Modern Mythologies

Together, American visual artist Mary Reid Kelley and her photographer partner Patrick Kelley combine drawing, painting, stop-motion animation, stage design, poetry, and performance to create a wacky universe that reinterprets ancient myths and historical events. In their baroque parodies, embodied with an opulent visual language, wordplay-rich poetry, and plenty of puns, they conjure up historically inspired fiction, whisking the art form into the 21st century.

For the video triptych The Minotaur Trilogy, the pair have used ancient myths as vehicles for tackling the timeless issues to which they have given a contemporary twist. Another of their works, This Is Offal, is a live performance that entails the various body parts of a woman who committed suicide blaming each other for her death during the process of her body’s dissection.

Your work is very idiosyncratic, but at the same time there are plenty of references to mythology, art, literature... What are your influences?

Mary Reid Kelley: The Minotaur Trilogy was strongly influenced by Minoan works of art. Minoan pottery is very different from classical red-on-black Greek pottery – it’s much more exuberant. There is a completely different approach to scale and proportion. The imagery resembles the drawings of Robert Crumb. We really got into it.

Patrick Kelley: We don’t think about our graphic aesthetic anymore. We already used this imagery in previous work. Like the videos about the First World War that we are showing in Kunsthalle Bremen. In particular, we looked at cartoons and graphic forms from that period or even earlier. Mary’s background is in drawing and painting, and mine is in photography. We naturally wanted to keep using these forms but we wanted to deal with them in another way, as we are working with a time-based medium.

You write the scripts yourselves, as well as act, make the sets, the props... Is it essentially a Gesamtkunstwerk?

PK: Well, it’s just the two of us. We like keeping it that way for a variety of reasons. One is that we are both trained in individual media. We are not film school people using cinema conventions. We do all the various things ourselves, from writing and visuals to filming. We don’t have fixed schedules or shooting periods. We want to be able to go back and change things.

Some of the props are being displayed as works of art; others are not. In Leuven, you are showing three masks from the video. How do you decide what to present? And what about the hierarchy of your work?

MRK: Some things just work very well as sculptures, like the masks. They almost become stand-ins for the actors. We also show some of the costumes and furniture. In our earlier work, we didn’t use so many props.

PK: There is also a risk when we show the things we have used in a film. It can add too much of an aura. That’s a trap we try to avoid.

Mary, you write texts that sometimes sound like rap songs. Of course, that’s also one of the oldest forms of oral poetry, like the poems of Homer.

MRK: I love rap. But when we began the trilogy, I started listening to it in a different way. I tried to see what I could learn from it as a writer. Something I picked up from Nicki Minaj and Lil’ Kim – who I really admire – is how the rhyme is not just at the end but also in the middle of a sentence. And how they rhyme proper names. Rappers use rhyme in incredible ways.

Your work has a strong theatrical dimension. Was doing a live performance as you did at the Playground festival in Leuven a logical step?

PK: It was the first real version of the piece in its present shape. The Playground performance was the second one we did – before that was the Berliner Festspiele. But Mary has since adapted the text quite considerably. It evolved out of a proto version we made for the Tate in London. We did a live streaming without an audience. But we were not consciously heading in that direction at all!

MRK: Catherine Wood, curator of the Tate Modern performance, once said to us “Why don’t you guys do a live performance?” And we said “OK!” And basically, that led to a year of performances, our first experience of performing live. We’ve really learned a lot!

You are a very convincing actress. You don’t happen to be an actor by training?

PK: I think Mary’s experience has come from making all the videos and translating them into ‘live’. We didn’t transform what we were doing in order to make theatre from it; we kind of forced the way we do our videos into a live version. It has the density and timing of our videos. I like that, as opposed to thinking: How can we make it more like theatre? That approach is also interesting, but it’s not the way we work.

MRK: The costumes are quite important, too. Dionysus is a god, so he needs to be nude. Greek gods don’t walk around in denim! While I was sewing the suit with his penis attached, I was thinking: Am I really going to wear this? A lot of the permissiveness comes from it being private. During the filming, it is just the two of us. I was trained as a painter and have the personality of a painter. I am more introverted and want to slam my studio door behind me. It was a stretch to perform for strangers. But it was great. Now we finally understand why it is so exciting to play in front of a live audience!