| Matilde Digmann: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I would like to start by asking you about the title of the work Love Songs? How does it correspond to the content and expression of the work? Mary Kelly: Well, the title is kind of unusual for me: in the past I’ve always had Latin titles. I try to suggest some kind of meta-language—something that is not commonly in use. The title Love Songs was a very intuitive thing that has to do with the way the project began: I worked with a generation of women who were born around 1968 and were intensely curious about what happened at that time. |
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Matilde Digmann talks to Mary Kelly
Matilde Digmann: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I would like to start by asking you about the title of the work Love Songs? How does it correspond to the content and expression of the work?
Mary Kelly: Well, the title is kind of unusual for me: in the past I’ve always had Latin titles. I try to suggest some kind of meta-language—something that is not commonly in use. The title Love Songs was a very intuitive thing that has to do with the way the project began: I worked with a generation of women who were born around 1968 and were intensely curious about what happened at that time. What I’m addressing in the piece is a renewed sense of collective sentiment that seems reminiscent of that moment. The title also has a humorous element to it—for some of the works, I use remix like they do in music: they’re events that are remixed. Obviously I don’t mean this in a nostalgic way, not going back to the past, but more like a playful replay in the present.
MD: One level of my experience with Love Songs was a feeling of shifting back and forth between my understanding of and associations with the imagery, space, and text. When and why did you start to work with giving physical form to complex language-based narratives?
MK: Well, thinking about space and thinking about narratives goes way back to the very beginning of my work in the 70s when I was involved with film. I wanted to do an installation that resembled film in the way it drew the spectator in, that had a diegetic aspect to it. I tried to combine this with the materiality of the work—thinking about affect, for example, the kind of thing that light or lint is able to provoke emotionally. I think it’s unusual to bring those two things together in a work. Narratives can overwhelm the other formal elements; overwhelm materiality. But I always try to keep a tension between those two things. When Deleuze wrote about cinema one and cinema two, he described one as narrative and diegetic and the other as delayed and avant-garde: this is what I tried to pull together in the form of an installation. I was very motivated to do something that cinema could do—in an installation: I wanted to combine film with a medium that is fundamentally still; to see what I could bring to that, say, if you look at The Ballad of Kastroit Rexhepi, a 200-foot work that wraps around the gallery like a 360-degree pan, you’re in motion, but the overall feeling is very contemplative.
MD: In my experience of The Ballad of Kastroit Rexhepi I really felt that I was able to ‘get’ something from both reading and not reading it…
MK: That’s very much the way I would like it to be.
MD: What is your specific interest in language, words, and the way they both reflect and create our culture?
MK: Well, language is culture, right? In the widest sense—not only the written and spoken language, but also looking at it in the semiotic sense—the symbolic order of culture as well as how we enter into that order. The way language is written and spoken is the most obvious manifestation of that entry, but there are so many other things that have to do with gestures, silences, and exchanges that are formative. I started thinking about this more in my recent work—not just the way you become a gendered subject in language, but the way your ethnicity, history, and social position is also passed on at a very early moment. I found that, generally, those who show the most interest in the events of 1968 were born around that time. And I started to see this as something similar to Freud’s notion of the primal scene—but I call it the “political primal scene”: It might have been what their parents said or did or even didn’t say—somehow the child picks up, and interprets, parental aspirations and desires at that moment. I’m reworking some of the things I addressed early on, but in the broader context of a cultural community. I’m intrigued by questions that Freud always went back to, but was a bit suspicious of: what he called the “phylogenetic heresy”: can you pass on things, unconsciously, that have a collective or historical resonance? So it is about the interface between individual constitution or subjectivity and social imposition. And that has to do with the impact of an event, not only as a traumatic incident—if you take something like 1968 or World War II, which are over-determined moments in history—I think they resonate, not in a conventional sense of generations, but they resonate for many years on all sides, as moments when consciousness changed.
MD: I am very interested in the way you juxtapose words and shapes, spaces, and images to create not only a bodily but also a visual, emotional, and intellectual experience; how do you perceive the interplay between the four works that comprise Love Songs?
MK: What you said about the combination of a bodily and an intellectual experience is crucial. That’s why I make art. When I give a longer answer, like I did just now, I always feel, well, that’s one way of saying it, but there is a different way of experiencing it in the installation—where there is nothing other than the light that emanates from the work itself, drawing you into it: and the four distinct pieces that are part of Love Songs all share that property. If you look at the Multi-Story House, which I did in collaboration with my partner Ray Barrie, it’s obviously an assisted ready-made, a standard greenhouse structure reworked. I was looking for some sort of domestic space or interior—something different from public space, different from the street or a demonstration like the head-on view in the work Sisterhood is POW. In Multi-Story House I put conversations and fragments of speech from a younger generation of women on the outside—and you have to go inside to read the stories that are from my generation. I didn’t set out to do a documentary and then interview people. The idea for the piece came from more random encounters. Actually, all the material I work with is from my own life in a sense; it’s the everyday, in terms of material, and that material includes language and speech. People of my generation would say that the women’s movement was like a lightening bolt—everything was different after that, while the younger ones, who really inspired the work, were saying things like: “oh, everything was so clear then,” or “we missed something.” What seems significant to me when I look at it retrospectively is that my moment is so Euro-centrist, but the voices that are inscribed on the outer walls are incredibly diverse—this wasn’t premeditated; but, in fact, it accurately reflects the present moment of diasporas and globalization. So the impact of feminism is completely unique to those situations—they say things like “second wave, third wave, I went through puberty in Saudi Arabia. There wasn’t even a first wave yet." Or, “I grew up dodging bullets in Angola, so the term feminist didn’t mean much." But you have to see this as a structure…did you go inside the house?
