Mike Kelley: Death andTransfiguration

GEORGE BAKER

OCTOBER 139, Winter 2012, pp. 183191. 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I had a standing date with Mike Kelley to visit him at his studio. Just totalk, he reassured me. An essay on his work had taken me most of the last twoyears to research and compose, and I had kept my distance, wanting not tocome under the artists sway. But now it was done. Kelleys reactions to the essayarrived in a string of emails, and he asserted little desire to control or influenceanything I had to say; encouraging notes, full of minor moments of disagree-ment (you can ignore my comments if you wish, he clarified). There were alsodetails, now precious, of process or context: I described a glistening color usedin one of Kelleys Missing Time paintings (197475) as nail-polish red, and theresponse arrived: I actually painted with nail polish in some of these earlyworks. Usually black. Proto-punk, the artist was also, it seemed, pre-Goth (oneof these early paintings was in fact entitled Gothicism, and another Gothic Lift).The last time I saw Mike was at his opening for the gallery exhibition Destroy AllMonsters in Los Angeles in late November. He was in uniform, big black combatboots, trench coat, leather vest, his hands covered in writing, ink from a ball-point pen, like something I havent seen since the self-adornments of some ofmy punk-leaning peers in high school. He was surrounded by old friends, butalso by many strangers, photographers, Los Angeles celebrities, by people claim-ing his time. We are going to get together, he reiterated, smiling. Just to talk.His smile seemed ironic, at least to me, as if he were saying, What had you beenworried about? But our standing date has been left standing. It was not to be.

*

At times like this, in the wake of the premature loss of a great or importantartist, retrospective thoughts do abound, claims for uniqueness or singularity thatmight never have otherwise occurred. Admittedly random questions spark ideasfor potential essays, ones I will probably never write. But I hope someone will.

Question one (categorize under the politics of postmodernism): Was therean artist in recent memory who impressed upon his audience such an enduring,visceral attachment to the place from which he came? Gramscis notion of theorganic intellectual seems wildly wrong and anachronistic when thinking of

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Kelleys practice, and yet not entirely inappropriate to his strangely aggressivefidelity to the place and circumstance of his youth. Not only would his working-class origins be endlessly interrogated and placed on display, but an entireseething cosmology of youthful enthusiasms structured Kelleys art, returningendlessly in the work, the writing, the interviews. In ways we do not yet fullycomprehend, Kelley definitively revised the very notions of a working-class orpopular art, resurrecting these paradigms from the grave of their late-twenti-eth-century obliteration, transforming them beyond recognition.1 Though hehated site-specific art, Kelleys last work will have been, it seems, a full-scalemodel of his childhood home, a mobile site-specific sculpture for Detroit, thingsbrought full circle long before their time.

Question two (categorize under formalism and postmodernism): Wasthere a better colorist to emerge since the moment of late modernist painting,Abstract Expressionist or Color Field? Kelley redefined color endlessly in his pro-jects, though few seem to have noticed, perhaps bowing to the reputation of theblack-and-white severity of his canonical, early zine-inspired drawings. WithKelley, we have racist colors (monochromes based on skin types), psychedeliccolors, missing colors, black-light colors, tie-dye colors, sex-shop colors, Pepto-Bismol or medicament colors. He really loved yellow, the color of bananas, thecolor of piss. He really loved green, the color of the Irish, the color of frogs.Color was always already a stereotype of color for Kelleythe clich as the ori-gin of color, or color as appropriated, named, and categorized. He painted theRainbow Coalition, 1985 (Oh Glorious Sun, the work exclaimed, of RainbowAfro Wigs!). He worked with ketchup. His titles cried out, More Tragic! MorePlangent . . . More Purple! But color could also be heartfelt, sentimental, even with(because of) its unrelenting abasement at the hands of culture, the commodity,or kitsch. Nostalgia would be wedded to consumption, literally, in Kelleys pho-tograph Butter Colored Vision of the Land O Lakes Girl, Peche Island, 2001. The workMore Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, 1987, with its variegated field of lay-ered afghans and stuffed animals, is among other things one of the greatreflections upon color in the entire history of art, local color becoming tieddown herealmost sadisticallyto drawing-room colors and bedroom colors,to color as emergent from an achingly specific time and place. My large afghanworks were color coded, Kelley wrote to me. Lumpenprole was knitted in fall col-ors to evoke aging, and Riddle of the Sphinx used dusk colors in keeping with theSphinxs riddlewhich also concerns aging. Some of these colors were chosenbased on the names of the yarns used. Color increasingly signaled all that Kelleyvalued in art, standing against all he wished to turn on its head. Color mightnow be inevitably and unavoidably readymade, but that meant that it was alsoalways hybrid, always open to being mixed. Color was supplemental, excessive,

