"An abundance of insights," by Christopher Knight of the LA Times, April 29, 2007
It's difficult to take in MOCA's sprawling 'WACK!' exhibition on one visit, but here are three reasons to return.
THERE are many appealing aspects to "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," the sprawling and critically well-received exhibition chronicling the global emergence of feminist art practice in the 1970s. One is its sheer size.
At MOCA's Geffen Contemporary (through July 16), the show features 430 works by 119 artists. Given the abundance of film and video — Chantal Ackerman's work alone has a running time of just under five hours — it is doubtful that even the most diligent visitor will actually see the whole show, multiple visits or not. Surveys of this size are usually a bad idea; one wants curatorial discrimination. But this time the magnitude emphasizes the monumental scope of the shift in thinking, which artists with a feminist perspective labored to bring about. Revolutions are rarely modest.
The size also fits the global sprawl of today's art, which has no single production center. Gone is the Modernist idea of a cultural capital, replaced by a Postmodern web of networks. It's tempting to think that feminism had something to do with that change too.
One effect is that "WACK!" breaks down into three general categories of work. There's art I was quite familiar with, art I knew about but hadn't experienced in any depth and, finally, art I'd never heard of. Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt, while discovery can point toward yet more uncharted paths.
Here are three works I encountered at the Geffen Contemporary that illustrate that soul-satisfying range. They are not meant to represent the best or worst of the show, but they are emblematic of what makes it so compelling:
1. The human stain
MARY KELLY'S "Post-Partum Document" (1973-79) upset a lot of people when the first of its several sections were shown at London's Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976. In the manner of a pseudo-scientific study, it inspects the relationship between a mother (the artist) and her newborn son during his first years of life. The subject is common enough in the last thousand years of Western art, thanks to the Madonna and Child. (Kelly went to Catholic colleges before she chose art school.) But the connection between them had never been considered quite like this.
Part 1 of the multipart work — "Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts" — is probably its most infamous segment, as the subtitle might suggest. Think Dr. Spock crossed with Dr. Freud. Flanked by graphs and tables, the work comprises 28 framed paper diapers chronicling the month of February 1974. A list of what Kelly's baby consumed each day — 2 teaspoons cereal, 1 teaspoon carrots, 1 ounce water, etc. — is carefully typed on each diaper. The list is a caption just beneath a ghostly brown or yellow stain.
Seeing these charts is very different from reading about them in a book, where Kelly's work is invariably discussed in psychoanalytic and other academic language. Those terms are surely legitimate. But they don't come close to conveying how flat-out funny the piece is nor how one's risible reaction to it is essential to its larger meanings.
"Eeewww!" is not an appropriate academic response, but it certainly applies when you're nose-to-the-glass scrutinizing baby poop. (Don't even think about the conservation issues facing the Art Gallery of Ontario, which owns the daily record of infant excretions.) After Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni's notorious 1961 packed and sealed cans containing 30 grams of his own excrement, Kelly's work does come with a built-in artistic lineage. And there's always Freud, who wrote that children recognize feces, as matter that comes from within, as their very first creations.
What makes the work funny is the relationship between Kelly's art and the collapsing edifice of formalist aesthetic interpretation in the 1970s. Formalism had latched onto the slight innovation in Helen Frankenthaler's big abstract painting "Mountains and Sea" (1952) as the engine meant to drive the next big wave of Modernist art into the end of the 20th century. She made her paintings by staining raw canvas with thinned and fluid pigments, creating diaphanous veils of transparent color. Kelly's diapers, by contrast, were "stain paintings" of a rather different order.
Marcel Duchamp might well have admired their visceral critique of art's traditional foundation in visual perception, since Kelly's paintings literally make you look away. And given Frankenthaler's notorious political conservatism, the fact that the younger artist's feminist criticism is spoken in her elder's formalist language offers its own particular pleasure.
Since the 1980s, enjoyment has returned as a motive for looking at paintings — and happily so. But the "Post-Partum Document" is a notable tear in art's fabric.
2. Help from the audience
AT the Berkeley Art Museum a big bowl filled with lapel buttons stood on a pedestal at the entry to a recent show of Yoko Ono's 1960s paintings. "Imagine Peace," the white buttons said in the black Helvetica type characteristic of the period. A visitor was invited to take one.
"Imagine Yoko had talent," I thought to myself, marveling at the banality of her art. There isn't much to recommend the degradation of Fluxus and Conceptual art into pop culture platitudes of wishful thinking.
The big exception in Ono's career is "Cut Piece," a fascinating performance first done in Kyoto, Japan, in 1964 and then the following year at New York's Carnegie Hall. (Its origin coincides with "Grapefruit," the book of simple instructions for paintings that were the focus of the Berkeley show.) The performance came nine years after Ono began to make art and two years before her fateful London encounter with John Lennon. A 9-minute video of the Carnegie Hall recital of "Cut Piece," filmed by renowned documentarians David and Albert Maysles and transferred to DVD is a highlight of "WACK!"
Seated casually on the stage floor, like the Little Mermaid sitting on a rock in Copenhagen's harbor, Ono wears her hair pulled into a simple chignon. The 30-year-old artist is dressed in black — cardigan sweater, skirt and fishnet stockings — appropriate to a classical recital hall. Beside her on the floor are a pocket watch and a large pair of scissors. Off-camera, audience members had been invited to come up on stage, of their own volition and one by one, and cut a piece of fabric from her clothing. In simplest terms, the audience was asked to participate in a practice as old as art — the creation of a nude.
But there's a considerable difference between an artist in a studio working with a model, engaged in a private act for later public consumption, and a real-time confrontation with another human being on a theatrical stage. In the Maysles' film we watch 16 men and women willingly accept the offer. With varying degrees of reticence or brio, they cut away her clothing.
