Mary Kelly, Photo by Aasa Lunden, 2010
It’s a warm Friday in May and American artist Mary Kelly is standing in London’s Pippy Houldsworth gallery ready to discuss art, feminism and political activism. Originally born in Iowa in 1941, she came to London in 1968 to study conceptual art at St. Martins when the city was rocked by student riots.
“Anybody who was alive and able to think during that period was an activist,” she says. “As artists, we thought, ‘How do we bring together what we’re doing, to have other kinds of social aspirations?’ And for us, that had to involve a different kind of content.”
For Kelly, ‘content’ designates feminism. She rose to fame with her installation “Post Partum Document”, first exhibited at the ICA in 1976, in which she documented the first years of her son’s life. “I recognised that there was so little out there that had anything to do with the main thing in a woman’s life, which was taking care of children,” she recalls. “There was absolutely no representation and that needed to be addressed.”
Despite having 40 years of experience as an artist and activist, Kelly remains committed to the principles that spurred her 20s – a fact she relates to her concept of ‘political primal scene’, the idea that an individual’s first encounter with political struggle creates the basis of their political thinking ever after. For her generation, that encounter was WWII.
“Our parents never spoke about it,” she says. “Therefore we thought the war was a testament to the failure of political struggle, and that our struggle was going to be the one that changed everything.”
Today, she believes that the legacy of 1968 functions as our political primary scene, arguing that as we decipher “the many political trajectories of that period,” we enable a reading of the political contemporary, which may explain why political activism is inextricably linked to her practice as an artist. “My work is a moment of reflection on what has happened,” she says.
Recently, her scope has broadened to include acts of political violence, such as 2014’s “Dicere”, which depicts the satellite transmission of a drone target, and 2008’s “My Games”, in which Kelly imagines letters sent from mothers to the American civil rights activists who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
As in her earlier pieces, she uses narrative to connect past and present while providing space for neglected voices. “It’s not the same as making a campaign film,” she says. “A work of art can’t be engaged in that way but you can make that interaction a medium.”
Today, Kelly is cautious to predict a primal scene for the 21st century: the importance of 9/11 was “perhaps overblown” though with the current situation in the Middle East it could prove to be significant. Such theorising is interesting, but has her engagement with art and politics over the last four decades furnished her with the solution for the world’s problems?
“Unless we have a project, or a vision, capital will continue to tell us what to do,” she concludes. “You need a vision. You need a project.”
This feature is taken from Sleek issue #47, which can be purchased on our online shop today