Artists Mary Reid Kelley (b. 1979) and Patrick Kelley (b.1969) discuss with us ancient Graeco-Roman objects, themes and myths – and how they have helped to inspire their own modern-day films. The artists work in collaboration to create video works that combine painting, performance and poetry; their films tell surreal stories inspired by history and mythology. Played by Mary Reid Kelley, the multifarious characters speak in poetic verse filled with wordplay and puns, and narrate stories that imagine unrecorded histories. From November 2017 to March 2018, Tate Liverpool presented the artists’ first solo exhibition in a UK museum, and Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014) was featured in our 2018 exhibition on The Classical Now. Mary Reid Kelley is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and received the Baloise Art Award at Art Basel in 2016.
James Cahill spoke with the two artists in connection with our ‘Modern Classicisms’ project at King’s.
JC [James Cahill]: I’d like to ask you how the idea for the trilogy of films about the Minotaur came about – and why you decided to focus on the figure in your three films (2013–2015):
Priapus Agonistes (2013), Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014) and The Thong of Dionysus (2015).
MRK [Mary Reid Kelley]: We had the idea of doing something with an ancient theme after living at the American Academy in Rome for a year. It wasn’t a question of wanting to do something thematically classical so much as the experience of living in Rome and recognising the historical process of the deconstruction and reconstruction of the city through spolia –the use of discarded and recycled elements. Ancient materials might be recycled into a medieval church, or ancient marbles cut up and used in mosaic floors. Before going to Rome we had done historically themed works: we did four films set in the First World War, and one in mid-nineteenth century Paris. But it was living in Rome that gave us an idea of putting things from different times, cheek-by-jowl with each other...
For a while I’d been identifying the way that I write – with all the puns and wordplay and rhymes – as ‘Dionysian’. So when we came to consider making three films about the Minotaur, the myth was an extra impetus – an opportunity to make something that was not just structurally or linguistically Dionysian, but also thematically Dionysian. And in terms of how the Dionysian plays out in the work, it’s something inescapable, like the sense of drunkenness: you can’t opt out of being drunk once you are drunk, you just have to wait for it to wear off. That’s one of the reasons we keep the films short. We want it to be an intense and overwhelming feeling.
JC: The opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian could be a useful way of thinking about your embrace of the irrational and the taboo. One line that comes to mind when I look at your work is Walter Pater’s reference to the ‘sharp bright edge of Hellenic culture’, although he of course he had a particular vision of antiquity. Your videos have a ‘sharp bright’ quality, but they’re very much the opposite of what Pater was describing in relation to the classical statues.
PK [Patrick Kelley]: Mary generally writes all the scripts, but the second film in the trilogy, Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014), was drawn entirely from a pre-existing text, a fragmentary poem by Charles Algernon Swinburne. It’s Swinburne’s story of Pasiphae and describes the moment of Daedalus building the cow for Pasiphae so that she can fulfil her desire for the bull. It’s about Daedalus’s own ego and desire in creating the cow. We made our version of Swinburne’s poem, using his text, word for word.
MRK: One of the interesting things about working from a mythological basis, rather than making a historically based film, is that while for a historical film you read memoirs and use photographs, with mythology, you’re basing your work on other artistic interpretations – in this case, Swinburne’s, but also those of artists like Picasso, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and other mid-century artists for whom mythology was really pertinent…
JC: What bearing do you feel the Minotaur story has on the present day? Do its elements of subversion, transgression, creative genius or bestial coupling have an enduring relevance?
MRK: I think all those elements you listed still come into play in contemporary culture. The only one that seems archaic is the bestial coupling, which serves as a nice marker in the drift of taste in metaphor from ancient times to now. Of course, it’s not just taste that’s intervened; it’s science, Darwin, genetics. But the acquisition of this knowledge hasn’t made us very much better at tolerating difference, which is what the Minotaur represents. The Minotaur is the ultimate unwanted being…
JC: Art historically, there are lots of different voices being brought into the mix besides your own, and in that sense it becomes a kind of Modernist poem. I can’t help thinking of the dilution of the self into the chorus of voices. And ‘chorus’ is a word that I think of in relation to the work. When I hear your voice over the top of each video, Mary, it reminds me of the chorus of Greek tragedy.
MRK: Yes, in the first film, Priapus Agonistes, there is a chorus which reinforces the story. That was part of the classical theme – working with ideas of the mask, the chorus and the verse play. I was very much inspired by Eliot’s ‘Sweeney’ poems, in which Sweeney was inspired, I guess, by a bartender that Eliot knew. And my character of Priapus was based on my first boyfriend from when I was in high school.
The thing that I think is really strange about the Minotaur story and other Greek myths, is that it is very difficult for us to deal with is the idea of fate, of being stuck in something against your own choosing. That was the Greek way of explaining bad things: it was because the gods had thrown bolt at you or had you on their blacklist. We’ve grown a counter-mythology to that, saying that we can ‘bootstrap’ our way out of bad situations, to use American terminology. That idea of fate is one part of Greek thought that has not come along with everything else that we readily claim as our heritage from the ancient world.
A full version of this interview can be read in the catalogue accompanying The Classical Now, published in February 2018.Want to find out more? We have uploaded a more detailed interview with the artists here.
