Personality Crisis:Mike Kelley @ Tate Modern.

Wow! Mike Kelley's Ghost and Spirit retrospective at Tate Modern is chaotic. There's a lot going on - and it's sometimes pretty hard to get your head around the artist and what it was he did but, eventually, you start to get a feel for his own particular style (or styles). You learn to see there is a method, of sorts, to his madness.

Ahh...Youth! (1992/2022)

Kelley (1954-2012) grew up in a working class suburb of Detroit and, like many of his generation, felt an intense sense of dislocation with the world. He said "I was part of the TV generation. I was mediated. I was 'pop'. I didn't feel connected in any way to my family, to my country, or to reality for that matter. The world seemed to me a media facade, and all history a fiction - a pack of lies".

In his early twenties he found something he could throw his lot in with. Anarchist political movements and experimental music. He studied abstract painting at CalArts in Santa Clarita (remaining based in California for the rest of his life) and he never saw art as an expression of himself, authentic or otherwise. Instead, he looked to challenge absolute truths with his art using performance, humour, and ambiguity. He didn't always succeed but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the point.

He made reference to pop culture as surely as he did underground culture while throwing in literature and conspiracy theories in an attempt to explore how life, modern life, is inextricably linked with institutional structures and belief systems. The meaning of the work was, and was intended to be, in constant flux in order to reflect that our lives, and our belief systems, are in constant flux. In that, he was ahead of the game. It's interesting that an artist who exhibited slobbered on soft toys and graffitied historical illustrations with crude slogans should at the same time be creating deeply thoughtful and provocative art. It's probably fair to say Mike Kelley's work is best viewed as a whole rather than as a series of 'pieces'. That's certainly what I'm trying to do here.

Performance Related Objects (1977-79/1998)

That means that to begin with nothing seems to make much sense. In the first room you're accompanied by a piece of audio called The Poltergeist (from around 1979) in which Kelley talks about ghosts and spirits (in keeping with the show's title) as well as adolescence. There's a group of seemingly random looking Performance Related Objects which he would use to create haunting music (or 'sounds'), there's a selection of autographs he was experimenting with back in 1982 (as if to experiment with what kind of person he was or could be - I don't think the fact they share a title with a New York Dolls track is an coincidence), and there's a gothic birdhouse. Because why not?

 

Personality Crisis (Untitled #1) (1982)

 

Personality Crisis (Untitled #2) (1982)

 

Personality Crisis (Death Trail of a Flea) (1982)

 

Gothic Birdhouse (1978)

 

Birdhouse for a Bird that Is Near and a Bird That Is Far (1978)

 

The Solipsistic Landscape (1982)

 

Choreographic Figure (1982-83)

 

Fallopian Tube (1983)

 

Landscape, Sine Wave, Bell (1982-83)

 

The Poltergeist (1979)

 

The Poltergeist (1979)

Birdhouses, to Kelley, represented or stood in for the working class and he had a desire to make art for working class people rather than the chattering classes. But really, it's probably not the main reason he made birdhouses. Or, indeed, models of fallopian tubes and choreographic figures or hung bells on gallery walls. There's something else going on there but it's never completely clear what that is.

Your're made to do some of the work. In the early eighties, Kelley's work started to expand and develop into performances and installations. Monkey Island was inspired by Kelley's observation of the mother-child bonding he'd witnessed from primates in Los Angeles zoo and The Poltergeist sees Kelley pondering fake mediums, most famously Helen Duncan, who would pull cotton wool streams from their noses to mimic ectoplasm during supposed seances. For Kelley, someone like Duncan was a forebear of contemporary conceptual artists who faked truth with their own work.

It wasn't necessarily so much a critique of fraudulent mediums and conceptual artists as it was an observation and exploration of their work and their methods. If anything, it seems as if Kelley admired their ability to create multiple personas and alternative realities. Kelley was interested in 'role play' and 'characters' and even made his own Banana Man costume - a television show he had never seen and had only heard his friends talk about. He also mythologised his Irish heritage with a series of wall hangings that also paid homage to his love for (or at least interest in) teen culture, heavy metal, and graffiti. He's even put a Motorhead style umlaut over the E in his own name.

 

The Banana Man Costume (1981-82)

 

Hangin' - Heavy - Hairy - Horny (1989)

The Orange and Green (1989)

Unlucky Clover (1989)

Peat Spade (1989)

Satan's Nostrils (1989)

Blood and Soil (Potato Print) (1989)

Emerald Eyehole (1989)

Country Cousin (1989)

 

Janitorial Banner (1984)

 

The Fabric of Life (1985)

 

Reconstructed History:The Lincoln Memorial (1989)

 

Reconstructed History:Jackson Tells a group of Southern Congressmen that He will not Accept the Nullification Idea (1989)

 

Reconstructed History:Magellan Tasking Possession of the Philippines (1989)

 

Last Tool in Use (1977)

 

The Power of The Unconscious (1985)

 

Hierarchical Figure (1989)

This pop culture also included items of folk horror (Janitorial Banner may be a tribute to his father who, like him, worked as a janitor but there's definitely something of the horror film about it), psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, abstract expressionist art, cosmology, and, of course, the deathless teenage hobby of amending your history books with puerile humour. Something of the Joe Orton about that. It also reminds me of the Gideon bibles we were handed out at school which all had cocks graffitied in them almost immediately and were chiefly used for throwing at other kids in the playground. My school wasn't very religious.

