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00:00:01
Mike Kelley
174 Plays26 days ago
This episode is dedicated to beloved and prematurely deceased American artist Mike Kelley. The Tate Modern has set up an impressive retrospective, those once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions that you cannot miss if you're in town. So we decided to dig in and bring it to you if you can't make it and enhance your experience if you did.
There are opinions, feelings, stories and a cacophonous experience that will leave no one indifferent. Jack White finally makes an appearance again as we had once promised!
Joana and Emily introduce you to the universe of Mike Kelley, of anarchist and punk teenage and young adult years, who ceaselessly poked at the overwhelming and overpowering world of entertainment. Then they move on to his academic life and career achievements, always marked by a rebellious streak consistently visible in his work about the traps of memory, the failings of education and psychology, and the fine line between fiction and reality.
For more about Ghost and Spirit @Tate Modern: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/mike-kelley-ghost-and-spirit
For more about Mike Kelley: https://mikekelleyfoundation.org/grants/overview
If you want to support us: https://www.patreon.com/c/exhibitionistaspodcast/membership
Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
Music by: Sarturn
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Transcript
Introduction to Mike Kelly and the Episode
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Exhibitionist as Emily here. So glad you could make it today. And I'm so glad to be here. It's really nice to plug back in to these conversations with Joanna and yourselves. And this one is no exception. So today we're looking at Mike Kelly. He's an American artist who really broke a lot of molds and ah had a really fascinating career.
00:00:37
Speaker
There is no lack of opinions in this episode. So do be warned. There's some feelings about Mike Kelly and I think some interesting perspectives to share. So I hope that you enjoy the episode. Thanks so
Support and Social Media Engagement
00:00:52
Speaker
much for listening. Oh, and I wanted to mention, if you haven't noticed already, you might've seen that we have a Patreon account. Check it out in the show notes.
00:01:01
Speaker
Thank you so much. We have folks signing up already and I can't tell you how much it means to us that you are signing up to Patreon, giving us a few quid. It just means the world to us. So if you want to check that out in the show notes, please do so. Enjoy the episode.
00:01:31
Speaker
welcome Back to exhibitionistas. This is the podcast where we go to contemporary art exhibitions and have a good chat about them. Do you like the ideas and idiosyncrasies of contemporary art? Great. You are in the right place. If you're a regular listener, thank you for coming back. It's so nice to have you here. And if you're new around here,
00:01:52
Speaker
I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition goer. I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, an art curator and writer. And as Emily said, we visit solo exhibitions so that you have to also that you visit them vicariously through us. Just a quick reminder to go to our Instagram account for visuals. If you're not familiar with the artist or the exhibition, it might make the episode even more enjoyable.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah agreed agreed and you put some great stuff up there Joanna you are the maestro of the uh of the social media account and there's I mean I have to say I love like kind of wandering through the exhibition again on Instagram it's really nice. What is the artist we're exploring this time Emily in this episode?
Mike Kelly's Artistic Journey and Exhibitions
00:02:37
Speaker
It's a biggie. It's a biggie. So this week we're examining Mike Kelly. He's an American artist whose work involved drawing video found objects, textile banners, collage, video, photography, and music. Kind of sound really. It's kind of an extension of the word maybe. But we're exploring his work through the lens of his exhibition Ghost in Spirit.
00:03:00
Speaker
that's on view at the Tate Modern until the 9th of March, 2025. So Kelly was born just outside Detroit, a fellow Midwest owner, just like myself, which I like. Yeah. Yeah. So he was born just outside of Detroit in 1954 to a white working class Roman Catholic family. His father was a janitor in the public school system, and his mom was a cook for the executive board room at the Ford Motor Company.
00:03:27
Speaker
So, Detroit, I mean, those of you, some might know, was Motor City, and, you know, kind of those big, you know, car companies having a job like that, I'm sure, and held a little bit of status. I mean, it's still working class, but that would have been a very good job to get, um for sure. So, there isn't a ton of information about his formative years. I mean, when I was at Tate's Modern in the book shop, I was like, what else do you got? and you know kind of what they had.
00:03:58
Speaker
was really limited to the exhibition catalog. This could likely be by design, as he often played into myths about himself. You know, this kind of myth-making is not that uncommon among artists. Jack White, Meg White, they were willfully ambiguous. if I know, we got back there to a Jack White reference. I know. It's been too long. It's been too long. It's been too long. We promised. We promised our listeners that Jack White would make an appearance.