Occasional twitters and smattered applause punctuate the soundtrack. Ono sits stonily, and as exposure increases, the inevitable sense of personal violation mounts. Will people defile her, just because they've been told they can?
When a young man who had been on stage once already returns to make a second cut, a look of slight concern crosses the artist's face. And with good reason: He begins to cut through her slip, all the way across her bodice, then both straps of her bra, up around her collar and finally the remains of her sweater. Unlike the generally meek snips that preceded it, his session is lengthy and overeager.
Eyes darting, lip bitten, the artist's concern shifts into passive alarm. The man retreats, she crosses her arms to cover her breasts and the film ends.
Will people defile her, just because they've been told they can? The question has been answered.
3. Bad boys
WHO is Alexis Hunter? Since 1972 the New Zealand-born artist has been living and working in London, where she moved at age 24. Before "WACK!" I was wholly unfamiliar with her work. Her single contribution to the show — a six-panel, 25-foot-long painting called "The Objects Series" (1974-75) — is the kind of work that's easy to slide right by. Its Photorealist style is one that rarely pays off.
Take a second look, though, and you're hooked. This sexy work appears startlingly fresh, almost as if it could have been made today.
Each black-and-white panel shows a cropped image of a different young man, focusing on torso and limbs and omitting the head or face. The backgrounds are generic — the men stand next to a car, sit on a living room sofa, loiter on an urban rooftop and such.
A narrow range of decorative elements replaces the individual identity a face or setting would otherwise project. This conspicuous adornment includes jewelry — rings, wristbands and watches, oversize belt buckles, lanyards, metal studs, etc. — as well as prominent tattoos. Given the artist's upbringing in New Zealand, where Maori tattooing is prevalent, the permanent ink decorations add emphasis to the transient metal and leather ones.
The ornamentation repeats with variations across all six canvases. An upper arm sports a rose with a scroll that reads "Mother." A heart borne on wings alights on a shoulder, like some exotic butterfly. Daggers above the legend "Love & Hate" pierce another heart, inked on a forearm. A snake coils around a blade. Given the painting's date in the post-Pop art '70s, long before tattoos became ubiquitous fashion accessories for suburban kids, these designs mark their already objectified wearers as bad boys. Most also show a good deal of skin. As the work's title suggests, Hunter has objectified the men, not personalized them.
If gender reversal were the only thing going on in these paintings, however, they'd be conventional and dull.
The black-and-white paintings were obviously made by copying photographs. Many feminist artists abandoned painting, because of the baggage that came with its traditional status as a trophy in masculine society. Hunter stopped in the late 1970s and like lots of women turned instead to camera work. That modern medium had only a brief history and, like the women, was commonly assumed to have second-class status in art.
Hunter's Photorealist fusion of camera work with painting assumes an unexpected dimension. "The Objects Series" smartly identifies painting with the elaborate attributes of male adornment. The six-panel work also uses photographs as painting's matrix, leading it around by the metaphoric nose. Thanks to the beautifully rendered Photorealist style, a lush assertion of feminine power enhances the erotic edge of its otherwise masculine imagery.
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"Not-Forgetting:
Mary Kelly’s Love Songs," by Rosalyn Deutsche of Grey Room, #24 Summer 2006
The age of protected democracy in which we live – when, as Giorgio Agamben writes, security is the normal technique of Western democratic governments – has had a serious impact on art that wants to play a role in deepening and extending the public sphere. Among the most urgent consequences are state censorship: for example, New York Governor George Pataki’s recent cancellation of plans to make the Drawing Center part of the World Trade Center memorial complex; and criminal prosecution: the federal governments ongoing indictment of Steven Kurtz, member of the Critical Art Ensemble. A consequence of another kind, one that has captured less attention but that also limits art’s participation in a richly agonistic public life, is a worsening of the left melancholy that surfaced in cultural discourse, including art discourse, in the 1970s.
“Left melancholia” was Walter Benjamin’s derogatory term for a mood afflicting leftists who remain more attached to past political ideals – even, according to philosopher Wendy Brown, to the failure of a political ideal – than to possibilities of political change in the present.(2) Brown says that the left melancholic renders his political analysis thinglike and frozen, unamenable to transformation. Applying Benjamin’s analysis to contemporary times, she argues that today’s left melancholic adheres to a traditional leftist representation of the political, a representation that includes “notions of unified movements, social totalities, and class-based politics.”(3) The melancholic therefore laments the challenges that have been posed over the last few decades to such unitary models of social change, scornfully calling them, among other names, “postmodern.” The most basic challenge was calling into question the idea that society is totalized by a single, economic antagonism, which is the absolute foundation of all other social antagonisms and governs all emancipatory struggle. Against this questioning, the left melancholic tries to reground the political in the authority of an ontologically privileged foundation, insisting, as Stuart Hall observed in 1988, on the determinism of capital and dismissing the political importance of postmodernism’s concern with the subject and subjectivity.(4) A current example is the introduction to Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, a book about the Iraq War that has attracted the interest of certain sectors of the art world. After wrongly claiming that academic leftists of the recent past dismissed the political significance of capitalism, the authors write, “It is ‘the end of Grand Narratives’ and ‘the trap of totalization’ and ‘the radical irreducibility of the political’ which now seem like period items.”(5) The phrases they mock as outdated stand of course for various postmodern, poststructuralist, and feminist critiques of traditional leftist political analysis.