1. The great essay on this topic is John Miller, The Poet as Janitor, in Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes(Harry Abrams, New York: 1993), pp. 14959.

Mike Kelley. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, right, and The Wages of Sin, left. 1987. Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.

gendered, materialit was social, historical, and class-basedand this is whyKelley devoted himself to it like almost nothing else.2 Look again.

Question three (uncategorizable): Has any artist painted the anus more fre-quently, more lovingly, more ludicrously, than he? Picasso, perhaps, but Kelleysfundaments were of a different kind.

*

Dead things are art, basically.3 I have to admit that I always read the myriadstatements Kelley made about art and deathhis project on the Uncanny, his medi-tation on Paul Theks meat pieces or the body-cast sculpture from the lattersinstallation The Tomb known as the Dead Hippie, his stuffed-animal works evoca-tion of corpses, evisceration, and mutilationas ironic, even funny. I heard theseclaims declaimed in Kelleys performance voice, in other words, followed by his cack-ling, maniacal laughter or his masochistic wailing, even when he was being seriousand professorial, direct and workaday: Im proposing that art basically addressesdeath. . . . And death strikes me as an important issue relative to postmodernism.4

If I begin these scattered reflections on Kelleys import by borrowing thetitle of Kelleys groundbreaking text on Paul Thek, perhaps his most luminousessay, it is simply because of course death is one of the things in the artists worktransfigured now in relation to his own death.5 I remain somewhat paralyzed inthe face of what has occurred, but at the same time the event brings clarification:one can only be terrifyingly aware now of how central death was to the artistsentire project. Its centrality to his tactics can hardly any longer be ignored. Fromthe beginningwhether we look to the Minimalist-inspired Birdhouses, 197879,the Conceptualist parodic archives, the stuffed animal accumulations, the falseCatholic felt banners, the theatrical props or the masochistic personas of earlyperformancesthe notion of the work of art as an effigy was the central, definingtrope of Kelleys practice. Like Allan McCollums notion of art as a surrogate,Kelleys thinking of art as an effigy positioned the work of art not as presence, but

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2. One of Kelleys most important statements on color occurs in his essay for the exhibition hecurated in 1993, The Uncanny. Along with material itself, color is one of the most loaded signs of thequotidian. The literal use of material is a non sequitur in art. No one would seriously consider the ideaof sculpting a body out of actual flesh, or carving a rock out of stone. What would be the purpose ofsuch a redundant exercise? Color is thus set at a difficult conjunction between sign and signified, aproblem that is negated in painting because it operates in two-dimensional mental spacewhich iswhy painting has been king of Western art history, with sculpture relegated to the role of idiot cousin.Naturalistically colored dolls, mannequins, automata, and wax portrait figures are not included in thegenerally accepted version of Western art history, and polychrome religious statuary is on the lowestrung of the art hierarchy. Kelley, Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny, in Mike Kelley, FoulPerfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John Welchman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 7879.3. John Miller, Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller in Los Angeles on March 21, 1991, in MikeKelley, ed. William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh (New York: Art Resources Transfer, 1992), p. 18.4. From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Mike Kelley in Conversation with Thomas McEvilley,reprinted in Kelley, Foul Perfection, p. 60.5. Mike Kelley, Death and Transfiguration: A Letter from America, in Paul Thek (Turin: Castellodi Rivara, 1992), reprinted in Foul Perfection, pp. 13849.

as an inevitable substitute, a stand-inone usually under the threat of violence,however, or as a memorial to that which is gone, a product of decimation.

