Mary Kelly
1-6) Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984-85
(detail, Menacé)
Laminated photo positive,
Silkscreen, acrylic on Plexiglas
Each pictured is 1 of 30 panels,
90 x 122.5 cm each
7) Interim: Corpus, Preliminary Artwork, 1984, Detail
8-9) Interim, 1984 – 89
Installation View
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1990
“INTERIM examines the woman-as-subject as she enters middle age, a time when her
increasing invisibility and powerlessness in the masculine world may lead her to
experience vividly her own “constructedness.” Conspicuously absent in most
novels, films, and ads, the older woman is not considered sexy because she’s no
longer seen to be a useful measure of a man’s potency. Because power accrues to a
woman in a patriarchy by virtue of her body’s procreative capacities and its potential
for fetishization, the aging or aged female body becomes a relic, a site of loss. For
1 Kelly, this loss of power lodged in the body renders transparent the economic,
political, and cultural conditions that deprive a woman of power-the very
conditions which simultaneously keep her from her own subjectivity.
Weaving together divergent positions of relative distance and closeness, neutrality
and engagement, fact and fantasy, from both a personal and political perspective,
Kelly explores the relational aspects of subjectivity and objectivity. To achieve this,
the “voice” used in INTERIM is necessarily disjunctive and multiple, a densely
textured melange of different tones, different times, different positions. Structured
on Brechtian principles, INTERIM is full of visual and linguistic interruptions that
radically challenge the seamless nature and unitary terms of so much traditional
arrmaking. To structure a piece with the device of interruption is to produce a work
punctuated with frozen gestures; without narrative continuity, discrete moments
collide. As Walter Benjamin observed, an audience, deprived of traditional linear
narrative, experiences not the usual empathy-the cathartic emotional release that
results from an identification with the characters-but “[astonishment] at the
circumstances under which they function.” 1 To this end, Brecht’s epic theatre offers
“the representation of conditions rather than the development of actions.” 2
So does Kelly’s INTERIM. As the work makes clear, it is the representation of
conditions that defines women’s subjectivity. For three years before she began to
give form to the project, Kelly kept a notebook-an archive, as she calls it-in
which she recorded conversations she had overheard or engaged in with women who
were responsible for launching, or had been affected by, the second wave of
feminism-the women, in other words, of 1968. Arranging her notes in various
forms, she offers us the opportunity to hear these women as they explore their
experiences as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters, most of them from the
vantage of middle age. In the process, we discover that we too are being encouraged
to search and research our own histories and responses, an engagement which
creates both a new definition of authorial power and a sense of pleasure in the
interchange of subjectivities. As for Kelly’s own subjectivity, the issues investigated
in the work are clearly indicative of her own interests and experience, though
INTERIM is not specifically autobiographical.
Mary Kelly began the work in 1983 while she was living in London. She isolated
the themes which figured dominantly in the collected conversations and used them
to organize the project into four sections:
Parr I, Corpus [the body], pairs images and narrative panels on reflective
plexiglass (white on black, with phrases and parts of the images picked out in red),
in an arrangement of five groups, three pairs to a group. Each takes its title-
“Menace,” “Appel,” “Supplication,” “Erotisme,” and “Extase” -from the nineteenth-century
French neuropathologist J.M. Charcot’s attitudes passionelles, his
classification of the hallucinatory phase of hysteria. The texts are hand-written,
first-person accounts which explore how older women experience the body shaped
socially and psychically by the discourses of popular medicine, fashion, and romantic fiction”
–New Museum
Little Bristling Soul 