Brown suggests that left melancholy has a narcissistic dimension because the frozen analysis to which it clings once formed the basis of leftist self-love, giving “its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, the true.”(6) Insofar as left melancholy rests on an image of society and of social change that is centered on the presence of an element that guarantees wholeness, the analysis is also masculinist. Hardly surprising, then, is the left melancholic’s rejection not only of postmodernism but also of the feminist voice associated with postmodernism. For it was postmodern feminists and, in particular feminist artists, who explored the role played by totalizing images in producing and maintaining masculinist subjects. This exploration implied that subjective, psychic transformation, like material transformation, is an essential component, rather than mere epiphenomenon, of social change. Also predictable, then, is that critics and historians afflicted by left melancholia (including some who once theorized the meaning of postmodernism but now regard it as nothing more than “the cultural logic of late capitalism”) would refuse to register the full impact of the feminist critique of the meaning of the political. Leftists may use the pressing nature of the current political situation to legitimate this refusal, but in the age of protected democracy, when the pursuit of mastery has become a self-evident virtue, the feminist critique seems more rather than less urgent.
The left melancholic’s insistence on a pregiven ground of society and of political struggle restricts the growth of democratic public spheres. For one thing, as Claude Lefort argues, the public sphere emerged precisely when the democratic revolutions withdrew the ground, making the meaning of society uncertain and, as a consequence, open to debate. For another, being in public means responding to the presence of others and therefore calls out our narcissism. Artists who want their work to be part of democratic public life are faced with the task not only of challenging protected democracy but of resisting left melancholy. One way of doing so – suggested to me by Mary Kelly’s exhibition Love Songs, held last fall at Postmasters Gallery in New York City – is through fidelity to the event of feminism.
“Fidelity to the event” is a concept formulated by the philosopher Alain Badiou. Like left melancholy, the phrase implies a relationship to the past, a type of history and memory of earlier radicalism. To distinguish fidelity from nostalgic forms of memory, Badiou describes the relationship as one of “not-forgetting.” Fidelity to the event is also Badiou’s name for a new conception of ethics, which he defines as a refusal of conservatism. The event for Badiou is something that happens in a situation, something that supplements, but does not complement, the order within which the event takes place, whether it is the political, personal, or artistic order. Examples are the political event of the French Revolution, the personal event of an amorous passion, and the artistic event of Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone scale. The event cannot be understood within the framework of already-constituted knowledges. It “punches a hole” in such knowledge, releasing what Badiou calls a “truth-process.”(7) The event is revolutionary, though not in the sense of something absolute that, as Julia Kristeva puts it in her criticism of revolution, will solve all problems.(8) Rather, the event presents hitherto unknown possibilities that put an end to consensus or dominant opinion in the order it disrupts; its course is uncertain, and importantly, it compels the subject to “decide a new way of being.” The subject becomes the bearer of a fidelity to the event when she decides henceforth to relate to the situation from the perspective of the event. “To be really faithful to the event,” Badiou writes, “I must completely rework my ordinary way of living my situation.”(9) After Schoenberg, for instance, I do not want to go to writing romantic music. I persevere in the interruption. I do not break with the beak and return to continuity. But neither do I take the event absolute, giving it total power and turning it into a new dogmatism. For the event, cautions Badiou, does not reveal the substance of the situation in which it occurs. Rather, it names the void of the situation. For example, the void of the political order is the meaning of the political community.(10) If as Lefort argues, the democratic revolutions constituted an event that did away with references to absolute sources of the meaning of the people and opened the political community to question, then to endow the people with a substantial identity, to name the unnamable, is to betray the democratic event and, of course, destroy the public sphere it invents.
For Badiou, the subject of fidelity to an event does not preexist the event. Rather, the subject is someone caught up in the event, “simultaneously himself and in excess of himself.” The event and the unpredictable course of the process it unleashes “pass through” this someone, who thereby becomes engaged in the invention of a new subject, a subject she has chosen to be and that extends beyond herself. The question faced by the subject of a fidelity is “how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being...via the effects of being seized by the not-known?”(11)
Kelly’s Love Songs demonstrated fidelity to an event that Badiou does not mention: feminism, which, questioning masculinist conceptions of both the subject and the political, attempted to build more democratic forms of each.(12) As its title indicates, Kelly’s exhibition treated the political event of feminism as also a personal one, an amorous passion, giving new meaning to the slogan of the Women’s Liberation Movement, “the personal is political.” This slogan challenged both mainstream and traditional critical conceptions of the public sphere, conceptions that draw a rigid divide between public/political and private/nonpolitical space. Whereas the public-private division once forced women’s issues into privacy, today the division is shored up by left melancholics who exclude feminist explorations of subjectivity from the public sphere. Against this exclusion, Kelly created a space - a kind of theater – dedicated to the history, memory, and postmemory of a feminism that mixes the personal and the political, a space in which the boundaries between the two could not be pinned down.
In her theater of not-forgetting, Kelly used a material that serves the philosopher as a metaphor for the event: light. The event, says Badiou is “a kind of flashing supplement that happens to the situation”; it bursts forth as if into flame and gives off light, which disappears, leaving a “trace” in the situation, a kind of afterimage that refers back to the vanished event and guides the subject’s fidelity.(13) Love Songs contains such traces: it took place in a darkened gallery; the only light emanated from the works in the show.
