DAICH, Deborah. Tras las huellas de Ruth Mary Kelly (2019). Feminismos y prostitución en la Buenos Aires del siglo XX. Buenos Aires, Biblos, 200 pp.

DAICH, Deborah. Tras las huellas de Ruth Mary Kelly (2019). Feminismos y prostitución en la Buenos Aires del siglo XX. Buenos Aires, Biblos, 200 pp.

Petra Bauer and SCOT-PEP’s ‘Workers!’: renewing the aesthetics and politics of 1970s feminism

This article explores the film and research project Workers!, by the Swedish artist Petra Bauer and Scot-Pep – a Scottish sex worker collective. The film is set in the soon to be demolished Scottish Union HQ, and the film places sex work in relation to the labour movements of the twentieth century, using strategies of 1970s film and visual art, such as Mary Kelly and Chantal Akerman. It also makes links to the Suffragist movement and feminist collective actions.

Concentric Pedagogy: Toward an ethics of the Observer

Critical pedagogies have been informed by feminism since the 1970s, but artist Mary Kelly considers what this means as a tactic rather than a specific content. Focusing on one of the central curricular components of studio art in an institutional context, the critique, she argues that the work of art is a visual proposition, legible on its own terms, and that the artist's verbal defense does not necessarily give him/her a voice. Instead, the process of deciphering must begin with looking and understanding this as a form of listening to the artist through the work. Moreover, Kelly suggests that not to do so is, in some sense, unethical.

The ‘Uncertainty of Our Climate’: Mary Kelly and the Rural Theatre

Andrew Walker examines playwright Mary Kelly’s writings on village theatre and her production of agrarian pageantry for purposes of expanding notions of the genres and cultural impacts of rural modernity. Kelly, best known as the model for Miss La Trobe in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, enjoyed success as a director of rural theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. This led to two influential books on rural arts, How to Make a Pageant (1936) and Village Theatre (1939). Envisioning the theatre as an outgrowth of folk religion and mythology grounded in agricultural and fertility ritual—a vision taken up to great effect by T. S. Eliot—Kelly advocated a theatre run by and on behalf of rural performers, producers, and audience. This chapter looks at her development of these ideas in print and practice as a way of examining interwar rural dramatic production writ large.

Conclusion

The conclusion foregrounds the claim that the artists whose artwork is the focus of Addressing the other woman – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. The conclusion also underscores that this artwork not only attests to the attention women artists paid to visual and textual appearance language in the late 1960s and 1970s, but also suggests feminism’s wide and rich historical impact. The writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey help to highlight this impact, as they provide detailed historical frames for seeing the artwork’s interventions. Pointing to the work of psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell and feminism’s struggles against the longevity of patriarchy, this last chapter argues that the artists’ and writers’ shared attention to language underscores the possibility and difficulty of reconfiguring the sign woman in the linguistic structure of the patriarchal unconscious..

Addressing the other woman

This book analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists used text and images of writing to challenge female stereotypes, addressing viewers and asking them to participate in the project of imagining women beyond familiar words and images of subordination. The book explores this dimension of their work through the concept of ‘the other woman,’ a utopian wish to reach women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To make the artwork’s aspirations more concrete, it places the artists in correspondence with three writers – Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey – who also addressed the limited range of images through which women are allowed to become visible.