MD: Yes, and personally, being inside Multi-Story House felt like being heard and understood and enlightened—the house in Love Songs is very warm due to the light but also very bright: it is not a comforting light—and in this way it was a very complex experience….
MK: I don’t even want to try to explain that—it would just ruin it. What you said is perfect. If it can do that: great.
MD: Your work has been called complex—to me, part of the complexity of the piece is the fact that it both hit me in the gut and got me thinking—and in my view only very few artworks have this effect. How do you balance the intellectual and the emotional aspects in your work?
MK: That’s difficult. There is no formula, but no matter what piece I’m working on, I’m not happy till I’ve got that, whatever it takes. I really want that sense of distance. And that’s why I panicked when I saw the salmon pink room at Documenta. I thought, “Oh my god, the room is going to overwhelm it, make it much more sensational or nostalgic.” But I think it held it’s own in there all right, and I wanted to be a part of what the curators were trying to do, so I didn’t insist on having it painted white, even though I don’t usually use color.
MD: A lot of “feminist art” risks being, or being perceived as, self-indulgent nostalgia, or as either romantic or aggressive. Yet, your work seems to keep a distance, there is something cold and serious about it. How do you feel about other feminist art?
MK: Well, there is a very large exhibition called WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution, that originated at MOCA in Los Angeles and is now touring—and this is the context in which feminist art is being reviewed. But I think there is a certain loss of historical detail, the diversity of what was going on then, because the exhibition creates more of a unified, overall aesthetic—it doesn’t show for instance, that artists like me, Adrian Piper, and Martha Rosler had something in common: that it wasn’t like either Judith Chicago or the realist painters of that time. Or, that Yvonne Rainer’s work came out of yet another context. That we came out of different things—from painting and sculpture to performance and conceptual art—points to the fact that everyone was challenging the dominant paradigm. And if you compare it with work by men who were prominent then, you understand the impact feminism had on the whole field. But if you isolate it from that, and put it together as something alternative, it tends to undermine a more significant history. I don’t see the differences in art informed by feminism as antagonistic: it’s not something against something else. I’m much more interested in the way all these tendencies like conceptualism, performance, and others were historically challenged by women at that time and how it contributed to all of the work that followed.
MD: Where does your interest in historical aspects of the feminist movement come from —and what is your particular interest in the 1971 protest against the Miss World contest in London?
MK: I was involved in that protest in London in 1971, so it’s based on that. But what interested me was how one kind of spectacle was countered with another that came out of the Situationists’ work, which had reached a peak of influence by then. I mean, the way street theaters, like the flashing nipple street theater that the photographs are based on, had another aspect to them, which was not so much about entertainment but about celebrating the action itself, about being together.
So what I am trying to get at in the story, and by remaking the photographs of the flashing nipple theatre, is the thing that’s left, after the event is over. After the specific demand is forgotten, the memory of the pleasure, rather than anger, seems to persist in a collective sense. It’s very ecstatic in a way. And I’m not trying to valorize it in the sense that every fanaticism has that ecstatic aspect to it. What is different about the women’s movement, though, is that it always avoided the imposition of a hierarchy—it never became like other fundamentalisms. In this respect, it was even quite different from the male dominated left. With the photographs, I was trying to convey the immediacy of this moment, and actually the Situationist thing interested me so much that I tried to do a real happening at the opening of Documenta. I didn’t advertise it, but gave instructions to a group of 100 women from Kassel, who were all born around 1968—and gave them bicycle lights to put on their tits and crotches. At 11 o’clock we turned all the lights in the Bergpark off and the women came out, congregated on the hill, converged at the pond, and then rushed towards the spectators to form a big circle around the crowd. They told me that some of the men, who got caught in it, turned and said, “oh shit!” in German. Many of them told me it was very empowering, and pleasurable, to be a part of it. And when unexpected things happened—women in the audience started cheering, spectators joined in, it was raining—it had the effect of making the ordinary seem strange and ephemeral. It was just there, and then it was gone.
If you look at the projected image—which is a re-enactment of the protest in New York in 1970, on the 50th anniversary of the 19th amendment (women’s right to vote)—they are holding up a placard. And I’ve changed the words from “unite for women’s emancipation” to “from stone to cloud”, which is a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath—which links back to your first question about Love Songs because it’s describing the transformation that happens in love. I think she’s referring to her child, but I’m describing it from one generation of women to another: In the poem Love Letter she writes:
Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.
MD: Another thing that is interesting to me is the fact that your works very much deal with issues in “real” life, history and gender as opposed to art that mostly deals with the concept of art itself—how do you perceive your mission as an artist, if you have one?
MK: Well, I wouldn’t say I have a mission, but I’d make a distinction between art as entertainment and art as knowledge: it would be arrogant to say you can guarantee this, and it would also be unrealistic to say that we’re not part of the entertainment industry, because we’re “what’s on” at a certain time, place, and so on, but all of my work is project-based, so for me it is driven by questions. They come out of everyday situations, but are also related to what I think of as a discursive site: questions that people hold in common. This establishes a particular audience that’s engaged with the work. And I don’t know if it’s possible, but I like to hope that it can have an impact on a wider audience, one that’s not part of the discursive site. What you said before: that you can still get it without reading anything—I’m hoping it works for a lot of other people in that way—emotionally. Because emotions are also a form of knowledge.