Running like a frieze around three walls of the gallery’s front room was a work called Sisterhood Is POW..., a title that transforms the earliest feminist slogan “Sisterhood is powerful” into a phrase that registers the powerful impact -the POW- of feminism as an event. Sisterhood Is POW... consisted of thirty-six black, cast acrylic panels incised with laser-cut script. Supported on wooden shelves, the panels were lit from behind by strip lighting, which illuminated the words and turned them into literal “words of light,” Walter Benjamin’s term for photography, a name that links photographs to language. Divided like lines of poetry, Kelly’s text expresses her subjective not-forgetting of her participation in an episode of the British Women’s Liberation Movement, a demonstration against the Miss World Contest held at the Albert Hall in London in 1971. Undertaking a type of historical work that Drucilla Cornell calls “the recollective imagination,”(14) Kelly recalls what was taking place inside and outside the Hall: inside, the Miss World contest, where “contestants flash / teeth and leg-length” as “judges tot up the / facts: figures, faces”; outside, a protest against this spectacle of patriarchal femininity in which “demonstrators, / arms locked, hands firm, fingers longer, / more lucid, flash / luminous nipples and / crotches at fans.” The group of panels bearing short phrases and placed at slightly varying heights resembled a cluster of picket signs contesting oppressive constructions of the feminine.
On the room’s fourth wall hung another, related work, Flashing Nipple Remix, consisting of three light boxes containing large black and white photographic transparensices. The activities pictures in the photographs are based on a snapshot in Kelly’s archive. The archival photo documents the street theater protest described in Sisterhood Is POW... and could be considered a trace of feminism as an event. Over their clothing, in the area of their breasts and genitals, protestors had placed bright lights, ironically mimicking the performance going on inside the Albert Hall. The first photo in Flashing Nipple Remix depicts a contemporary restaging of the protest by five young women. Representatives of a new generation of feminists, the women wore the same lights as the original protestors and set them in motion by shaking their bodies with increasing vigor. The women became radiant as their bodies dissolved into luminous streaks and patterns of light. A student of mine observed that the moving lights served as “a vehicle to problematize the definition of a woman by way of anatomical form... Through their actions, the women become complex, ineffable figures of their own definition, defying the notion of a woman as an object presented for the enjoyment of the viewer.”(15) The photos can also be read as somewhat humorous images of Badiou’s subject of a fidelity, of, that is, women caught up in the flashing event of feminism, using a trace to guide them.
Love Songs continued in Postmaster’s back room, which contained two works that echoed those in the front. Seemed Right, placed on the right-hand wall, repeated the form of Sisterhood Is POW..., only its acrylic panels were white, not black. As in Sisterhood Is POW..., the panels contained the recollections of older feminists, whom Kelly had asked to describe their initial responses to the Women’s Liberation Movement. The most common answers, once again written in light, a form that matched their thematic content, characterized feminism as an event: “seemed right,” “just made sense,” “like a lightning bolt!”
Across from Seemed Right, on the room’s left-hand wall, Kelly projected a ninety-second film loop titled WLM Demo Remix, the film depicts both an early Women’s Liberation Movement street demonstration and its contemporary restaging. This work, however, uses an actual archive photo, a trace of the event, to represent the original demonstration, which took place in New York City in 1970, one of several demonstrations held across the United states to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment giving American Women the right to vote. Like Flashing Nipple Remix, WLM Demo Remix portrays a transgenerational haunting. An image that carries the legacy of an earlier generation of feminists appears to the new generation. Likewise, the women in the later image inhabit those in the earlier one. Using a slow dissolve to combine past and present images, a technique that imitates the scene of the unconscious mind, the loop begins with the later image – the photo of the restaging – which gradually fades and disappears as the earlier image emerges and grows clearer. The image of the restaging never fades out completely, however, but remains visible behind the earlier one, which itself does not picture an originary event, because the 1970 demonstration, mounted by a second wave of feminists, was haunted by earlier street performances – late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century suffragist parades. The archival photo, then, also depicts a restaging. Literally and figuratively, Kelly’s work is a visual remix: a recording produced by bringing together ingredients in a new formation that modifies their identities.
The phrase on the demonstrators’ sign oscillates between “Unite for Women’s Emancipation,” which appears in the archival photograph, and, in the restaged image, “From Stone to Cloud.” A clear political exhortation to bring about emancipatory change, an exhortation recalling those of the suffragists, alternates with a far more cryptic word-image that describes a particular kind of change: a transformation from a thinglike thing, an entity – a stone- into somethingcapable of remixing – a cloud. In the context of Kelly’s exhibition, “from stone to cloud” can be read as a metaphor for at least two interrelated changes: mutations in the identity of feminism as a political movement and mutations in the subject seized by feminism. Each moves away from a fixed state and grows into something defined by its ability to change, to be reborn, liberated. Feminism as an event and the subject of a fidelity to it leave behind a conception of politics grounded in solid foundations and ascend to a more democratic one that exists in multiple incarnations and changes shape as it articulates with other political aims and objects; for example, human rights. Politics as a remix.
“From stone to cloud” is taken from a poem by Sylvia Plath titled “Love Letter.” Kelly’s choice of Love Songs as the title of her exhibition bespeaks a debt: The show may be influenced by Badiou, but it operates, quite literally, under the sign of Plath, whose life and poetry have long haunted feminists, and whose poem begins
Not easy to describe the change you made
If I’m alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit
Plath wrote the poem six months after giving birth to its addressee, a baby girl, who, as the poet describes it, also gave birth to her. Since the 1970s, when she made The Post-Partum Document, Kelly has been interested in the mother-child relationship. Following Badiou, she suggests that it might be considered a form of fidelity to the event of love. (16) More important, she compares the relationship to the intersubjectivity of a political project; in particular, to the kind of love that existed among feminists in the early womens’ movement. This love, she claims, characterized a feminists community that recognized difference and, as a result, attempted to forge nonhierarchical forms of political organization.(17) The implied “you” to whom Kelly writes her love songs is, I think, both new and older feminists, with their own irreconcilable difference, as well as feminism itself, which gave birth to a new subject and whose own birth the women quoted in Seemed Right also address, saying, as Plath does, “I knew you at once.”