Kelley seems to think that as these images of American history are partial, occluding the truth, and with that in mind the addition makes perfect sense. After all, lots of important details have already been subtracted from them. It's the American history the system wants you to believe in, man. It's not the truth. Not the whole truth anyway.

Although sometimes it's seems that puerile behaviour, coprophilia even, was enough in itself. Kelley's Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood is a series of photographs showing performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose seemingly poohing on, and possibly being licked out by, some soft toys. Thankfully, the faeces is just paint. Or at least  that's we're told.

 

Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood (1990/2008)

 

Three Point Program/Four Eyes (1987)

 

Ahh...Youth! (1991/2002)

Ahh...Youth! (1991/2002)

 

Next to the shitlovers, the soft toys look a bit less innocent than they might do on display in Hamley's or on a child's bed. Kelley chose used, or - in modern parlance - 'preloved', soft toys precisely because they'd been slobbered on, their beady eyes had come out, or they had become slightly disturbing looking. Sonic Youth certainly enjoyed Kelley's work at this time (as, quite likely, he did theirs - he was a huge music fan and participated in experimental noise and art bands including Destroy All Monsters as well as collaborating with Scanner) and the band used an image of his (the one that tops this blog) for their 1992 album Dirty. That's the one with Sugar Kane, 100%, and Youth Against Fascism. Some would argue the last LP of their imperial phase.

Elsewhere, there are piles of stuffed animals on the wall and on the floor (Kelley pondered the soft toy - or any child's toys - as an item in a 'system of exchange' where the child is given the toy in expectation of some repayment yet the child has nothing material so can only repay the gift giver with their love and as love has no fixed exchange rate the child becomes permanently indentured - which is quite a grim take on the parent-child relationship, let's get back to those apes and monkeys), garbage drawings, and wall hangings with crude messages on them.

 

More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987)

 

Garbage Drawing #14 (1988)

Dialogue 5 (1991)

Arena #4 (Zen Garden) (1990)

Arena #10 (Dogs) (1990)

Ouija (1990)

Mooner (1990)

Estral Star #3 (1989)

Manly Craft #2 (1989)

Eviscerated Corpse (1989)

 

Untitled (Pasolini) (1990)

Jesse Helms Protest Sign (1990)

 

Timothy Leary's Family Counseling Center:Options of Coupledom (1995)

 

Timothy Leary's Family Counseling Center:Options of Coupledom (1995)

 

Winner (1987)

 

Tears of a Clown (1987)

 

Symbiotic Relationships (1991)

 

Trash Picker (1987)

Irked by the fact some were interpreting his work as nostalgic, Kelley turned to copying flyers and making use of voids and blank spaces. All part, it seems, of a lifelong obsession with that which is hidden or repressed. That didn't mean he was shy of making a political statement. Then, as now, leading American politicians drew comparisons with Nazis (even if they drew the line at making actual Nazi salutes like the totalitarian Tesla tosspot).

 

Jesse Helms, a Republic senator for North Carolina, campaigned against LGBTQ rights and funding of what he deemed to be 'obscene art' (art like Kelley's one would presume, definitely Robert Mapplethorpe). The Nazis also had a beef with 'degenerate art' so Kelly drew a well deserved swastika on his forehead. If you keep doing Nazi type things, people will start thinking you're a bit of Nazi.

In his 2001 series of photographs, Photo Show Portrays the Familiar, Kelley was riffing on the idea of a 'familiar' as a spiritual entity, an assistant to a witch, or as one of the 'cunning folk'. It's interesting he chose to return to his home town of Detroit to take the photos. Perhaps, that's where, for Kelley, the "ghosts and spirits" resided. We may leave our homes but our homes, it seems, never leave us.

 

Photo Show Portrays the Familiar (2001)

 

Photo Show Portrays the Familiar (2001)

 

 

Photo Show Portrays the Familiar (2001)

 

At one point he even recreated models of his family home and the buildings in which he had been educated. This was partly because people had been looking at his soft toy pieces and concluding, incorrectly, that he had had an unhappy childhood. The amateur psychoanalysis he was subjected to led to him becoming ever more interested in the concept of, and the public fascination about, 'repressed memory syndrome'. Modern science makes a mockery of the concept and it's now widely accepted that some that promoted it were charlatans and crooks with ulterior motifs at play.

