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The Art World Of The 1970 ' S Essay

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In the art world of the 1970’s, Mary Kelly responded directly to the issues raised in Mulvey’s article often making works that attempt to reclaim feminine identity. Most of Kelly’s films are works of research and documentation that concern ideas of women’s roles and women’s work. In the early 1970s Kelly was involved in the making of the film Night Cleaners (1970-1975). The film explored contemporary issues of feminist activism in following a group of working-class female service labourers and feminist activists attempting to draw attention to their issues to build a union. The film utilises documentary style, simple mimesis and minimal editing to build a more direct connection between the subjects and the audience. Using the stories of real female cleaners and showcasing the most abject of the labours, such a toilet cleaning, Night Cleaners presented a ‘warts and all’ perspective on women’s work. While working as crew on the film, Kelly’s role as a feminist activist meant Kelly was also diegetically involved in the film. Kelly saw the ‘radical potential’ in the film medium and she utilised her work on Night Cleaners as a way to develop her artistic productivity in the realm of moving image. Expanding her feminist ideologies beyond specific concerns of women’s manual labour, Kelly’s later moving image work, Antepartum (1973), focused on the labour of motherhood. Antepartum is an ninety-second long looped moving image work depicting Kelly’s own pregnant belly from a

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