Jacqueline Rose, in her superb book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, observes that in Plath the boundary between personal, psychic history and political history is uncertain.(18) For this reason, Plath has been severely chastised by critics who want to separate the two. But she has also served as a site of contestation about the meaning of the feminist formulation that the personal is political. Rose points out that some feminists claim that Plath’s late work reveals the emergence of the poet’s authentic self.(19) Plath, they say, was emancipated into a resolute identity. Those who interpret Plath in this manner often render her personal journey political by turning it into an allegory of feminism understood as a female selfhood. Love Letter suggests otherwise. In this and other poems, the stone stands for separateness from other things. And it is precisely this hard separateness that characterizes the phallocentric self, the self understood as constituted outside of relationships, a private rather than a public being. Because Plath describes her liberating transformation as a move away from a stonelike state, the transformation cannot accurately serve as an image of a feminism that wants to move toward self-constituted female subjectivity – especially if we consider Love Letter in relation to Magi, a poem penned by Plath one day later. There, the narrator, fantasizing a group of transcendent beings hovering over a baby’s crib, shrinks from their “loveless” abstractions and asks, “What girl ever flourished in such company?”(20) Kelly, like Rose, claims Plath for a different feminism, one grounded in the continual opening and remixing of feminist politics and the feminine rather than in conclusive identities that disavow intersubjectivity and foreclose mutation. In Love Songs “from stone to cloud” counters – protests against – the danger that feminism and the subject of feminism might, as Rose cautions, “find itself reproducing the form of phallocentrism at the very moment it claims to have detached itself most fully from patriarchal power.”(21)
Both fidelity to the event and left melancholy remember the past and write history. But unlike triumphalist historical narratives, in which emancipation leads to resolution, Kelly’s history is written in the tense of the future anterior, an order of time in which, as Cornell observes, reimagining never ends.(22) Theorizing the future anterior as the time of personal history, Jacques Lacan wrote, “What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” (23) Lacan’s description of personal history recalls Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of political history. The historian, as Benjamin famously wrote, does not reconstruct the past “a it really was” but, bringing past an present into a constellation, “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”(24) Kelly mixes Badiou and Benjamin – two philosophers of the flash and of revolutionary not-forgetting. For Love Songs the Women’s Liberation Movement cannot be distinguished from the transformations it undergoes in the hands of a new generation of a new generation and, perhaps most important, in both generations’ fantasies. WLM Demo Remix, for example, literalizes the future anterior, never allowing the image of the 1970s demonstration to appear in isolation. And while the image of the restaged demonstration does technically resolve, it, too, cannot be separated from its counterpart by virtue of its status as a theatrical reenactment, a repetition with a difference, in which a group of women literally assume an image and in this way claim a relationship to an event in which they did not participate. Kelly’s performers enact a mimetic identification that for Cornell forms the basis of feminist politics.(25) As a psychic narrative of repetitive time mixes with and reimagines a historical narrative of progressive time, Kelly writes feminism and herself as what they will have been for what they are in the process of becoming.
The principal way in which Kelly’s fidelity to the event differs from left melancholy is in its refusal to “break with the break,” to go back to prefeminist ideas of politics and history. In keeping with this fidelity, Kelly neither absolutizes the event nor takes up an authoritarian position in relation to a younger generation. Rejecting the paternal role, which would demand identification with a supposedly authentic feminism, Kelly foregrounds the category of fantasy, exploring her own and her young performers’ imaginary investments in feminist history and politics. In this way, too, the subject of a fidelity diverges from the left melancholic, who must disavow his participation in fantasy, precisely in order to defend his fantasy of mastery.
1. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14.
2. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” in Loss, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 458-465.
3. Brown, 460, 462-463.
4. Brown, 461-462
5. Retort (Ian Boal et al.), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), 9.
6. Brown, 460
7. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 41, 42-43.
8. Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’keeffe (New York: Semiotexte(e), 2002), 104
9. Badiou, Ethics, 41-42.
10. Badiou, Ethics, 80-85.
11. Badiou, Ethics, 50.
12. In Badiou’s most recent book to be translated into English, feminism is absent from the philosopher’s outline of the last forty years of French politics. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005), xxxiv-xxxv
13. Badiou, Ethics, 72
14. Drucilla Cornell, “Rethinking the Time of Feminism,” in Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1994), 152.
15. Josh Tonsfeldt, “Mary Kelly, Love Songs” (unpublished course paper, Barnard College, 2005).
16. Sasha Archibald, “Care and the Psyche: An Interview with Mary Kelly,” in At the Mercy of Others: The Politics of Care, exh. Cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005), 26. The exhibition was organized by the Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and ran May 18- June 25, 2005.
17. Archibald, 26.
18. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
19. Rose, 144.
20. On a BBC broadcast, Plath introduced this poem by saying: “Abstractions, by definition, are withdrawn from life and formulated in spite of life’s minute and vital complexities. In this poem, ‘Magi,’ I imagine the great absolutes of the philosophers gathered around the crib of a newborn baby girl who is nothing but life.” Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981), 289-290, n. 130.
21. Rose, 149
22. Cornell, “Rethinking the Time of Feminism,” 152.
23. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 86.
24. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 255.
25. Cornell, 155.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery,
Press Release: Oct 14 - Nov 11, 2006
Mary Kelly
“Love Songs”
Mary Kelly’s new work takes the form of a large-scale narrative installation, incorporating film and photographs in which young artists and performers re-stage classic emblematic images from the 1970s.
