Shit on Gallery Walls
UCLA Department of Art distinguished professor Mary Kelly is known for her project-based work as well as her theoretical writing informed by psychoanalysis and feminism. Since the 1970s she has addressed questions of sexuality, identity and memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations.
Mary Kelly first came into my consciousness after I stumbled across the transcripts fromNightcleaners, her 1972 film about women forced up take up low-paid cleaning jobs at night so they could look after their families in the basement of the Women's Library. Here was an artist asking important questions about power, sex, love and the validity of women. Just like, for example, when she presented her son's shit-smeared nappy liners as art object in the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976. The point was an important one: if wine, soup cans, fascist symbols, and a man wrapped in a tent beside a coyote can be art thanks to Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, and Joseph Beuys, then why not the detritus of the maternal experience?
As a young woman in the 1960s, she traveled to Beirut to teach art, and in the early 1970s joined the Women's Liberation Movement while at art school in London. She fell in love with a fellow student, had a child, and began to use the muck and material of everyday life to create work that interrogated the world around her. The large-scale installation Interim followed in the 1980s, breaking the figure of woman down into a folded leather jackets, text, and etchings; in 2005 her show "Love Songs" brought together artifacts of the women's movement; while in her 2014 show "Dicere Kelly," she turned the satellite transmission of a drone attack in Northern Waziristan and the witness accounts given at a congressional hearing into a story, printed onto compressed washing machine fluff, of a killed grandmother. In every case the concept behind her conceptual art has been unapologetically political and intrinsically personal. She is the godmother of feminist art.
Now age 70 and still teaching in LA, Kelly is having something of a moment in London. This week, her work will be shown at Tate Britain's new show Art in Britain: 1964-1979, her work can also be seen in the States of Mind exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, in Lesson in Sculpture with John Latham at the Henry Moore Institute, and her Early Work 1973-76 will be shown at at London's Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until June.
I caught up with her to chat about bringing up kids in communes, smearing shit on art gallery walls, and the art scene in London in the 1970s.
VICE: You're all over London at the moment—how does it feel to see that early work on show again?
MK: My early work has always been present. I feel like I never really left it—particularly Post-Partum Document [the shit-smeared nappy one]. Feminism made everything I did from Post-Partum Document very consistent; I was working from what I call my discursive psyche. Asking the same questions I've been asking since I joined the Women's Movement—the same questions that were being asked in lots of different fields. There is a logic to the work after that. — Nell Frizzell, Apr. 13
Read the full interview at the VICE website.