Mike Kelley, from the Basement to the Cupola
Mike Kelley is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection in Paris (October 13th, 2023—February 19th, 2024, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais), which will then be shown in London, Düsseldorf and Stockholm. 10 years after the artist’s death, the exhibition, which is part of the “American Mythologies” cycle, presents most, but not all, of his major works, and sometimes tends to smooth out the darkly humorous oeuvre of this enfant terrible of the West Coast.
Mike Kelley was used to settling scores with repressed memories in seedy basements, and now, ten years after his death, he is being received under the cupola. Not one that would add a green suit and a sword to his performer’s panoply and pay tribute to his remarkable work as a scriptwriter, critic and poet. The artist, celebrated in the “American Mythologies” cycle, has achieved immortality at the former Bourse de Commerce in Paris—now the temple of the Pinault collection. This first stage of the Ghost and Spirit touring exhibition confirms the institutionalisation of this champion of counter-culture and his later consecration by the art market.
The monumentality and coherence of Kelley’s work imposes a selection process on any exhibition that is all the more cruel given the inextricable interdependence inherent in a total work of art. This challenge is compounded by the difficulty of building an exhibition project around a body of work that has already been partially assembled. To guide visitors into Kelley’s artistic depths, the curator Jean-Marie Gallais has chosen to focus on the guiding principle of memory (as did the exhibitions at Wiels in Brussels in 2008 and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2012). Among the ghosts and spirits, we should first commend the genius loci, which has inspired a particularly compelling use of the architecture of the Bourse de Commerce. In reverse chronological order, Kandors Full Set (2005-09), the artist’s last major completed project, spectacularly deployed beneath the glass dome, introduces visitors to the logic of rereading and reconstructing memory that runs through all the artist’s work. This particular attention to space is reflected in the scrupulous reconstructions of the Monkey Island installation (1982-83) and some of the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000s), based on meticulous archival work carried out in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
“DESTROY ALL MONSTERS”
Past Monkey Island, the circuit continues chronologically, resituating the artist’s beginnings at the time of his training at the University of Michigan and then at CalArts. Based on the name of the proto-punk group Destroy All Monsters, which he co-founded in 1974, Kelley developed a real programme of identity and artistic construction. With the stated aim of “flaying the dominant culture,” (1) he methodically undermined every socially established power structure and authority figure—familybased, religious, educational and so on. The
Catholic Birdhouse and Gothic Birdhouse, built in 1978 from technical manuals, are as much a mockery of the moral and stylistic pretensions of religion as they are of formalism and minimalist reductionism. But Kelley’s insubordination did not lead him into a systematic enterprise of Oedipal liquidation, as we are reminded by his plea in favour of one of his former teachers, Douglas Huebler, in “Shall we kill Daddy?” (1996). Another example is The Poltergeist (1979), a performance produced with David Askevold, another of his teachers, who was an accomplice in this satirical and mediumistic mise-enscène, parodying the occult sciences and the dominant photo-conceptualist pseudoverism at CalArts.This spiritualist buffoonery bears disturbing similarities to the zany masquerades of the young Sigmar Polke ten years earlier in Düsseldorf. (2)The young Kelley’s critical verve also found an expression in a recurrent form of self-mockery, evident in his first recorded performance in 1983, The Banana Man, in which he dressed up as a martyr and perverse predator wearing a grotesque costume whose countless pockets promised all sorts of questionable surprises to children.