In several works of the early 1990s, Kelley replicated an old college leafletadvertising an Effigy Hanging Contest to take place at a sorority house, a contestthe artist then claimed he had in fact attended (and won), bringing along hiseffigy to be hung, a blank, vaguely human form made from old clothes stuffedwith newspapers. In my recent essay, I suggest in writing up this event that it musthave been a screen memory invented by the artist, an effigy in psychic form, simi-lar to the mostly fabricated Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions thathave recently made up the monumental video cycle Day is Done, 2005. But Kelleyinsisted to me that the appropriated Effigy Hanging Contest poster was actual,the event a real one he had in fact attended during college, one that he remem-bered and endlessly recalled within his project s, as he thought of thisperformative intrusion as one of his first or originary works of art. To see thework of art as an effigyto see how Kelley twisted the existence of the artworkinto that of the effigybecame the standard of my own reading of Kelleys largerproject, of his relation to modernism and postmodernism both.

It was a way to begin to comprehend the epochal turn that Kelleys work hadtaken since the 1990s, the work that followed the varied appropriations of subcul-tural styles and personas that characterized his emergence in the 1980s, or thestuffed animal sculptures of a project like Half a Man that closed that crucial decade,the works for which the artist is perhaps best known. Leading up to and then awayfrom the key piece Educational Complex, 1995the functional equivalent, within theartists oeuvre, of something like Marcel Duchamps Large Glass, the engine fromwhich a larger host of projects will stemKelley had seemingly shifted his attentionto an endless recycling of modernist forms, modernist histories, modernist guises.The turn was surprising, given the hostility to modernism evinced by Kelleys earliersubcultural investments, his interest in kitsch as well as the persistence of an almostpre-modernist, underclass practice of craft (knitting, model-building, youthful doo-dling, homespun carpentry, the endless toils of the amateur hobbyist). The heyday ofpostmodernism had come and gone, but if it had once been interpreted as implyingthe death of modernism, Kelley seemed increasingly to want to take this critical idealiterally (typically), as something like a provocation. His notion of the aesthetic as aplaying with dead thingsthe title of the essay he composed for his exhibition TheUncannynow would be extended to the vast panorama of modernisms critical his-tory.6 If Kelleys stuffed-animal accumulations had addressed the viewer as literaleffigies, the Educational Complex continued this address, a collection of architecturalmemories or ghosts; but it seemed to provide access simultaneously to anothermodality of the effigy, the notion of form as a cover-up, a stand-in, a surface signalingabsence, a chain of substitutions. Hardly sincere, and not exactly simple parody,

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6. Kelley, Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny, in Foul Perfection, pp. 7099.

Kelleys work in the last twenty years presented an endless exploration in this sense ofmodernism as an effigy.

The treatment of modernism as an effigy might look like this: In 1989,Kelley produced a video with Erika Beckman entitled Blind Country. In one of itscentral scenes, Kelley evoked an ur-site of modernist history, the utopian formalexplorations of the Bauhaus. Pointing to Wassily Kandinskys notorious Bauhausquestionnaire where the painter attempted through a statistical survey of hisstudents to assign one primary color to each of the basic geometric shapesarriving at a yellow triangle, a red square, and a blue circleKelley inserted hisviewers into a classroom where a priggish teacher confronted an audience oforally-fixated, candy-licking students with similar primal configurations. Eachcolored shape was able to be removed from a background of the same primarycolorrevealing a black void beneath itand then replaced, in a repeatedaction that could only evoke Freuds fort-da game, associating abstract formnot with logic and transcendence, but with absence, trauma, and loss. Thesewould always be the engines of Kelleys sense of form. HERE, the teachercalled out, demonstrating the resplendent fullness of his three primal shapes.GONE, he lamented, uprooting the geometric form from its ground, revealingthe dark chasm hiding beneath.

