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).
