From the Archives: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley

Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley, Gaudy Night, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer.

This interview originally appeared in Musée Magazine’s Issue 21: Risk

ANDREA BLANCH: I think your work is absolutely brilliant and unique. I would like to ask about your collaboration with Patrick. I am curious how that came about. Was it organic?

MARY REID KELLEY: We've been together since 2002, but we didn't start working together until 2008. We've been collaborating together for 10 years, so it's been a slow roll towards this full collaboration together. When we started making films together they were just under my name, but gradually Pat's involvement became much more significant and we started crediting him over the years.

PATRICK KELLEY: It's evolved a lot over time. It’s been very organic because we're always talking about ideas. When we were first together I was teaching full time, and when Mary decided to shift into video, I was there to help out. I eventually stopped teaching and we gradually built up how much and how early I was involved in the projects. Initially, I would come in at the end when we were ready to shoot and edit. What's evolved the most is how much more and earlier I get involved. Mary still does all the writing and comes up with the concept but then again, we live together; we're talking about stuff all the time.

MARY: I guess your question is about what it’s like to share an artistic practice and also be romantically partnered.

ANDREA: I haven't interviewed a lot of partners, I've noticed the the times I have it took a while to acknowledge the other partner. Why did Patrick begin to participate more and how much did it have to do with trust in the relationship?

MARY: I think we've always had a lot of trust in our relationship, and I think we always had a lot of admiration for each other's individual practice, which was a big part in driving us together, and our romantic attraction to each other, which is the essential bond between us. But I think I had to totally redefine what it meant and what it felt like to have an artistic practice; normally you think things out yourself, in your head. Now I don't think solely in my own head. I also think aloud with Pat and that's a type of trust. When you haven't made a decision yet and you are like, "Well I'm thinking about this, but also this." You're giving a lot of power to whomever you talk to even though it might seem casual.

Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley, In The Body of The Sturgeon {HD video still}, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

ANDREA: How has Patrick's thinking changed you, Mary? Did he give you a perspective that you didn't have before?

MARY: Definitely. There is a distinctive feel between the earlier films when it's mostly my vision and Pat is helping execute it, and the later films, which are much more complicated and Pat starts thinking in cinematic terms. There’s a balancing act between leaving each other alone to do what each person is good at, and trusting that I'll come back with a script that we can both work with and trusting that Pat will come back with the best sound effect for a particular scene. We leave each other alone and then talk to each other. Opening up is like expanding from tunnel vision, from thinking with one brain to thinking with two brains. I think it’s fair to say that although a lot of the things that are definitive fea- tures of the films, the black and white, the costuming, and the verse scripts date from the period when I was making most of the artistic decisions. The films are now a language that we both speak, and it's a language that's increasing in complexity because of Pat's involvement in the editing, the shaping of the shots, and even the sound. The sound work is something that he's really intensified the last few films and he’s done a lot of foley work that I think has really added to them.

ANDREA: Why do you feel that Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, which you used for source material, is relevant now?

