Mary Kelly
Post-Partum Document
Publication to the exhibition from September to December 1998.
Reprint of the original English edition of 1983 and first German translation.
Ed. by Sabine Breitwieser. Introduction by Lucy R. Lippard. Preface and texts by Mary Kelly. Appendix by Andrea Fraser, Jo-Anna Isaak, Margaret Iversen, Laura Mulvey and Paul Smith.
Conceived as an installation in six consecutive sections, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (PPD) has been widely exhibited and intensely debated since its first scandalous appearance in the 1970s. Since then the PPD's initial challenge to conceptual art and its impact on the emerging discourse of sexual difference have taken on a new significance. For many younger artists and critics, the republication of Kelly's influential artwork in book form provides the opportunity to engage directly with the visual and intertextual strategies that produced a generation of "thinking bad girls."
The Author: Mary Kelly is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her project-based artwork − Post-Partum Document (1973-79), Interim (1984-89) and Gloria Patri (1992) is represented in such public collections as the Tate Gallery, London, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Australia, the Helsinki City Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna. She is author of Imaging Desire (MIT Press 1996) and her writing is included in the monograph, Mary Kelly (Phaidon 1997).