Flashing Nipple Remix, a series of black and white transparencies in light boxes, records choreographic improvisations based on a snapshot of street theater performers at the 1971 Miss World protest outside the Albert Hall in London.
WLM Demo Remix, a 90 second film loop, uses slow dissolves to bridge past and present representations of the 1970 Women’s Liberation march in New York City that marked the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
Sisterhood is POW, a 72-foot narrative illuminated by strip light, replays the artist’s irreverent recollections of participation in the Miss World demonstration and a shorter piece, Seemed Right, highlights phrases most often repeated in numerous interviews with women about the impact of these events on their lives.
In the four works that comprise Love Songs, Kelly attempts to describe what is left after the specific demands of the moment have faded and what, if anything, is passed on from one generation to the next. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of the 70s, she presents a performative synthesis of the past in the present, exploring the artist’s and the performers’ imaginary investment in the current relevance as well as the historical legacy of sexual politics.
Recent exhibitions of her work include the 2004 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Academy, MuHKA, Antwerp, 2006; forthcoming, WACK, MOCA, 2007 and Documenta XII, Kassel. She is the author of Post-Partum Document, Generali Foundation, Vienna and University of California Press, 1998 and Imaging Desire, MIT Press, Boston, 1996. A survey of her work, Mary Kelly, was published by Phaidon Press, London, 1997. Mary Kelly studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. Currently, she is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at UCLA
Feminism: Legacies and Reinventions, a discussion with Andrea Bowers, Mary Kelly,
Suzanne Lacy, Taisha Paggett, Yvonne Rainer and Emily Roysdon, will take place in the
Gallery on Saturday, October 28, at 11:00 am.
Mary Kelly
On View: October 14 – November 11, 2006
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 5:30 pm
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 14, 5 – 7 pm
Discussion: Saturday, October 28, 11:00 – 12:30
Media Contact: Edward Sterrett
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POSTMASTERS Press Release: Oct. 29 - Dec. 3, 2005
Mary Kelly
“Love Songs”
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of "Love Songs", a new group of works by Mary Kelly. The show will open October 29 and will be on view until December 3, 2005. The opening reception will take place Saturday, October 29, 2005 between 6 and 8 pm.
Love Songs is a remix of photo classics and oral histories of the 1970s, capturing both the inspiration and irony of events that, in different ways, have affected two generations of women. Mary Kelly's riff takes the form of a large-scale narrative installation, incorporating, for the first time, photographs made in collaboration with a group of younger artists and performers who have re-staged images from her archive.
Flashing Nipple Remix, a series of black and white transparencies in light boxes, records choreographic improvisations on a snapshot of street theater performers at the 1971 Miss World protest at the Albert Hall in London. WLM Demo Remix, a 90 second film loop, uses slow dissolves to bridge past and present representations of the 1970 Women's Liberation demonstration, marking the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, in New York City.
Sisterhood is POW, a 72-foot narrative illuminated by rope light, replays the artistÕs irreverent recollections of participation in the Miss World protest and a shorter work, Seemed Right, highlights phrases most often repeated in numerous interviews with women about the impact of these events on their lives.
In the four works that comprise Love Songs, Kelly attempts to describe what is left after the specific demands of the moment have faded and what, if anything, is passed on from one generation to the next. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of the 70s, Love Songs is a performative synthesis of the past in the present that explores the artist and the performers' imaginary investment in the historical legacy as well as current relevance of sexual politics.
Mary Kelly's previous large scale installation Circa 1968 was most recently shown at the Whitney Museum 2004 Biennial Exhibition.
Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea at 459 West 19th Street (corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday to 11 - 6 pm. Please contact Magdalena Sawon at 212-727-3323 with any questions or image requests.
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"Mary Kelly, Love Songs," by Lauren Cornell of Time Out New York
Mary Kelly's latest show (all works 2005) looks at feminism past and present. Her previous work, mostly large-scale installations, explored the intersection of psychoanalysis, feminist politics and art history, favoring inquiry over dogma. "Love Songs" continues in the same vein, recollecting and critiquing the artist's involvement in the 1970s women's-rights movement.
Flashing Nipple Remix, a triptych of large, black-and-white photographs mounted in light boxes, documents a reenactment of a feminist rally outside the 1971 Miss World pageant in London, where protesters were outfitted in dark pantsuits with lights affixed to their breasts and crotches. Kelly lengthened her camera's exposure each time the women moved; figures devolve from one photo to the next until they appear as clusters of lights, like fireworks in miniature. Nearby, Sisterhood Is POW is a similarly ambient portrait of protest. Installed along three walls of the main gallery are 36 black panels, connected by a line of illuminated text; the narrative describes a chain of demonstrators whose linked arms block the path of oncoming Rolls-Royces.
In the adjacent gallery, the video WLM Demo Remix dissolves an image of a 1970 demonstration, which marked the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment (granting women's right to vote), into a similarly composed picture taken at a rally earlier this year. The contemporary group, notably more multicultural (though still predominantly white), carries a sign that reads from stone to cloud, a far more enigmatic message than its predecessor's, unite for women's emancipation. This apparent shift in feminist politics, from an ostensibly unified stance to a more dispersed approach, corresponds to the strategy employed here by Kelly, an enduring artist of appropriation and recombination.
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by Christopher Miles of Art Forum, March 2002
In a career defined by attempts to give physical form to complex language-based narratives, Mary Kelly has generally kept her work visually lean. Her installations tend to betray the aesthetic inheritance from the Minimalism and Conceptualism that defined her generation’s coming of age. As a viewer, I have found myself at times wanting more – not because I wished the work were luscious or heroic (either would seem out of sync with Kelly’s interest in psychological residue, trauma, personal history, identity formation, human interactions, and social hierarchies), but because I wanted it to catch my eye as and hit me in the gut as much as it got me thinking. Well, I’ve learned my lesson. With “The Ballad of Kastroit Rexhepi” (2001), Kelly has delivered a work that got me on every level and didn’t let go.
