Mary Reid Kelley: Self As Drawing
With its literary allusions, stylistic references to absurdist theatre, word play and visual punning, Reid Kelley’s work is a dazzling appropriation of our cultural past. Yet we are supposed to do more than just admire and be entertained by this self-reflexive sibyl: these constant reminders of Europe’s civilized heritage have an ultimately alienating effect, in the Brechtian sense of the term. That is to say that the more we appreciate the artfulness of You Make Me Iliad, the more uncomfortably aware we become of our own dislocation from the violent reality being translated on screen. In the final scene, the soldier is apprehended by a ‘reeking editor’ (poison gas). As he suffocates, still struggling towards posterity (‘Sing, Muse! Your scribe has quill in hand!’), his valiant clichés evaporate into the air. The point Reid Kelley invites us to consider is that our cherished aesthetic structures and expressions are themselves sustained and even inspired by the workings of brutal military power. As the film ends the patriarchs of European thought are seen to prevail. Their hand-drawn portraits were even resurrected on the gallery walls, their influence seemingly undiminished while the war goes on. [source]
