Mary Kelly - Post-Partum Document:
Documentations I-III at ICA, London (1976)
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A proportion of Feminist artists and critics continue to believe that Mary Kelly’s art is too complex and cerebral for the vast majority of women to understand and that therefore it is only appreciated by a small, educated elite. Kelly’s response to this criticism is to deny that there is any homogeneous mass audience for an artist to address: “You can’t make art for everyone.” She sees her audience as quite specific, that is, “the Women’s Movement, other women artists and people generally interested in the issue of patriarchy”.
Another charge levelled at Mary Kelly’s work— and Conceptual art in general— is that it lacks visual and tactile appeal. For instance, in 1979 the critic Peter Fuller dismissed Post-Partum Document as “obsessive, aesthetically dead, forensic ramblings”. Some years later Edward Lucie-Smith remarked: “Its aesthetic content, in any conventional sense of the term, is almost nil.” Her supporters, however, argue that it does have aesthetic qualities but that they are subtle ones compared to those found in a brightly coloured painting. (Long-established art forms such as painting and sculpture were deliberately rejected by some Feminist artists in the 1970s because of their historical and msculine connotations.)
Mary Kelly herself told Terence Maloon: “The formal qualities of typed script are very important, as well as the internal construction of the document.” As far as she was concerned, the items on display in the ICA were fetish objects which had displaced the mother’s fetishisation of the child. She added: “It’s almost comical in that the value of the objects is minimal in any commercial sense, yet their affective value... is maximum for me.” She has also stated: “For me it’s absolutely crucial that this kind of pleasure in the text, in the objects themselves, should engage the viewer, because there’s no point at which it can become a deconstructed critical engagement if the viewer is not first... drawn into the work.”
Whatever one’s opinion is regarding the aesthetic qualities of Post-Partum Document, it was a challenging intellectual exhibit that subsequently proved to be highly influential within Feminist circles. The sheer quantity of commentary it has generated is surely proof of its significance. Mary Kelly’s ICA show did not deserve to be trivialised by the popular press as simply a display of “dirty nappies”. Yet again it was the unusual material presented by a radical artist which distrubed those suspicious of all new developments in fine art. The presence of the nappy-liners provided them with an excuse not to engage with the substance of the Post-Partum Document exhibit and the important social issues that it raised.
Notes:
> Mary Kelly. Footnotes and Bibliography, Post-Partum Document. (London: ICA, 1976).
> Roger Bray. “On Show at ICA ... dirty nappies!”, Evening Standard, (14 October 1976).
> F. Robertson. “Soiled Nappies ‘Are Art’”. Daily Telegraph, (15
October 1976).
> Jane Kelly. “Mary Kelly”. Studio International, 193 / 985,
(January/February 1977), pp. 55-6.
> Jane Kelly. “Mary Kelly”. Studio International, 193 / 987, (March 1977), pp. 186-8.
> Terence Maloon. “Mary Kelly” (Interview). Artscribe, 13, (August 1978), pp. 16-19.
> Peter Fuller. Beyond the Crisis in Art. (London: Writers & Readers, 1980), p. 165.
> Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
> Hilary Robinson (Ed.). Visibly Female: Feminism and Art: An Anthology. (London: Camden Press, 1987), (reprints Spare Rib articles from three issues 1976-77), pp. 100-5.
> Mara R. Witzling (Ed.). Voicing Today’s Visions: Writings by
Contemporary Women Artists. (London: The Women’s Press, 1994),
pp. 198-219.
> Edward Lucie-Smith. Art Today (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).
> Mary Kelly. Imaging Desire. (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996).
> Margaret Iverson & others. Mary Kelly. (London: Phaidon Press, 1997).
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