MARY: I initially looked at the poem because I wanted to learn more about the unusual meter it's written in, which is trochaic tetrameter. It's what makes the poem sound so distinctive. It's a back footing of the usual iambic stress verse of English literature. That's why I even thought to look at Hiawatha, because I wanted to write the script for In The Body of The Sturgeon in trochaic tetrameter, because it's kind of a clanky mechanical sounding meter and the Sturgeon is a submarine. I wanted it to sound artificial and heavy-handed which is how trochaic tetrameter sounds to me. When I looked at Hiawatha, which I have some memory of reading parts of when I was a child, I realized it was an enormous poem. It's 32,000 words. It's the size of a short novel. But what I ended up doing to Hiawatha was basically cutting it up into tiny pieces and re-jumbling it to make my own narrative. I considered it as forcibly rearranging Hi- awatha to make a new narrative for new purposes. It's not an entirely respectful treatment, but Hiawatha doesn't do truth or justice to its ostensible subjects, Native Americans. Hiawatha isn't just a classic exam- ple of noble savage literature or cultural appropriation. It’s also very interesting to look at the text and ask, "In what way is Hiawatha racist?" When Longfellow was writing the poem in 1855, he was making an attempt to shape the way 19th-century Americans thought about Native Americans who were very much in their midst and engaged in a desperate battle for survival. The Declaration of Independence points to the way that 19th-century Americans felt about Native Americans; one of the articles accuses the King of England of conspiring with Native Americans to murder American colonists. The Declara- tion calls Native Americans savages and brutal and accuses them of killing women and children. This rage and hostility towards Native Americans is in our country’s founding document. Hiawatha does not take this same tone, it's the opposite. It establishes this dreamy magical pre-industrial idyll to replace the murderous image. You say, "Well isn't a dreamy romantic idyll better than the savage image?" Well, maybe not. It's different; it's an evolution. I am sure that Longfellow thought he was trying to open up a new avenue of sympathy that just wasn't there for Native Americans, but what he did was create a narrative in which the Native American characters, Hiawatha Minnehaha, and Nokomis, are not pre- sented as fully realized people with reason and observation at their command. Rather, they’re presented as essentially childlike creatures, whose sustainability in the new industrial modernizing 19th century is tragically doomed. It's a white supremacy narrative. I think it's incredibly important to go back and query these kinds of grand monuments to white supremacy.

Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley, In The Body of The Sturgeon {HD video still}, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

ANDREA: I love how you make a political statement in such an original way. When working on your Lightbox series, in the gallery now, why did you choose lightboxes?

PATRICK: The lightboxes started with the exhibition we had at the Hammer in 2015. They showed The Minotaur Trilogy and they have a courtyard with these old, large window spaces that were originally for movie posters in the old movie theaters. When we did the show, the Hammer commissioned new work for those windows, and that catalyzed the idea of making these large lightbox portraits of the characters from our films, in the tradition of movie posters. We did those, we really liked them, and we wanted them to be really high resolution. The new boxes are stand-alone lit panels with large prints that are full or actually larger-than-life portraits for the characters.

ANDREA: They look fantastic!

PATRICK: We really liked how it turned out. We would usually shoot that character's lightbox portrait on the same day as their scenes in the film just to be efficient. We would set up a pose and some green screen and I would shoot them almost like a panorama. We would take seven or eight photos up and down and piece them together so that we would end up with a really high-resolution total image.

MARY: I would have to breathe in between shots.

PATRICK: I'd try to do that and have her hold still like an old school portrait. So that left us with a re- ally high-resolution image, and the semi-surprise of it was seeing them installed at the Hammer and just how revealing they are, how much texture they show; seeing the makeup, seeing the handmade clothing and costumes. I really like how it showed even more of the crudeness we like in our sets and costumes. We decided to make them as standalone lightboxes for the next show we had.

ANDREA: Mary, is that you in every photograph? MARY: Yes.PATRICK: Every different character.

ANDREA: The reason why I'm asking, you mentioned in previous interviews that you play all your roles because you were initially too embarrassed to let anyone else act and say the lines. Is that true In The Body of The Sturgeon? Because there were some sculptures or figures where they had a few heads. Is one Patrick, or is it just edited that way?

MARY: In the films, with some exceptions, I play every role. But for the sculptures, what you're seeing is an assemblage of objects that are either from the film or painted and constructed in the same style as the film. The faces you’re referring to are masks that I've painted in the same way that I painted my own face for Sturgeon. We made extensive use of masks for the Minotaur Trilogy because it was an an- cient or classically themed piece, and masks and tragedy and drama were at the forefront of the things we were looking at to add that human facial presence to the sculptural works.

Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley, Harry S. Truman, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer.

ANDREA: Your characters are portrayed in a macabre, humorous way. I'm just curious how you de- veloped your aesthetic. I know that you said you prefer black and white over color. Can you tell me why, Patrick?