Curiously, this sensually rich piece, made of nothing but dryer lint, is as sparse as anything Kelly has done. Using a method she debuted in a 1999 work, “Mea Culpa” (two twenty-foot panels of which were simultaneously on view at Rosamund Felsen Gallery), Kelly equipped the arc-shaped lint screen of a clothes dryer with stencils and then dried numerous loads of her own black and white clothing. The result is a series of curved gray mini-blankets of lint. Running straight across each is a bit of text in black sans-serif typeface; when the sections are butted end-to-end and mounted on the wall, the words connect to form a narrative. In “Mea Culpa,” the lint forms a kind of scalloped pattern, like the pointed waves of water in a child’s drawing, but in “The Ballad of Kastroit Rexhepi” the sections alternate between curve-up and curve-down, forming a gently snaking line that runs at eye level around the walls. The narrative cutting straight down the center through the undulations loosely follows the traditional structure of a ballad to tell the true, albeit media-filtered and now faded story of Kastriot, an ethnic Albanian boy who, at eighteen months, the age when he would have begun to form language skills and develop his own identity, was left for dead in a Kosovo battlefield by his mother. He was rescued by the Serbs, who assumed he was one of their own, and renamed Zoran, only to be abandoned again during the NATO occupation and renamed Lirim by Albanian hospital nurses. Months later, the boy was reunited with his parents when the refugees returned to their homes, and the first word out of his mouth was “bab” (dad).
Even if you don’t read a word of it, the piece has a strange effect, a kind of dull turbulence generated by the oscillation that is at once disturbing and soothing. The material form draws you into the words and seems an apt accompaniment with its suggestion s of domesticity, cleansing, child rearing, and ephermerality. The sound-wave pattern invites a variety of associations – give and take, positive and negative, ebb and flow, kindness and cruelty, tragedy and miracle – that seem interchangeably appropriate.
Kelly’s ballad was set to music by composer Michael Nyman; the piece was performed for the first time at the opening by his string quartet accompanied by soprano Sarah Leonard. For the rest of the show’s run, a video documenting the performance was projected in the rear of the space. The music naturally lent drama to the installation, but no more so that Kelly’s carefully structured language and precise display. So much text-based art leaves you glassy-eyed after the first sentence, but Kelly’s piece lures you in at the start and keeps you hooked until the end, guiding you around the room, controlling your pace with its meter. For better or worse, its troubling tale stays with you long after you have left the museum.
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"About a Boy," by Ernest Larsen of Art in America, December 2002
The ambitious new work by Mary Kelly which premiered last December at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “The Ballad of Kastroit Rexhepi,” powerfully engages everyday domestic waste in a mediation on the epochal waste of war. In the process, the artist more fully exploits the ingenious working method developed for her previous installation, “Mea Culpa,” (1999). For both projects, Kelly attached vinyl letters in Helvetica typeface to the filter of the clothes dryer in her garage. While drying thousands of pounds of black and white cotton clothing, she slowly monoprinted texts on the lint trapped against the screen. “Mea Culpa” literally united Kelly’s own texts to the fragile makeshift fabric in order to examine, albeit elliptically, wrenching moments of brutal conflict in Sarajevo, Beirut, Johannesburg and Phnom Penh. In the “Ballad” she astutely focuses the conceptual and emotion potential of this approach to articulate the implication of just one such story.
On July 31, 1999, during the NATO occupation of Kosovo, Kelly read a Los Angeles Times article headed, “War Orphan Regains Name and Family.” Four months earlier, a starving toddler, to all appearance no longer breathing, had been left for dead by his panic-stricken Albanian parents as they escaped a sustained Serbian attack. Found, still alive on the battlefield, he was given a new Serbian name, Zoran; left behind in a hospital as the Serbs retreated he was now assumed to be Albanian and renamed once again: Lirim.
The media routinely singles out such human-interest stories as thumbnail compressions of the large-scale movements of history: little Kastroit, innocent victim of the horrors of war, survives against all odds. Transforming the press account, Kelly’s own narrative further compresses Kastroit’s story of miraculous survival into three stanzas and a shorter envoi, which are intended to evoke the traditional folk ballad.
She begins with a dismissal of the comforting illusion of innocence: “Unnatural spring: / metal seedpods germinating bloody flora / anticipating the ‘expulsions’.” Still, there is no escape from the facile affirmation of the media: “Summer, 1999 / happy ending in the Times,” she writes. In Kelly’s reworking of Kastroit’s fate, the media offer a simplistic redemption even more false than that of the folk ballad – the “media” of yesteryear – which once served to nurture ethnocentric feeling with mythic evocations of nationalist sentiment.
Embossed in compressed lint, Kelly’s ballad advances within a repeated waveform determined by the curved shape of the dryer’s filter. These elegant and continuous waves suggest the pulse of the heart, the pull of the ocean, the audio pattern of a recurring sound – all natural forces that intensify the narrative’s iconic form. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the spare text stretched in a 206-foot line of rhythmic prose that ran across 49 panels to encircle the perimeter of the space. The installation’s scale allowed the embedded text of the “Ballad” to resonate at once as word and image, according it the visual sweep of an epic, like a 36-degree shot in a wide-screen war movie. The tension between the narrative’s individual incident and its extravagant presentation (more than 200 feet to tell the story of a two-foot toddler) engaged reader-viewers in the contradictions between the private and public.
