![]() ![]() At a time when many conceptual artists were focused on violence and transgression - Chris Burden dragging his half-naked body across a parking lot strewn with glass Paul McCarthy smearing himself with paint, ketchup, mayonnaise, raw meat and feces - Kelly’s early work was almost understated and excruciatingly intimate, with an emphasis on motherhood, pregnancy and reproductive sexuality. Though she was known as a socialist who tried to unionize artists alongside factory workers, and as a boundary pusher who brought feminism to the testosterone-driven realm of conceptual art, arguably the most radical aspect of her work, especially in its early years, was its insistence that maternity and domesticity were worthy subjects of serious creative expression. KELLY FIRST CAME to prominence in the 1970s with a practice that was both highly conceptual and unapologetically political. “The older I get, and the more we recognize the huge crises like climate change,” she said, “the more I see this as just a very brief period of time.” She considers history in context, describing incremental change on a geological scale. But Kelly herself is not despairing - she noted that she never could have predicted the #MeToo movement, either. “What’s left?” The rollback of abortion protections is something she never could have imagined after the gains of the 1970s, and the attack on reproductive freedoms horrifies her. “Since so many of the demands have not been met, what is the legacy?” she asked calmly. As she laid out plates of snacks and poured small glasses of chardonnay - it is a “feminist imperative,” she said, to embrace pleasure - she told me that the impacts of the women’s movement, the enduring theme of her work for more than half a century, had been on her mind. Now 81, she was soft-spoken and poised, her hair swept into an elegant updo. Wade, Kelly and I sat in her Los Angeles backyard at a table overlooking the pool where she swims laps. This past August, two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. They “thought it was amazing that we could ever have asked for free child care for all, or abortion on demand,” Kelly said, “because that still was not realized.” The young women who participated in the restagings almost two decades ago had similar reactions. Looking at them today, it’s hard not to see them as akin to a memorial, ghostly images of a movement whose record of accomplishments seems, at this moment in history, to be fading. Kelly’s photos of “Flashing Nipple Remix” (2005) are now on display at the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., through Dec. It’s a moment Kelly has returned to repeatedly in her work, including for “Documenta 12” in 2007, when a hundred women, their torsos illuminated, charged through a German park en masse after dark. In 1970, Kelly and a group of fellow activists had disrupted the Miss World Contest in London - which they decried for its objectification of women - by setting off flour bombs, shooting water pistols and dancing, some of them adorned with bright, flashing bulbs. The time-exposed photographs were taken by the artist Mary Kelly in 2005, capturing a re-enactment she staged of a long-ago feminist protest. In the third, their bodies seem to mesh, dissolving into a radiant cloud. ![]() In the second image, the women, now dancing, morph into whorls of light reminiscent of Christmas trees. THE FIRST PHOTO shows five young women, lights attached to their breasts and crotches, posed defiantly in the dark. ![]()
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