For Kelley, it seems it was simply more grist to the mill. Just another weird and wonderful thing out there in the world that didn't really make a lot of sense but was certainly very interesting. Life is chaotic rather than ordered and it's us humans who try to apply order to the chaos. Kelley, it feels, was one of those people who revelled in, and celebrated the chaos. Certainly the last room in this show gives that impression. It's a riot of noise, colour, and, I can't think of a better word, things! It's the room that makes the least sense of all. It's the room that makes the most sense of all!

 

Color and Form (1999)

 

Timeless Painting #9 (1995)

 

Balanced by Mass and Personification (2001)

 

Memory Ware Flat #17 (2001)

 

Silver Ball (1994)

 

I can't say I fully understood what was going on. I just submitted to it. There's a Silver Ball with a tape recorder and some picnic baskets, a recording of Kelley reading texts associated with UFO sightings, a horse that looks like Bojack Horseman's (or My Little Pony's) bad trip, bottles covered in buttons, bottles with faces, and abstract compositions made up of marbles, shells, and beads inspired by the African American funerary art found in the Southern states of the US.

 

There's a whole load of stuff about Superman and his home planet of Krypton (there's the pop culture influence coming out big time) - even at one point a video of Superman reciting Sylvia Plath (because his home city, Kandor, was in a bell jar of sorts) and reflecting on the fact that his home planet had been destroyed and he's now stuck on Earth. There's plenty of imagined recreations of Kandor too. There's a lot of Kandors. I've only included a small selection.

 

Superman Recites Selection from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999)

 

Lenticular 14 (2007)

 

The Swelling Seafoam and Mint Swamps of Mushroom Promontory (2007)

 

Lenticular 18 (2007)

 

City 13 (2011)

 

The surprise comes in learning that Kelley wasn't really much of a fan of Superman comics. Instead he just liked the idea of a man burdened with his own past. Even a super man. Superman is equally held down by the responsibilities he has on Earth. Saving it from baddies. It's a tough lot. I didn't realise Superman had such a melancholic back story. Even when Kandor, which was saved from the destruction of Krypton by virtue of being under that bell jar, is transported to Superman's secret base he is unable to restore it to its original size.

Even Superman isn't that powerful and it makes Superman sad. The reason for the multiple Kandors is that illustrators over the years depicted the city differently and Kelley felt that was a good starting point for exploring the elusive nature of memory. How we all remember things slightly differently and how the passing of time shifts how we remember things. Are we remembering the thing itself or are we remembering a previous memory of the thing?

Kelley's Torture Table from 1992 reminded of the sex table from the brilliant sitcom Dave, there's a forty-three minute film - made in conjunction with Paul McCarthy - of a woman dressed as 19c Swiss toddler Heidi playing with picnic baskets (again - does Yogi Bear know about this? I hear he's got shit hot lawyers) and wearing a Madonna mask which - full disclosure - I didn't watch in its entirety, and there's a lots of reconstructions of images of college students playing fancy dress in their yearbooks. Oh, there's also a silhouette of a sexy lady dancing seductively behind a red (or pink if you prefer) velvet curtain. Mining the rarely interrogated territory between Twin Peaks and Tales Of The Unexpected.

 

Torture Table (1992)

 

Heidi's Four Basket Dances (1992/2001)

 

 

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles' Miser) (2004-05)

 

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil:Master of Ceremonies) (2004-05)

 

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #24 (May Maenad) (2004-05)

 

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #26A (Pink Curtain) (2004-05)

 

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #9 (Fresno) (2004-05)
 

Kelley was creating art, and having ideas, so rapidly at this point it feels like too much work to try and decipher and interpret what he was actually doing and why. But, perhaps that's the point. Art should ask questions, not answer them. Artists and storytellers can lie and play games with us. Medical professionals and politicians shouldn't really. Kelley may not have seen his art as an expression of himself or the world he lived in but when you make something for long enough, when you create your own little (or even big) world, you can't help doing that.

Something of the person behind it can't help but seep into the art and visiting Ghosts and Spirits we get the idea of Kelley as being a thoughtful, complex, and provocative individual but one with a sense of fun and a love of music and pop culture propelling him to keep making art. Which he did pretty much until he took his own life, aged just 57, in 2012. Often those who seem to love life the most are those who can feel most crushed by it.

Of course I don't, and can't, know if that was the case with Kelley. Towards the end of the exhibition he riffs on what he calls "the ultimate zone of unspeakable horror". He made tunnels that visitors to his shows could crawl into, he made works about alien abduction, and he created a video work called, quite simply, Empty Gym. These late works seem to speak of escape. Escape from the planet, escape from other people, escape from now, escape from the past even, and, maybe most of all, escape from one's self. In less than six decades, Mike Kelley had created a phenomenal amount of work and it seems in keeping with that work that his death should also leave us with plenty of thoughts but no clear answers. Maybe now he is one of those ghosts, one of those spirits. You can't help wondering what he'd make of the times we're now living in.

 

Empty Gym (2004-05)