In a subsequent scene, Kelley suddenly emerged in the role of theteacher, ranting and raving while displaying his primal configurations in aclassroom now itself gone dark and smoke-filled like a stinking nightclub, withthe infantile students devolved one step further into pig-faced, snorting animals.What [do] they remind you of ? the teacher raged, while facing the shapesdrawn upon a blackboard, bending over and presenting his backside to the stu-dents. A blue square suddenly emerged, superimposed over Kelleys anus. OK,he fumed, well, what do you see? A red circle appeared, to punctuate Kelleyscrotch as he turned back around. This was followed by a yellow triangle, floatingover the artists armpit as he raised his arms. Here then were a series of aestheticfig leaves, modernist forms not just attached to the lowly genitals or to thebody, but configured as direct displacements from them: abstract form as aneffigy or a covering, laid over a gaping void, or on top of the body, linked tobase, instinctual desires.7

Looking back over his production, Kelleys work might seem at first to pro-pose an overwhelming archaeology of modernist or avant-garde forms. The signsof this history are everywhere. From minimalist-derived object formats to con-ceptualist-seeming archives and arrangements, we move in rapid succession to

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7. Throughout these scenes in Blind Country, Kelleys primal configurations deviated slightlyfrom Kandinskys conclusions, altering the Bauhaus yellow triangle, red square, and blue circle into ayellow triangle, red circle, and blue square. This deviation called up another, more recent deploymentand alteration of the Bauhaus questionnaires forms, the early logo devised for the Museum ofContemporary Art in Los Angeles, spelling out the abbreviation MOCA with a blue square, green cir-cle, and red triangle.

works that consider the history of agit-prop aesthetics (From My Institution toYours, 1987), socialist realism (Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988), readymades and accu-mulations, assemblage, and even sculptural mobiles. In terms of painting, Kelleyearly on referenced key Abstract Expressionist mastersPollock, Rothko,Stilland would go on to explore the forms of the monochrome and the rela-tional composition, the grid and the shaped canvas, geometric abstraction andbiomorphic abstraction, simultaneously, persistently, and illogically. Abstractionbecame an unending obsession, figured fir st through Kelleys not ion inEducat ional Complex of the blank, the open form of modernist negationrecoded as abuse, as oblivion and repression, in all his play with the idea ofrepressed memory syndrome during these years.

Hardly systematic or coherently archaeological, Kelleys modernist tropeswere instead presented as a spiraling series of effigies, displaced dead things, anunceasing parade of high culture in the necrophilic space of the corpse.Turning to modernism as a way of using an artistic form that itself is dead,Kelleys tactics could be seen as an ultimate anti-idealism, almost a realism:Death forces one to confront materiality, as he would clarify.8 This, Kelleyseemed to say, was the only way we could relate to the formerly resistant claimsof high culture todaythrough (their) death, through what death means,through what he also sometimes called, with sardonic laughter, critical joy, anegative joy. In the realm of culture, we are all playing with dead things,Kelleys work seemed to imply. We are all, aesthetes, lovers of death, devotees ofthat which is gone.

The question we are left with in facing Kelleys work, however, is what theeffigy hides, whatas a replacement and displacementit could be a stand infor. Suddenly, in Kelleys hands, modernism had a secret, having become a hid-ing place for other forms. The effigy was a double strategy, an excessive hybrid, acomplex form, in the expanded sense that Kelley gave this crucial term. For ifthe effigy presents the products of high culture in a deathly guise, the tactic alsoopens up these forms to substitution, to their being occupied by other dynam-ics, other drives, other cultures. If modernism is presented by Kelley as aneffigy, what entity thrives beneath this surface, what heart, if any, beats beneaththe faade?

