Out of the Closet

Abstract

The extraordinary cover of Mary Kelly's early Interim catalogue, published by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Kettle's Yard, and Riverside Studios in 1986, consists of a magnified detail of a leather jacket (fig. 1) taken from the first panel of Corpus, part 1 of an eventual four-part work titled Interim. Wrapped around the cover, the jacket becomes an “all-over fold” in the Deleuzian sense of a Baroque pli captivating art and aesthetics and microcosmically encrypting the periodization of style. Viewed at close range, the work reveals a sinuous suavity common to Mannerist painting and film noir that emanates from the leather, the effect of light mysteriously smeared across the dark furrows. And then there is the zipper with its large teeth snaking along the eastern edge of the volume in the form of a figura serpentinata, a “line of beauty,” in the words of William Hogarth, “which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho' in a single line) varied contents.”2 No vagina dentata, this zipp...