Mary Kelly at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1976)
Excerpt from Art & Outrage (1999) featuring Mary Kelly and the ICA exhibition Post-Partum Document: Documentations I-III.
Mary Kelly - 1976: Can dirty nappies be art?
At the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London an exhibition by the Feminist artist Mary Kelly in 1976 was scorned by tabloid journalists because it included some stained nappy-liners.
Mary Kelly is an American-born, Conceptual and Feminist artist, theorist and teacher now resident in the United States, who lived in Britain for over 20 years. She was born in Minneapolis in 1941 and studied at the College of St Teresa, Winona, Minnesota, where she graduated in 1963. After completing an MA in art at the Pius 12th Institute in Florence, she taught at the American University in Beirut from 1965 to 1968, and undertook further postgraduate study at St Martin’s School if Art in London from 1968 to 1970. She then married the English artist Ray Barrie and they had a son in 1973 whom she named Kelly. Mary Kelly taught at Goldsmiths College in South London for a time but returned to the United States in 1987. From 1989 Kelly was director of Studio and Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. Then, in 1996, she was appointed chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mary Kelly says that being in London in the 1970s, at the start of the Women’s Movement, was one of the happiest times of her life. She became involved with the Berwick Street Film Collective, which made a documentary about women’s labour entitled Night Cleaners (1975), and she helped to organise the exhibition Women and Work (South London Gallery, May 1975). She also chaired meetings of the newly founded Artists’ Union. During these years she was concerned with the contribution of women to the reproduction of society, their economic condition, the division of labour between the two genders, women’s multiple responsibilities as workers outside and inside the home, their roles as lovers, wives and mothers. However, as a result of the publication of articles in the film journal Screen and Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), Mary Kelly’s attention turned to the psychic dimension, the role of the unconscious and women’s internalisation of patriarchal ideology.
Mary Kelly’s offending exhibition, held in the New Gallery of the ICA, Nash House (near Buckingham Palace), in October 1976, was entitled Post-Partum Document: Documentations I-III. At the time Ted Little was the ICA’s director and Barry Barker was in charge of exhibitions. The show was an interim report about a long-term project which began with the birth of her son in 1973 and was completed six years later when he entered primary school. The final work consisted of 135 individual units organised into six sections. A summation in book form was later published in 1983.
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