metropolis m

We have entered a decade of avant-garde centenaries, each of which will act as a clarion call declaring the energy and fortitude of the past. If many progressive artists have spent recent years trying to unlock the canonizing universalisms implicit to Minimalism et al, others may be learning that to finally move on they must first tackle the even more foundational myths of the early avant-gardes. This process generally proceeds by attempting to re-inscribe these a-historical monoliths in their times, to better understand where they came from and to whom or what they should pay their dues. The young American artist Mary Reid Kelley’s recent New York debut featured two videos combining live action with stop-motion animations. In each work Kelley plays an English woman caught up in the swirl of World War I circa 1915. Kelley’s characters tell their stories in the simple rhyming verse style long a part of popular movements in Britain. Doggerels whose very simplicity allowed them to reach and effect a mass audience for the purpose of memorializing, satirizing or romanticizing a given agenda. The artist cleaves to the form, but upends the content of these texts, using inspired word play that trades in much of the clichés of the time, but dismantles them by surfacing their often sexual or ideologically motivated subtexts. Sadie of Sadie, the Saddest Sadist, 2009 is a self-described ‘modern woman’ who in the course of the 7-minute video gets a job in a munitions factory, and is wooed in song by the handsome sailor Jack (also played by Kelley), who abandons Sadie having passed on his syphilitic sores. Her last lines ‘I’d lie back and think of England, but it’s a mental Trap; I gave you my applause, and you gave me the clap’ address her exploitation by the sailor, but also by the State whose endless patriotic rhetoric constructs women as vital to the war cause, but fails to deliver them the status of citizens, or protect them from the ravages of venereal disease through more effective public policy. Kelley’s world is paired down and simplified, everything is painted a white all-over ground with black providing the sketch-like definition the general effect of which is to flatten the depth of the projected image, emphasizing the two dimensionality of painting. Sadie wears a women’s factory uniform, white make-up, with black mouth and teeth and black ovals over her eyes. The stop-motion animations feature heavy, hand-lettered, sans-serif type like that of Russian Constructivist Rodchenko, which moves across the frame in asymmetrical patterning coming together at times to illustrate the language or contradict it somehow. That Constructivism features so strongly is not a surprise, Sadie’s fundamental identity is as a producer. ‘I do the job of two women.’ She fills shells with shrapnel for the war, and is a fertile repository for the continuation of the race. Her foreman sums up this duality in his double entendre advice, ‘Take a good grip on the means of production, relax and just let your form follow its function.’ While Sadie’s material conditions have more in common with those of a masochist than a sadist, Kelley’s authorial detachment and nous lends a certain malevolent frisson to Sadie’s skewering of male hyperbole and mystification in lines such as ‘I know that you care by these MARX ON MY LENIN’. For The Queens English (2008), the artist plays a nurse wearing period uniform and bulging prosthetic eyes working in a makeshift hospital on the Western Front. Behind her on a painted backdrop injured men in their beds are abstracted into simple geometries redolent of analytic cubism. These shapes, or ‘units’ as the artist calls them, extend to the stop-motion animation where they accumulate and disperse in abstract proletarian accompaniment to the spoken word. In a parody of romantic love, the nurse falls for a dying soldier. Kelley’s earnest delivery is contradicted by the overdetermined fact of rotting flesh, disease and impending death. Observing her ‘true loves’ passing she remarks, ‘The strong and silent type also need their beauty rest.’ Again, a darkly humorous dialectic occurs where the artist’s vision acts in contrast to the genre. F.T. Marinetti’s First Futurist Manifesto of 1909 haunts the works. It embraced the proud march of a still-analogue modernity, announcing ‘scorn for women’ and declaring war ‘the world’s only hygiene’. Before the ‘Great War’, the Suffragists in England, lead by the activist Christabel Pankhurst, were demanding votes for women and chastity for men. By 1914, Pankhurst became a strident supporter of the war effort, her newspaper The Suffragette was renamed Brittania, and the quest for woman’s rights fell before the demands of Nationhood.If the avant-gardes collapsed art into life, then the Suffragist’s radical extra-parliamentary militancy and Pankhurst’s sloganeering had as much in common with the Futurists as with any political organization. This is just to point out that avant-garde histories are imposed upon today as ideologically invested symbols of white male intellectual supremacy, and until people put a little horizontality in their aesthetic-historical narratives, contemporary art will continue to engage in the wrong conversations descending into the wrong arguments. Whether Mary Reid Kelley would make these claims for her work or not, I think Sadie and I might agree. As she calls out to the scurrilous Jack, ‘I’d throw the history book at you, but it’s not written yet.’ Bartholomew Ryan is a Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Mary Reid Kelley’s work can be seen at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects in May and from 24 March through 6 June at the ICA in Philadelphia.