Heroic take on Kelley
Hauser & Wirth’s ‘Kandors’ showcases the late L.A. artist’s dive into Superman.
Literary inspirations for art are common. Tiepolo, Delacroix and Ingres had the 16th-century epic poem “Orlando furioso.” The anonymous sculptors of India’s Khajuraho temples had the Kama Sutra. Barnett Newman had Ezra Pound.
In Los Angeles, Mike Kelley (1954-2012) had “Superman,” the heroic adventure rolled out by DC Comics in the 1930s, just as the world was shuddering into chaos. What’s exceptional about Kelley’s large suite of works derived from it, currently on abundant and essential display at Hauser & Wirth, is how he treated what would generally be considered a negligible, throwaway subject with sincerity and discernment.
Other artists, such as Andy Warhol and Llyn Foulkes, have used Super-
man motifs, but none like this. The result is an extraordinary body of work, which Kelley began in 1999 and continued to elaborate for the next dozen years. Elements have been seen in gallery and museum shows, but with 45 examples, this is the most nearly complete survey. It includes individual sculptures, ensembles with video, mixed-media works and lenticular panels.
Standouts are two big installations, one having its U.S. debut, plus 20 spare, Minimalist drawings that have never been shown.
The drawings visualize various shapes of glass bell jars, each in one seemingly continuous, achingly precise pencil line perfectly located on sheets of paper 3 and 4 feet tall. Kandor, the alien city of Superman’s birth on the planet Krypton, had escaped annihilation by being shrunken and protected beneath a glass bell jar, filled with artificial atmosphere.
An acute, highly controlled meditation on the parameters of isolation, the ghostly white drawings inevitably put you in mind of Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, “The Bell Jar,” which chronicles with similarly stripped and poetic precision the emotional and mental labyrinths of memory and depression. Kandor is a place of loss and hope, fragility and grandeur.
Kelley began the series with the installation “Kandor-Con 2000,” a wry reworking of fan-displays at San Diego’s Comic-Con International. As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, he turned to a popular midcentury literary vision of the future, written in the vernacular.
One irony: The era’s futuristic images of the city typically drew their styles from the immediate past, especially Art Deco design of the 1920s and 1930s, and the comic book images were no different.
Another oddity: The Kandor skyline changes shape throughout the decades of Superman comics’ publication. Different artists gave it different configurations. It’s a space of individual imagination, which is not fixed in time or place.
Kelley merged these peculiarities in his exquisite sculptural iterations of the mythic city. “Kandor Full Set,” having its American debut, transformed two-dimensional comic-book renderings into three-dimensional objects of jewel-toned cast resin illuminated from within. The glowing, multicolored urban fantasias and their accompanying handblown glass bottles read as flat but voluptuous graphics.
They exert a visual pull strong enough to coax you around their sculptural fullness. Kelley has fun with illusionism, which he underscores elsewhere in pictures of individual Kandors made with lenticular technology: The view changes as you walk in front of them.
The brilliant inspiration for achieving these comicbook landscape sculptures was another past art — namely, the contemporaneous, chromatically lush paintings and paper cutouts of Henri Matisse. (“I’m a perverse formalist,” Kelley once said.) In these fantastic cityscapes, Palmyra meets Metropolis inside Matisse’s “The Red Studio.”
He delves into his own past too. Climb the stairway attached to a luminous sculpture placed atop a 6foot-tall pedestal, and hanging up high and spotlighted on an adjacent wall is a rustic bird house. It recalls Kelley’s stylistically varied 1978 sculptures of bird houses, which coincided with the then-young artist’s CalArts graduation. The pairing makes Kandor into a kid’s treehouse hideaway — simple, isolated spaces of protection reverberate against one another.
A daylong symposium on Kelley’s Kandor works will be held at REDCAT on Nov. 18.
Hauser & Wirth, 901 E. 3rd St., L.A. Through Jan. 21; closed Mondays. (213) 9431620, www.hauserwirth.com
The art museum, frozen in time
A witty moment occurs deep within the massive, immersive installation by Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas that fills almost the entire Geffen Contemporary warehouse space in Little Tokyo. The show, organized by Museum of Contemporary Art curators Helen Molesworth and Bryan Barcena, is part of the citywide series, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
Inside a brightly illuminated refrigeration case, the freezing temperature set at 10 degrees below zero, according to its glowing digital thermostat, a disintegrating bicycle wheel affixed atop a ramshackle stool takes incisive aim at the lingering legacy of Marcel Duchamp.
