Indexing
Looking back on the art of the late Sixties and early Seventies Mary Kelly has described the way in which a “systemic approach to art” was pursued by herself and others, an approach that could be summarised by the formula “‘art interrogating the conditions of the object’ and then going to the second stage and interrogating the conditions of the interrogation itself…”1 Produced in successive years, Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (1971), Art & Language’s Index 01 (1972) [Fig.24] and Mary Kelly, Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison’s Women and Work (1973) [Fig.25], though sharing a certain visual affinity, stand as sharply differentiated markers in the development of conceptual art. Though all three could be described as employing a “systemic” approach, each represents a very different interpretation of what this means. Women and Work formulates a critique of Shapolsky et al. and Index 01, two works which themselves represent divergent approaches to a particular artistic problem, namely the challenge of defining the ontological ground of (autonomous) art after the collapse of formalist modernism.
The differences between these works can be understood by considering the differing ways in which they conceived the challenge of “interrogating the conditions of the interrogation” of postformalist art. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., embodied systematic self-reflexivity about the sociological grounds of advanced art production. Art & Language’s Index 01 focused on systematic self-reflexivity about the discursive or, more strictly, the philosophical grounds of advanced art production (albeit with philosophy understood narrowly as Anglo-American Analytic philosophy).2 Yet Kelly found fault with both approaches explaining
Fig.24. Art and Language, Index 01 (1972).
Fig.25. Mary Kelly, Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison, Women and Work (1973).
that there was “something very inadequate about the systemic approach to art, something wrong with the formula ‘art interrogating the conditions of the object’ and then going to the second stage and interrogating the conditions of the interrogation itself, but refusing to include subjectivity or sexual difference in that interrogation.”3 Though admitting that she had been influenced by Haacke’s approach—“you can see the Women and Work project looks a lot like Haacke’s ‘Shapolsky’ piece”—Kelly also stressed her awareness that
“something wasn’t working in the strategy” employed by Women and Work.4 Kelly describes Women and Work as “a document on the division of labour in a specific industry, showing the changes in the labour process and the constitution of the labour force during the implementation of the Equal Pay Act,” noting that in making the work she discovered “how the division of labour in industry was underpinned by the division of labour in the home and that the central issue for women was in fact reproduction.”5 For Kelly, however, the sociological approach of Women & Work failed to capture her subjects’ psychic investments in their social roles which was, for Kelly, both the cause of their social subjection and the site of their possibility for resistance. Art
& Language also launched several polemics against what they perceived to be the “sociologism” of Haacke’s work, polemics which will be discussed in more detail below. Yet Kelly, who encountered Index in its second incarnation as Index 02 in “The New Art” (1972) exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, was not persuaded that its philosophical self-reflexivity provided a more productive trajectory.6
Kelly’s response to the perceived failings of the “systemic approach” was to begin to make work that included subjectivity and sexual difference in the
“interrogation.” The problems that Kelly discerned with Women & Work became the spur for her next major work, Post-Partum Document (1975) [Fig.26]
“an on-going process of analysis and visualisation of the mother-child relationship.”7 Peter Wollen has commented on the way in which Post-Partum Document was conceived and presented as an inter-subjective artwork, observing that it consisted of “the discourse of an artist who was also a woman, constituting herself inter-subjectively as a mother and collaborating in a work with her own infant child.”8 Women & Work prompted Kelly’s self-reflexivity about the subjective ontological grounds of art production.9
In her own account of her artistic development, Kelly has emphasised that the political upheavals of the late 1960s directly impacted the evolution of her work: “First of all, I was an artist making systems work without any political content, if you like. When the great upheavals of 1968 opened up areas of activism, none of us immediately responded at the level of our artwork. As Hans Haacke has said, for an interim period people just kept their art and their politics separate.”10 Yet Kelly, as with Haacke, did not keep her art and her politics separate for long. As a contemporary reviewer remarked of the Women
& Work show, “The work on display is the result of two years collaboration between women who share a common commitment to the women’s liberation movement. Their project was to combine research on the sexual division of labour in industry with the techniques of informational art.”11 What the reviewer does not comment on is the link between the “division of labour in
Fig.26. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (1973).