In keeping with the artist’s contestation of artistic models and forms of socio-cultural alienation, the exhibition continues with the murdered figure of the father ( Hierarchical Figure, 1989) and the Half a Man series (1987), made from stuffed animals, crochet dolls, handmade blankets and felt banners. After his cobbled-together birdhouses, “made specifically to comment on [his] class status and on clichés of maleness,” (3) the undermining of gender essentialism was pursued in his needlework. In his tapestries, Kelley lambasted the machismo of the Abstract Expressionists, whilst the series of floor installations, Arena (1990), refers to the famous statement by the action painting theorist Harold Rosenberg, comparing the canvas to “an arena in which to act—rather than a space in which to reproduce...” (4) His floor-based arrangements lay into the work of Carl Andre and the Californian artist Barry Le Va, whereas his felt banners hijack religious messages of peace, love and charity, whilst ironically commenting on Robert Morris’ Wall Hangings. Kelley’s dirty, worn-out handmade stuffed animals were produced as a reaction to minimalist manufactured objects and to the spectre of commodification that haunts the simulationist art of Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons. With their explicitly sexual postures, these toys represent the “unconscious projections of [their] maker” (5) and are akin to the “reduced copies of human objects [...] essentially a microcosm of the adult world” (6) in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. In More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), Kelley highlights the affective debt of the “morality of toys” that weighs on craft object’s “life in miniature.” (7) Although the Arena series, showcased in the 1993 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, did much to shape the artist’s reputation, it also gave rise to a chronic misunderstanding in the critical reception of his work. Despite repeated recriminations by the artist himself, his soft toy installations have stubbornly been perceived as symptoms of an abusive childhood. Rather than oppose this entrenched interpretation, Kelley agreed to “give people what they wanted from [him]” (8) by throwing himself into this scenario of childhood abuse in an autofiction, the simulated nature of which is signalled by discontinuity and exaggeration. At the same time, however, he employed the opposite strategy by taking on the role of an art historian, arguing that “if you don’t write your own history, someone else will, and this ‘history’ will suit their purposes.” (9)
A NODAL WORK
At the heart of this reconstructed memorial history, which “capitalise[s] on that notion— not so much of sexual abuse, but institutional abuse,” (10) is the nodal work Educational Complex from 1995, a mainstay in exhibitions devoted to the artist, which is nevertheless absent from Ghost and Spirit. This fictitious campus, with its modernist architecture, brings together his childhood home and the seven schools he attended during his formative years in a monumental white model. Working from memory, Kelley came up against the impossibility of faithfully reproducing almost 80% of the exact topography of the sites. In keeping with the Freudian theory of repressed memory syndrome, the artist interpreted his amnesia as the repression of traumatic episodes, and materialised this forgetfulness in the form of solid, impenetrable blocks left blank. Rather than this essential work, in the
chapter of crime scenes on display, Ghost and Spirit brings together Memory Ware Flat #17 (2001), Photo Show Portraits the Familiar (2001) and Double Contour with Side Bars (2000), made from the recycling of scraps from Educational Complex. Compiling the first attempts and failures of earlier projects, this piece explores the aesthetics of failure. Through this selection of works, made up of collages and accumulations of sentimental objects, small relics and religious knickknacks, the emphasis is placed on the form of the collection, the rocaille aesthetic and the register of the “uncanny”—derived from the Freudian Unheimlich and chosen by the artist as the title of the exhibition he curated at Museum Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1993. Establishing an equivalence between individual and collective memory, Kelley slid from his own reconstruction to media infiltration, assimilating his memories to the cultural myths that shaped them. With Timeless/Authorless (1995), he developed another form of vernacular usurpation: after the homemade found stuffed animals, he appropriated press shots and then images from yearbooks in the dizzying cycle of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, compiled in video form in Day Is Done (2005). Although the artist was unable to complete his total project of “spatialised filmic editing” of the 365 video chapters associated with the installations, including the sets, costumes and scenic artefacts from each scenario, due to a lack of funding, 32 videos were shot and 25 reconstructions of scenes and props were edited into an almost 3-hour film, shown on a loop in the exhibition basement. Derived from Educational Complex, this unfinished ensemble aimed to re-enact the repressed traumatic scenes of the supposed assaults suffered in his educational establishments, drawing on the standardised iconographic repertoire of popular folk rituals. Taking the theme of victim culture as its starting point, this disjointed mock-musical parodies the Hollywood aesthetic, grotesquely re-enacting transgressive scenes of religious cults, satanic exorcisms, Halloween parties, carnivals, family incest, pornographic clichés, end-of-year school costume shows and so on.
