Picking a gender
Jerry Kamecki: Can you describe the atmosphere surrounding your best-known piece Post Partum Document?
Mary Kelly: There was total outrage. Every English newspaper had headlines on the scandal of the dirty diapers. It was a problem of 'what is art?', with my quote as caption, "It's art because I say so." (laughter)
JK: Are you telling us something through your art?
MK: The difference between art and other academic areas is that when you do academic research, they want answers and arguments. In art, you're not actually giving answers in the same way, but it's very important to ask the questions.
JK: What role does narration play in your work?
MK: One has to do with words as a medium - I'm not using them literally, as words to be read for meaning, I'm trying to find a material way for them to be experienced as objects. That's why we call the show "Words are Things." The piece made of dryer screen lint [Mea Culpa] is a good example. News about mass killings and war crimes filter into your everyday life - like lint - while you're doing other things, like washing clothes and producing lint. So, that was so direct! I also look for a story that unfolds, like diegesis in film. With Mea Culpa, here in Warsaw, the lint units are in groups of four in a panel, kind of like 4:4 time - you don't see everything at once, you just walk along and it unfolds as well as having a certain narrative rhythm.
JK: If you could choose your gender what would you choose?
MK: Oooh, interesting question! I would not want to fix it in that way to say: who is a man and who is a woman. On the other hand, I do like women, and the women's movement made me very happy to be a woman. Interestingly, I have students I absolutely adore that are in the queer/trans movement who do things we could never even have dreamed of with gender. It is a cross between the two; it's hard to put your finger on exactly what it is, but I don't think queerness necessarily wants to change a woman into a man. They want to find some third term. An incredible question!
JK: Why are you interested in women in art? Is all your art about women?
MK: The way these two things came together is history, that is, being a conceptual artist and being informed by feminism. I felt faithful to what happened then and carried on with it. I have done work about other things, like the Gulf War. But it connects in the end, because it's about how that war affected women. For example, did feminists do all that work just so women could be in the military and go to the front to kill people?
Mary Kelly's exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, "Words are Things," is a review of the artist's work ranging from the mid-80s through the present. It is on view through June 8.