Lets go down into the chapel of my basementthe shadowed domain ofthe tinkering genius, Kelley proclaimed at the conclusion of his very first pub-lished essay.9 The invitation might be understood as a call to consider what liesbehind or beneath the appearance of Kelleys forms. It is an invitation that stillstands today. It too has been left standing.

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8. From the Sublime to the Uncanny, in Foul Perfection, pp. 62 and 66.9. Kelley, Urban Gothic, Spectacle 3 (1985), reprinted in Foul Perfection, p. 9. The essay concludes:[T]hat which lies on the surface is often not of the same material as that which lies below it.

*At the moment that I write these words, a spontaneous memorial to Kelleyhas sprung up near his home in Highland Park. Not coincidentally, the memorialpresents itself as a sprawling, open-ended effigy of Kelleys More Love Hours Than CanEver Be Repaid. Like the shrines to public figures that emerge from time to time in thewake of tragic deaths (Princess Diana), or like the recent high-art versions of thesame associated with the work of someone like Thomas Hirschhorn, friends andadmirers have been contributing old afghans and a menagerie of stuffed animals inever-increasing profusion, accompanying their effigies of Kelleys effigieslike somany testaments to lovewith graffiti inscriptions and hand-lettered signs: WEMISS YOU MIKE, we needed you, FREAKDOM IS LOVE.10 The outpouring ofemotion testifies to one thing at least: Kelleys engagement with form as an effigysurely carries along with it not only its negative, critical ambitiona modality of anti-art, a strike against the dominant cultureit also participates in a deep way with thecultural or popular forms of acknowledging loss and bereavement. Kelley has left uswith this dual legacy at least.

Equally immediate and spontaneous, another recent Los Angeles memorialto Kelley points in similar directions. A previously-planned concert at the galleryThe Box focusing on the Los Angeles Free Music Society, with which Kelley hadbeen involved, was transformed into a memorial concert for the artist. I arrivedjust as one of Kelleys oldest friends, the artist Jim Shaw, began to sing, accompa-nied by younger musicians like Eddie Ruscha (who as a boy had a starring,unforgettable role in Kelleys film made with the Yonemoto brothers entitledKappa, 1986). In dissonant, wavering tones, but beautifully sung, Shaw performeda rendition of Kurt Weills It Never Was You. This was followed by the jazz stan-dard Nature Boy, the old songs reoccupied and spoken as if directly to Shawslost friend, after which the audience wandered about in stunned silence, withmuch weeping. Shaw was followed by a performance of Extended Organ, a bandwith which Kelley used to play. He had once recorded some sounds for the bandto use in a concert he had been unable to attend, and so Kelley was made toaccompany his friends in this form, in sonic effigy, from beyond the pale. And atthe front of the stage, Paul McCarthy sat, his mouth held so tightly against hiscupped hands that you could barely see his face, his hands themselves hugging analtered microphone, reminiscent of the photographs of Kelleys early perfor-mances where the artist utilized sculptural props as megaphones to generatenoise. As the band began to play, Kelleys old friend and collaborator could beheard vocalizing, words sometimes struggling through the guttural sounds like

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10. Hirschhorns shrines, of course, would hardly be conceivable without Kelleys example, and thesame could be said for most forms of contemporary sculptural language, such as the deep reflection onKelleys tactics attested to by Rachel Harrisons recent projects. One couldand shouldwrite anentire book on how Kelley was involved in reformulating the project of sculpture for our times, defini-tively passing through and beyond the minimalist endgame to a series of new dynamics.

Oh, No, or what the matter was. But then McCarthy descended into completelywordless vocalization, a spiraling series of mourning sounds, wailing sounds,wounded sounds, sea sounds like the cries of dolphinsan almost animal grief,rhythmic and spreading out across the audience in waves, a despair that seemed toemerge from a space before or after the human, before or after the subject. Agrief that was too early, too late. Pure trauma. It hollowed you outlike aneffigyand the noises continued. After thirty minutes, I could take no more, andmade my way quickly, shaken, from the scene.

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