00:04:27
Speaker
ever so often and, you know, we've been neglecting him. Hello, Jack. You're listening, I'm sure. but Yeah, so I mean, so they were willfully ambiguous about their relationship for years. I mean, I remember reading yeah about Bob Dylan kind of manufacturing. Oh, yes. Right. yeah Like about his autobiography and stuff like that. So and I mean, look, you know, this happens all the time. So that's that's not that scandalous really, but I have found a few things, I mean, from from his childhood and teenage years. So if you listen to interviews, once in a while he will make a reference. So apparently he described himself as being a bookworm. And when the interviewer asked him, so, oh, did your parents seem encourage, you know, your your interest in culture and in books?
00:05:17
Speaker
he had this kind of abrasive answer, you know, like, yeah that was seen as something um to do. um And so to annoy ah his dad who said he was, you know, weird and doing interested in weird stuff, he took up embroidery, for example, or sewing, you know, so there must have been a part of him that really rebelled against a very typical American family period. And he did have that rebellious streak in him, but that through him, but that was a nerdy rebellious streak there since the beginning, apparently.
00:05:58
Speaker
And that makes sense, I mean, you know, the 50s in America were a very special time, you know, it's like those cookie cutter houses, the suburbs were just exploding, you know, kind of having this formulaic life, you know, it's really held in high esteem.
00:06:14
Speaker
And you're right on the cusp of the counterculture of the 60s that is going to be exploding and exploding in Detroit. In Detroit, and yeah. Man, huge, huge scene for the counterculture, which, you know, we'll certainly get to, but so you're right.
Cultural and Personal Influences
00:06:28
Speaker
Nevertheless, the history and autobiography emerge in all 40 years of his artwork that he produced. You can see that his identities of being a white male of Irish heritage, middle, well, kind of working class, I guess, more than middle class, raised Roman Catholic, all of these. Right. so But the new Tory leader just said that you can become working class if you're middle class, if you work at McDonald's. So what?
00:06:57
Speaker
Did you not hear that? and hear this now I saw this whiz by on Instagram, this real, where she's like, well, I was born middle class, you know, but I worked at McDonald's at 16, so I became working class.
00:07:09
Speaker
um Oh my god. Sometimes. Sometimes. Oh my god. No clue. No clue, woman. Anyway, that's a whole other rant, isn't it? And this was someone on Instagram replying and saying, well, I am working class, but I do buy my stuff at Sephora. So I guess technically I'm middle class now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I did a shop at Waitrose. So I guess I'm coming up in the world. She said Waitrose. Sorry, it's not Sephora. I don't know why my mind went to Sephora. Yeah, it's probably lipstick.
00:07:41
Speaker
yeah it's my lipstic Yeah, I have lipstick on today, people, and it's throwing us off. He's throwing us off. But yeah, so so that his working class heritage had a huge influence. And so these were through Leinzer's work that often married ideas of ritual. So his identity was married with ideas of ritual.
00:08:06
Speaker
He had lots of work that revolved around high school because of the ritual. And obviously, Roman Catholic stuff played into that. His you know ideas of memory and and popular culture, but kind of really subculture and counterculture as well, played in with these identities that he had you know of himself. he played He played in that thin line between culture and reality which I think is really, really important for now as well. Or culture as reality, I guess. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think that's a much better way to put it because what we see and consume and how we put ourselves in that and then how we reflect that back to the culture is a huge thing in his work.
00:08:56
Speaker
but And these were the times where culture came through television yeah where that we don't have now. So everyone was watching the same thing. And you can see how Kelly was very aware of that opium of the people, which is not no longer religion. And he says so himself, it's entertainment. And so he was very aware of that this idea of entertainment that kind of gets to you, like you're saying, goes under your skin, comes out somehow.
00:09:26
Speaker
and is really part of you and therefore the counterculture is something that we have a hard time explaining the young uns now because it's it really is a sort of a parallel balance where you kind of try to gnaw at this prevalent big empire of entertainment through television and radio back in the day.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have those monocultural moments anymore. But yeah, so Detroit is a huge music city in, you know, when D is sort of coming with age. I mean, it still is, obviously, but it was giving birth to monumental acts at the time. I mean, the Stooges, raw, unadulterated. Oh, one of my favorites. So I love them. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and C5. Iggy Bob. Yeah, totally.
