Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Image by Alexander Coggin
It’s not often that artists are inspired by a combination of Ancient Rome, Victorian literature and Nicki Minaj. Yet American artists Mary Reid Kelley and her husband Patrick Kelley deftly blend these range of influences to create films that are witty, dark and striking. Between 2013 and 2015 the duo created the rich, poetry- based world of “The Minotaur Trilogy”, and their most recent film, “This is Offal” won the Baloise Prize at this year’s Art Basel, while Mary just got awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant”. Intrigued by their weird collection of inspirations, SLEEK tracked the duo down during a performance of this award-winning show at the Berliner Festspiele, and asked them how they come up with their punny titles.
SLEEK: Your work is clearly influenced by many different things. How do you choose which ones to begin with?
Mary Reid Kelley: They often come out of an unresolved issue in one of previous works. The theme of This is Offal is suicide, which was also a present in The Minotaur Trilogy, itself based upon the myth of the Minotaur from antiquity. There are many different versions of this story, but the one I found the most plausible was the one in which Ariadne hangs herself after she wakes up in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. At the time I was interested in family disappointment and the delusions of sex and love, and it became the seed for This is Offal, a consideration of female suicide in literature.
It seems to be somewhat of a theme: Jocasta and Antigone in the myth of Oedipus, and Ophelia in Hamlet.
Mary: Yes, and the Minotaur myth brought me back to “The Bridge of Sighs” by Thomas Hood [a 19th century English poet and humourist].
Mary Reid Kelley. Backstage before performance, Berliner Festspiele, 2016. Image by Alexander Coggin
Is he the reason for all the word plays in your titles like “You Make Me Iliad” and “Sadie the Saddest Sadist”?
Mary: Hood was a comic genius who wrote brilliant poems with extremely macabre puns. In this poem he’s addressing London, asking the city what it’s done to this young woman who has jumped off a bridge.
Patrick: And, of course, the woman is mute…
Mary: Which is a recurring trope in 19th century literature. Poe believed that the death of a young, beautiful woman was the best subject for poetry, so I wanted to create a counterpoint to this where the woman comes back and isn’t silenced by men. Being silent is the ultimate in decorum, but in This is Offal, the female protagonist is rude, vain, and a show off – but she’s also speaking for herself.
Last year your “The Thong of Dionysus” video and exhibition for Fredericks & Feiser in New York included allusions to rap and R&B stars as well as a portrait of Nicki Minaj. What power does pop culture hold over your work?
Mary: Up until The Minotaur Trilogy our works were historically situated in particular eras, then we moved to Rome. Over the centuries the Romans were constantly recycling bits of architecture for other projects, and there’s a word for it, spolia. That’s what led to the integration of pop culture in our work.
Patrick: At that point we had already been thinking in terms of pop culture. In the trilogy, we decided that in mashing-up different time periods, we would include our own. It was the first time we mixed references to visual periods in a way that was similar to what Mary does in her poems.
Despite its provenance, spolia seems comparable to the modern notion of intertextuality. Did you encounter any other concepts in Rome that prefigure other contemporary notions?
Mary: We also picked up on the idea of the mythological being as something authorless. We were interested in the popularity of the Minotaur as a classical being, from the Middle Ages to Picasso. And then I had this idea when I was thinking about the Minotaur’s mother, Pasiphaë, it prompted me to consider how literal classical literature can be. How do you get a half-man, half-bull? Well, a lady fucks a bull. But it’s also a story of how evil enters the world. Pasiphaë is an image for uncontrollable female desire and the story of the Minotaur is about its severe consequences. It made me think, ‘Who is this woman with her powerful, aggressive female sexuality?’ It’s the California babe, Bo Derek, Pamela Anderson – an idealisation of femaleness.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Image by Alexander Coggin
Current Exhibitions:
Kunsthalle Bremen
10 September 2016 to 19 February 2017
“A Marquee Piece of Sod”
The WWI films of Mary Reid Kelley
Accompanying Exhibition:
10 September 2016 to 15 January 2017
“And then a Plank in Reason, broke”
Prints and drawings about WWI selected by Mary Reid Kelley
M – Museum Leuven, Belgium
29 September 2016 to 8 January 2017
Solo exhibition
Portraits: Alexander Coggin
Taken from SLEEK 51