The famous “Bicycle Wheel” sculpture by the Dada imp, made a full century ago, is kept in the forefront of museum culture today through extraordinary, preprogrammed and finally absurd means. Art on ice, so to speak.
Duchamp’s work is like a bottle of milk in the refrigerator whose sell-by date may have arrived somewhere around 1980, the year of Villar Rojas’ birth. In case you miss the point, a dead fish is impaled at the base of the wheel, like some supermarket Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
His sleek and shiny refrigerator is an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities, re-conceived for a technological age. One of a number scattered throughout the installation, it stands amid big stone boulders, as well as tall, skinny monoliths made from sedimentary layers of cast concrete and synthetic amber.
Other refrigerators hold artfully arranged displays of tree roots, athletic gear, fish, clothing, feathers and more. Vanitas, a traditional genre of painting and sculpture filled with symbols of death and the inevitability of change, is cleverly transformed into an attractive installation of contemporary objects.
The Geffen’s floor has been raised and covered with a layer of packed dirt, the walls painted royal blue to underscore the entire museum as an artificial construction. (If you miss that reference, one gallery’s walls are lined with theater flats, seen from behind.) The theatrical ensemble, heroic but disheveled, suggests the contained ruins of a civilization, natural and cultural, on display for our amusement.
An extended if familiar meditation on the modern museum, the grandiose installation, titled “The Theater of Disappearance,” suffers from a sense of exhaustion not dissimilar to that of the frozen, dilapidated bicycle wheel so puckishly entombed.
“We are proud of our museums,” the great Indian art curator Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote in 1947, “where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.” By now a common sentiment, it is merely repeated in Villar Rojas’ thoroughly academic installation.
Given the obvious expense and herculean labor of the undertaking, partly underwritten by the artist’s dealers in New York and Mexico City, the show, originally scheduled for a fourmonth run, will now remain at the Geffen for seven months. The gigantism of the project far outpaces its slender rewards, which shrink further by comparison.
Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., L.A. Through May 13; closed Tuesdays. (213) 626-6222, www.moca.org
Marking time with morbidity
Nine new paintings and a dozen works on paper by San Francisco-based Luke Butler continue his keen foray into the vagaries of life lived amid ubiquitous media imagery. An emphatic element of morbidity has been injected into what had hitherto been a more playful mix, a move that may speak to unsettled times when a minor TV celebrity sits atop the federal government.
The paintings in his second solo at Charlie James Gallery show landscapes of tangled tree limbs and churning seas along rocky coastlines. Printed neatly across the center of each is an old cinematic tag from an American or European movie’s closing — The End, Finis, An L. Butler Picture, Fin — together with a date in Roman numerals.
Most dates are from the vicinity of 1971, the year of the artist’s birth. That was also a moment when painting was itself claimed to be experiencing death throes — the end, finis. The numbers in the nine pictures’ titles, also Roman in format, don’t correspond to the numbers in the images but instead record the sequence in which Butler painted them. He’s marking time.
Cinematic Ed Ruscha meets oceanic Vija Celmins, with a bit of Roman Opalka and On Kawara numerology mixed in. Butler has a sure hand in these works, although they haven’t advanced much from similar paintings he showed at the gallery three years ago.
A potentially compelling new direction will be found in the drawings, which record pages torn from recent newspaper obituaries of movie and TV stars: Gene Wilder, Adam West, Carrie Fisher, Roger Moore. What’s odd about these heartfelt factual narratives is the photographs chosen to top the stories of their lives. Willy Wonka, Batman, Princess Leia, James Bond — cloaked and collaborated fictions stare out from the page. The people are famous for wearing masks, so the masks are what we are shown to remember them by.
These media-made characters have died a little bit too, of course. Or perhaps with the passing of their celebrity human inhabitants they’ve grown a bit larger; fictional characters do have a life of their own.
Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown. Through Dec. 9; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. (213) 687-0844, www.cjamesgallery.com