PATRICK: To go with a couple of reasons; it started partly because the first work we were doing to- gether was set in World War I. There was some attempt to be literal about the film technology. But more important now, is that we both like black and white. You’re immediately in a formalized space, you know you're not in the natural realism of television, it's not like a sitcom or documentary. You're imme- diately removed into some kind of artifice and that formalization is based on the text. Mary's writing these texts in verse with a lot of punning and wordplay and so you also immediately recognize that you are in some kind of formalized language space. We wanted those to work together. There's also this nice conceptual reference to the text.

ANDREA: I love it. Mary, do you ever find yourself slipping into the role of your characters when you're not orchestrating a performance?

PATRICK: Yeah.

MARY: Really? (Laughs)

PATRICK: I mean, there are occasions when we're quoting things to each other; if there's some stupid line in the news or something that reminds us of a line you wrote. I guess that's not really falling into character.

MARY: We love wordplay and bad puns, all good puns are bad. We do that constantly. But I don't consider myself at all professionalized as an actor and so I'm never tempted to slip into a character.

PATRICK: That makes me think of how sometimes when we go somewhere and are meeting someone for the first time for shows and then someone is so surprised to meet Mary. Like, "Wow, you are not at all what I expected."

MARY: The films are short because they're a handful. It's a lot of wordplay, a lot of rhyme. A lot of it goes by very quickly and hopefully with a lot of impact. But I think it would be exhausting to have to live that. It is funny, I think people are often expecting a more flamboyant personality, but that's okay.

Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley, Torpedo Juice, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer.

ANDREA: When you did the poem from Thomas Hood, that was something that I could see somebody living with day to day because it's depression and suicide. How did that affect you day to day, and how did it affect you when you were writing?

MARY: Yeah, the content does affect me. It's impossible not to because with something like This Is Offal, the theme was suicide and self-deception and this constant dividing of the self, and self-versus-self. Hating yourself, which requires a certain amount of talking to yourself and then, of course, trying to counteract those voices. The self is so fractured. The thing about making a film about suicide is that suicide has affected so many people, indirectly or directly. That's a tragedy that spares very few people. I knew that theoretically while I was making it, but it was sobering when the piece started showing and we started presenting it in talks and just seeing people watch it and having it be very unmistakable that they're thinking about events in their own lives, that's been sobering.

PATRICK: With the recent one too, the submarine with the lives of the soldiers.MARY: Oh, doing the research for the submarine piece was so sad.PATRICK: Yeah, even just going on the submarine.MARY: We went on a few submarines and the experience is really intense. Sometimes it's hard to live with.

ANDREA: I have to say it commands attention. It emotionally had an effect on me. I'm glad I saw it. It's very poignant. I'm sure a lot of people who suffer from depression can relate to that. Have people spoke of it when you're giving your talks?

MARY: Honestly, I think people have said things to us in more of a one-on-one thing in general- ized terms, but there are very few people brave enough to stand up in an auditorium and disclose something like that. In a public talk, I think people would tend to frame it in terms of hypotheticals, or just suicide as a kind of an intractable social constant problem. But we can see people being af- fected by the work. When we did our Minotaur Trilogy, one of the great things about doing that was to get to look deeply at the foundations of drama and tragedy and how critical that experience of collectively coming together to witness and to purposely feel these wrenching emotions. If you look at these ancient Greek theaters, some of which we visited, you just imagine them full of people from thousands of years ago all sobbing at Medea. It is an essential human experience to cry and to do it with other people. Whether it's a sad movie or something else, and the opposite is equally fundamental. We've often remarked about the humorous bits of our films; the dynamic is so differ- ent when we show the film to an audience in the context of a talk or presentation and everyone is watching it at the same time. This is a very different collective and older experience than a typical museum or gallery where people kind of wander in and out of their own free will, and when every- one there's watching something from beginning to end together, things like laughter are extremely contagious. People take so many emotional social cues from each other, and I think we're just meant to feel things together.