Interviewed for the exhibition’s small catalogue, Kelly explains that she was particularly attracted by the press’s preoccupation with Kastroit’s first word upon being reunited with his family, and specifically by the coincidence between “patronym” and “patria” as the child simultaneously claims language, family and nation. Hitherto silent, the boy’s momentous passage into speech is witnessed and, as Kelly writes, “by reporters / the tender armistice is staged / Mater, pater et familia / For the camera, they kiss his coral cheek / and Kastroit, young patriot says “Bab” (Albanian for “Dad”).
Drawing on political and psychoanalytic theory, Kelly portrays Kastroit’s entry into the social into the social world of speech as an inscription of national, familial and sexual identities. By accumulating the variants “pater,” “patriot” and “Bab,” she proposes to isolate the decisive moment in which a toddler becomes a nationalist, which later in life may well provide the indispensable psychological legitimation for acts of uninhibited violence such as those undertaken by the Serbs against Kastroit’s own people. With carefully modulated irony, she indicates that even within little Kastroit’s family unit, the sinister potential for xenophobic righteousness is constructed and consecrated in infancy.
Kelly’s conceptual achievement is that the procedures of filtration and compression implemented by both the media source and her ballad are echoed in the installation’s material form. She uses a common domestic labor-saving device, her dryer, as a labor-intensive printing process. Such an engagement with everyday objects and processes has characterized her art since the autobiographical “Post-Partum Document” (1973), a landmark work bridging Conceptualism and feminism.
In the interview, Kelly speaks of “filtering out the figurative elements and working with the emotional or affective residue of the event.” Lint, of course, is not only the residue of the process of filtering: it is residue as waste product. Insofar as the critical subjectivity of her text is wholly inextricable from the waste within which it appears, Kelly implicitly reiterates the claim, well established in the modernist canon that runs from Dada and early assemblage through process art and Conceptualism, that artistic production can subvert the customary structure of art. Moreover, this particular subversion’s association with cleansing chillingly conjures the verbally and physically degraded turn of phrase “ethnic cleansing.”
Kelly came of age as an artist in London during the early ‘70’s, in the heady intellectual atmosphere of British Minimalism and Conceptualism (prominently Art and Language) and the feminist development of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Her mature work positions the viewer as a reader, and each successive project has offered a new response to the challenges that mark the uneasy relationship between image and text. The depth of her solutions was indicated by what amounted to a mini-retrospective and Rosamund Felsen Gallery, which coincided with the Santa Monica Museum installation. This gallery show also indicated that Kelly’s major artistic projects – from “Post-Partum Document” through “Interim” (1984-85) to “Gloria Patri” (1992) – in one way or another investigate the processes by which the subject intersects with a wider history. In the autobiographical “Post-Partum Document,” there are the dual subjects of mother and son; in “Interim” the claims and contradictions of the no-longer-young generation of women who came of age in the watershed year of 1968; in “Gloria Patri,” the social construction of masculinity in the context of the Gulf War.
With the “Ballad” Kelly recasts the individual’s ‘entry’ into language and society as a physical journey. Instead of standing in one place and reading a more or less self-contained text before moving on to the next element, the viewer-reader must continually move along as the uninterrupted line of text extends around the space. This discretely theatricalized both the story and the space of the museum, a quality that was further heightened by the role granted to performance within the installation.
On the night of the opening, the “Ballad” was sung to music composed by the minimalist Michael Nyman. The program featured his string quintet and soprano Sarah Leonard. Unspectacular and intimate, the event nevertheless fully animated the complex themes of the installation. By placing her audience within a context of music and rhetoric, balladry and legend, Kelly symbolically inserted them in the larger construction of nationalism promoted elsewhere by the media. Hers is a pertinent tactic at this moment in history, when extreme patriotic fever in our own country continue to attend what has been billed as only the first phase of a permanent war on terrorism.
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Mary Kelly
January 5 – February 2, 2002
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by internationally acclaimed artist Mary Kelly. In the nearly three decades since the exhibition of her seminal work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), Kelly has been making works of rare intelligence, combining narrative with everyday objects, that have become landmarks in the history of conceptual art.
Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be exhibiting selected works from Kelly’s career. Intimate black and white photographs from Primapara, Manicure/Pedicure Series (1974) will be shown alongside large scale projects such as Interim, Part One: Corpus (1984), photo-laminated positives and screenprints on plexiglass, Gloria Patri (1992), a wall-sized installation comprised of 31 units in polished and etched aluminum, and two 20 foot panels from the series, Mea Culpa (1999), each forming a single line of intaglio text in compressed lint culled from the screen of a domestic dryer. In these works, Kelly’s interrogation of language and her interest in the phenomenological process of reading can be appreciated as a long-term refinement of narrative as visual form.
Mary Kelly’s work has been the focus of one-person exhibitions at prominent national and international institutions such as the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Kunstmuseet, Malmö; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Her work has been exhibited in a number of important exhibitions including The American Century, Part II: 1950 – 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the inaugural exhibition of the Tate Modern, London; and the touring exhibitions Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s - 1980s, from the Walker Museum, Minneapolis, and Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75 from the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Kelly’s theoretical writings and project-based art have established themselves as central to the discourse of gender, sexuality and identity formation in contemporary culture. Major publications on and by the artist include Imaging Desire (MIT Press, 1996), Mary Kelly (Phaidon, 1997), Post-Partum Document (Generali Foundation and University of California Press, 1998) and Re-Reading Post-Partum Document (Generali Foundation, 1999).
Open concurrently with the show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be the exhibition Mary Kelly: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, on view from December 11, 2001 through January 20, 2002.
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