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MK: My early work has always been present. I feel like I never really left it—particularly Post-Partum Document [the shit-smeared nappy one]. Feminism made everything I did from Post-Partum Document very consistent; I was working from what I call my discursive psyche. Asking the same questions I've been asking since I joined the Women's Movement—the same questions that were being asked in lots of different fields. There is a logic to the work after that.You studied at St. Martins, your husband's British, and you show a lot in the UK. Do you think there is a particularly British attitude to conceptual art?
London was absolutely formative for me. Not least because I was very young. Everything was happening then. Everything was on fire. Art schools were being occupied, people were smoking pot and discussing big ideas. There were also some very progressive people at St. Martins when I was there: Gilbert and George, Richard Long, and my partner Ray Barrie. I was a painter but I hung out with the sculptors, a lot of whom went into film and photography. That was, I suppose, the English route.
Oh it was euphoric. We did a live piece with 100 women at the opening of Documenta. As with all happenings, we didn't announce it so people were very surprised when we started. I wanted to do something that had been done in the past—the protest at the Albert Hall during the Miss World contest. Doing it again, I was trying to ask—what's passed on from one generation to the next? And the work sort of answered the question for me. Much has been forgotten, but the pleasure of women being together was so intense. That's what I remember from the past and I could see at the event. They were happy. In that moment.
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Yes. Nightcleaners was the first very politically engaged work that I had been involved in. It brought up all those issues you see in my other pieces—those women were doing this work because they had children. They couldn't work in the day because they had to look after their children, but they didn't have enough money without working. So they had to work at night. It's what we called the social sexual division of labor.There are so many lovely moments in that film. One that particularly stands out to me, but that people tend to miss, is when they're in the pub, talking to the trade union organizer. There's music in the background and at a certain point you see this woman just bobbing her head to the music. I remember being there and feeling that we were all just women, the trade union guy was boring us and we all just wanted to dance. They were all so much younger than they looked. Life had worn them out.
It was a shockingly different world but not the one you know today. It was a very cosmopolitan place when I was there from 1964-68. It was still very patriarchal and a little like the structure of Ancient Greece, with women cooking and taking care of the children and men out in the world. But people were so knowledgeable, so highly educated. They were probably better informed than people in England were in those days. It was a very internationally well-connected place.
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Oh, it's absolutely a women's question to ask about war. The consequences for children are unimaginable. But war also makes you think about difference that isn't based on gender; ethnicity, race, and how those things are so formative in those first few moments of life. That was a logical question for me to ask in The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi [in which Kelly typed onto compressed lint, pulled from a tumble dryer, a newspaper report about an infant who got separated from his Kosovo-Albanian family during the Balkan war in the 1990s, who was renamed by the Serbian army, renamed again under NATO's occupation, and finally reunited with his family and went back to his original name].In the late 90s we lived in the period that marked the beginning of the War Crimes Tribunal and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. So it was part of a larger cultural conversation. Compressed lint wasn't the obvious medium but I thought it worked well for the historical idea of following the experiences of these few people.When you do this kind of concept piece, what comes first? The text, the idea, or the form?
The questions come first. The compressed lint pieces were my first attempt to deal with questions of war crimes; of mothers and children. At first I couldn't think of a form that would suit that vulnerability, that fragility. But I often use things that come from around me, in my domestic situation. So when I came across lint, in my dryer, it presented a challenge. How do I process that into a form that will work? I never fetishize the material, I just like it to feel right for the ideas.
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Well yes. When we were talking about a new form of family back then, the context seemed very hopeful. Communal living, pre-school care; it felt that those things were imminent. My son was born in a communal situation and that was so important.But then there was the whole period of Thatcher and things got turned back. To look at things on the ground, 40 percent of families are single mothers. So somehow the family has disintegrated but not in the progressive way that we had hoped for. Children are not really being brought up in situations that make them happy. Would you do that to a plant? Or a pet? No. It's still a very, very big issue.Sometimes the term 'domestic' feels like a dirty word. You literally made it a dirty word—you put poo on a gallery wall. But do you think we're wrong to see the domestic sphere as inferior?
It's certainly denigrated. I didn't set out to shock. I was formed in the moment of conceptualism. My models were [the pioneering English conceptual art group] Art and Language. I was carrying out an interrogation. I wanted to deal with the stuff of life; which I felt they weren't doing. I wanted to engage people emotionally and intellectually at the same time.Follow Nell on Twitter.