Susan Hiller and Mary Kelly

In conversation with William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 3, Number 3, 1977

Transcript

The emergence of Feminism in the late 1960’s was reflected in a number of artists’ practices at that time and through the 1970’s. The following artists brought the debate to London and articulated its primary concerns both through their work and through the following discourse.

William Furlong: When we discussed the idea of making a tape originally it was felt important that two artists, concerned with evolving a meaningful women’s practice, initiated the discussion. Growing out of the recent public conference organised in London by the Women’s Free Alliance were a number of issues – perhaps we shall take some of them up later – but can we begin by discussing the differences between, on the one hand, evolving a meaningful practice generally and on the other, the problems of evolving a meaningful women’s practice. Presumably the two things would have something in common and overlap, but there would be a residual area within which you as women would find yourselves situated.

Mary Kelly: Possibly I’d always find it necessary to elaborate some general historical kind of conjuncture within which we as women were working, and I think what I said in the seminar is that I feel it is quite important that some notion of the social totality – which includes a number of instances that I have defined as economic, political and ideological – actually helped to provide an understanding of the limits and possibilities of an art practice, because I place it very much within the ideological instance of that social totality. I’d say that an art practice didn’t just reproduce the ideology of that moment, but in fact it reworked it, and if you are going to define the practice it was through a kind of reworking of that ideology – in my case a feminist ideology – in such a way that you produce a new meaning that has actually a long-term political effect.

I feel that kind of statement actually covers the oeuvre from a kind of crude insertion into the political instance. I mean, you can actually never claim a direct effect at that level. I think that a lot of the problems of people on the Left have come from that type of reduction of an art practice to a political practice. In fact it means that nothing exciting about art comes to the fore, but if you do engage with it at the level of the ideological instance, then I think you have another set of problems which are how you actually understand the subject in terms of ideology. Again, I would say it is not a constituted subject but a subject being constituted by that moment. That allows you to say how the female subject is being constituted at that moment and how, in a sense, women’s art practice has a possibility of even revitalising the practice at a given historical point.

Susan Hiller: Mary and I have been talking about these things on and off for some time, and I like the way we have punched right into the exact point of our disagreement by her statement, because, although I am completely emotionally in sympathy, in a sense, with her position, mine is so divergent from it.

I started from the idea of the subjective, what I called the necessity for truth-telling in art, which strangely enough has led me to similar conclusions, although I wouldn’t place the causes specifically on the level of politics and ideology but rather on the overall level of culture and language, which is to me more of an overview and also bypasses a lot of male thought on the subject – which is another point of divergence that we have. I feel there’s a struggle to unite in my practice as a woman and an artist; there is a struggle to unite the subjective with the language of public discourse or the art meta-language, or wherever we want to situate that particular problem, because culturally women are very much disadvantaged. They are alienated from the mainstream language or distanced from it to some extent, and consequently at the moment you either have women artists who are speaking the ordinary, dominant languages of art and speaking it rather politely, or you have a kind of confrontational approach which thinks of crashing through the dominant structure and coming up with something else.

I don’t feel it that way, I don’t perceive it that way, and it seems to me that everyone is both a victim and a kind of beneficiary of the culture. As women we are not in a position to speak our own language. After all, in our society we do all theoretically share a language. It’s not a culture that has a man’s language and a women’s language, but because of our experience there are certain disjunctions, certain discontinuities, and I think very valuable new perceptions. Now, I have always called these conceptions ‘paraconceptual’, because they are not encoded linguistically and they are not encoded in art practice. There are particular kinds of things which tend to be, in a sense, future oriented or even slightly science fiction which interest me and I think it is by this kind of paradoxical statement – an awareness of the disjunction and the playing off with one’s own self – that the eye of the artist, the subjective eye and the objective eye, are not unified for women artists.