MAJESTIC KANDOR
Just as excessive as Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction and Day Is Done, Kandors Full Set is the other triumph of Kelley’s short-lived maturity, his grandiose, “visually opulent” (11) counterpart, on display in the Holy of Holies. Kandor, Superman’s home town, miniaturised and bottled to survive the destruction of his planet Krypton, is given a spectacular, disenchanted treatment here, in 20 architectural variations in coloured resin. Noting that Kandor was given a different drawing treatment in each comic book, Kelley blamed these discrepancies on lapses in memory and transposed this relic of Superman’s childhood into as many architectural whims, brought together in a multicoloured, postmodern collection of styles, from the corniest to the most erectile. Whereas earlier versions of the project guaranteed the atmosphere of the bubbles with artificial respirators, the bell-jars installed here make the unplugged Kandor unbreathable. Superman and his fellow creatures, victims of “asphyxiating culture” or of ornament as a modernist crime, seem abandoned to their fate...
The exhibition’s accomplished spatial layout and illuminating circuit provide access to Kelley’s artistic development by precisely contextualising his “highly reactive” (12) art, which is interwoven with references. From this point of view, this ambitious and generous overview does justice to the breadth and ambiguous complexity of Kelley’s work, and makes up for the affront of the Centre Pompidou’s wizened exhibition in 2013, which was encapsulated in the South Gallery. Ghost and Spirit also has the merit of freeing the artist from the cliché of the eternal scatological adolescent, at the risk of presenting a version of his work that is, if not sanitised, at least not very “dirty” or disturbing. While we can understand the absence of the crude drawings of his youth, the corrosive works of Documenta IX (1992) and the co-productions with Paul McCarthy, the absence of Pay For Your Pleasure (1988), which combines creation and criminality, Reconstructed History (1989)—the sarcastic and obscene cartoon exegesis that mocks the icons of American history in school textbooks, whose absence is deplored by Jean-Marie Gallais—and of course Educational Complex, are less explicable for an undertaking placed under the sign of memory... Without having completely cleaned up his act, the exhibition presents Kelley in a clean, appropriately radical light, far removed from the overly explicit sexual images and degraded, soiled bodies that are the stuff of organic trash. But the most disturbing aspect of the exhibition is the treatment of Kandors Full Set, conceived as the jewel in the crown of the Pinault collection. As if caught up in the “Finish Fetish” of Californian minimalism, Kandors Full Set and its formal seduction break with the repulsive aesthetic of disqualified handmade objects. And the lingering sense of unease engendered by the work’s central radiance becomes clearer when we readThomas Crow’s chilling narrative, which situates this last major completed project as the artist’s epilogue-tomb. The historian charts Mike Kelley’s unstoppable trajectory from the epicentre of the American counterculture, gaining recognition among the stars, gallerists and collectors of contemporary art by collaborating from 1995 onwards with an expert technical team capable of rivalling the artillery deployed by the blockbusters of the international scene, which “held patent dangers to the integrity of Kelley’s enterprise” (13), before sacrificing the superhero of his popular roots and ending his life.
Hovering over the genuine jubilation of this reunion with Kelley’s work is the shadow of an absent work, Pay ForYour Pleasure.
Translation: Juliet Powys
M. Kelley quoted in J. Strau, “Mike Kelley, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,” Artforum, May 2013. 2 See Höhere Wesen befehlen (1966-68). 3 M. Kelley, 2011 interview, published in Mike Kelley, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Dec. 15th, 2012—April 1st, 2013, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2013. 4 H. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, Dec. 1952. 5 “M. Kelley by John Miller,” BOMB, March 21st, 1991. 6 R. Barthes, “Toys, ” Mythologies [1957], Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. 7 Ch. Baudelaire, “La Morale du joujou,” Le Monde littéraire, April 17th, 1853. 8 M. Kelley, quoted by H. Singerman in “Memory Ware,” exh. cat., Mike Kelley. Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008, Wiels, 2008, p. 13. 9 “Isabelle Graw in conversation with Mike Kelley,” in J. C. Welchman, I. Graw, A. Vidler, Mike Kelley, Phaidon, 1999, p. 19. 10 M. Kelley quoted by J. Strau, art. Cit. 11 M. Kelley, “Kandors,” exh. cat., Mike Kelley. Kandors, Berlin, Jablonka Galerie, Sept.—Dec. 2007, Hirmer, 2010, p. 56. 12 N. Roussel, “Mike Kelley, musée national d’art moderne, Paris,” Frog, no. 13, 2013, p. 115. 13Th. Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge, Princeton University Press, 2023, p. 243.