Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history.
When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation-an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader broader discourse of art and social purpose in the early 1970s. Throughout, the collection addresses such themes as labor, war, trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with histories of feminism and generations of feminists.
The contributions also consider such specific works as Kelly's Interim (1984-1989), the subject of a special issue of October; Gloria Patri (1992), an installation conceived in response to the first Gulf War; The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), an extensive project including a 200-foot narrative executed in the medium of compressed lint and the performance of a musical score by Michael Nyman; and two recent works, Love Songs (2005-2007), which explores the role of memory in feminist politics, and Mimus (2012), a triptych that parodies the House Un-American Activities Committee's 1962 investigation of the pacifist group, Women Strike for Peace.
Essays and Interviews by
Parveen Adams, Emily Apter, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Mary Kelly, Helen Molesworth, Laura Mulvey, Mignon Nixon, Griselda Pollock, Paul Smith
Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history.
When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation-an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader broader discourse of art and social purpose in the early 1970s. Throughout, the collection addresses such themes as labor, war, trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with histories of feminism and generations of feminists.
The contributions also consider such specific works as Kelly's Interim (1984-1989), the subject of a special issue of October; Gloria Patri (1992), an installation conceived in response to the first Gulf War; The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), an extensive project including a 200-foot narrative executed in the medium of compressed lint and the performance of a musical score by Michael Nyman; and two recent works, Love Songs (2005-2007), which explores the role of memory in feminist politics, and Mimus (2012), a triptych that parodies the House Un-American Activities Committee's 1962 investigation of the pacifist group, Women Strike for Peace.
Essays and Interviews by
Parveen Adams, Emily Apter, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Mary Kelly, Helen Molesworth, Laura Mulvey, Mignon Nixon, Griselda Pollock, Paul Smith
Mignon Nixon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at
University College London and an editor of October magazine. She is
the author of Fantastic Reality- Louise Bourgeois and a Story of
Modern Art and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Eva
Hesse (both published by the MIT Press).
Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator at the Institute for Contemporary
Art, Boston. She edited Louise Lawler's Twice Untitled and Other
Pictures (looking back), published by the Wexner Center for the
Arts and distributed by the MIT Press.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck
College, University of London. She was Director of Birkbeck
Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She is the
author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989 and 2nd ed., 2009),
Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992), and Death
Twenty-Four Times A Second- Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).
She has co-edited British Experimental Television (2007), Feminisms
(2015), and Other Cinemas- Politics, Culture and British
Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). She made six films in
collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx
(British Film Institute 1977; DVD publication 2013), and two films
with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology
at Princeton University and the author of Prosthetic Gods (MIT
Press) and other books.
Parveen Adams teaches in the Human Sciences Department of Brunei
University, England.
Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at
New York University. She is the editor of a book series,
"Translation/ Transnation," published by Princeton University Press
and is completing a book on the politics of translation. Her recent
book, Continental Drift- From National Characters to Virtual
Subjects was published in 1999 (Chicago University Press).
Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History and Theory at the
University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl- Art History and
Theory and Beyond Pleasure- Freud, Lacan, Barthes.
Mignon Nixon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at
University College London and an editor of October magazine. She is
the author of Fantastic Reality- Louise Bourgeois and a Story of
Modern Art and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Eva
Hesse (both published by the MIT Press).
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