00:10:17
Speaker
I mean, so it's super countercultural influences are going on at the time. I get the sense that Kelly was cool enough and in touch enough to, you know, feel it and experience it. So so here's Kelly. He's a long haired teen. He's a marinated in religion and also this counterculture. So what does he do? He starts a noise band, aptly called Destroy All Monsters. You love that. That's such like a teenage, you know, like, you know, kind of thing.
00:10:45
Speaker
But the band was a mix of punk, psychedelic, and hard rock. And importantly for Kelly, there was a real performance art aspect to the band. So he was there, he was one of the founding members, he was there for I think the first three years with them. yeah And you can listen to some of those stuff online and I guarantee you it is not gonna be an easy listening experience. So, you know, I floated around some of it and it was like I couldn't quite hang there for that long. But, you know, you appreciate the the energy and the vigor. It was a performative experience. You had to be there live. Yeah, I agree. It's not really something, I mean, for me personally, um
00:11:25
Speaker
Some of these punk bands are hard to listen to on your iPhone, I mean. That's not what they're for, I guess. Yeah, totally. Performance art, obviously, is in the exhibition which we'll talk about. And I think that some exhibitions, like the Marina Abramovich one, they bring that performance alive in a very unique way.
00:11:49
Speaker
You know, not all of them do but um, so little foreshadowing please maybe ah Yeah, maybe that was a little bit of a tidbit so Kelly went to the University of Michigan and in 1976 enrolled in the MFA program at CalArts. And a couple of things kind of struck me about his education. First, the University of Michigan is like a 40 minute drive from his family home. And he's like, he just seems like such a rebellious character and and granted he's
00:12:25
Speaker
you know He's not moving far from Detroit, which is certainly a center that had a cultural center that had a lot to offer him. so In that sense, yeah you could say that he's not moving far from Detroit, and that was really you know kind of his gravitational pull. But also, you know I have this image of people at that time of really just chucking themselves out into the world. and You know, if you're from the Midwest, you go to the coasts, right? It's like, oh, I see. Yeah, that's interesting that you say that because I have no idea how the culture was. Yeah. Yeah. And he stays there. He stays put near the family home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But and then and then and then also it's like, you know, kind of reflecting on on Mike Kelly and you obviously seeing the exhibition, the fact that he entered an MFA program, I think that's it feels like a really establishment move.
00:13:15
Speaker
you know from someone who is in a noise band you know I mean and that's that I find that really interesting I mean you can't imagine Iggy Pop going to Juilliard. I think you're hitting the nail on the head there because that I think for me is a real contradiction in this artist whereby He's very rebellious and at the same time he's very, very cultured and he's interested in the culture and the hybrid culture. He puts himself out there and he becomes part of sort of the establishment of contemporary art, you know, in the 80s and 90s and and
00:13:54
Speaker
and so forth. So yeah, yeahs that's really him, I think. and Yeah. And I mean, you know it's not even that it's you know a bad choice by any stretch. They just struck me as kind of counter counterintuitive from what I know about him. And obviously, there's a lot for me to learn. but I mean, and they're good ones, you know? I mean, so the Cal art scene in the 70s, you got the body art and feminist practice, in part thanks to julie chicago Judy Chicago, rather, good lover. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and check it out. She had an incredible exhibition at the Serpentine in London not so long ago that we made an episode about. um so So both, you know, this body art and this feminist practice
00:14:40
Speaker
were offering a counterbalance to sort of formal painting and sculpture at the time. So you can see his attraction to that from that standpoint. So I want to play a little music. Oh, cool. Great. Because I think that this is how I encountered Kelly. But I think a lot of our listeners, too, who are from our generation. So this is Dirty by Sonic Youth.
00:15:26
Speaker
Listen, I love this and I remember discovering this album and then do and thinking how perfect the covers were. Oh, for sure. You know, not knowing at all, it was Mike Kelly and how incredible the music was. The texts were amazing. Don't touch my breasts. I just want to go to my desk. Brilliant. You know, sung in the monotone and scratchy voice of Kim Gordon, at least some of the songs. And the cover, you know, an orange plushie that has seen better days, you know, that looks like an alien.
00:16:03
Speaker
for dirty, right? And then a drawing of a cool couple fleeing that was in fact, I found out recently, David and Morris Smith, who reported the most killers to the police, which is in reference in this podcast of this horrendous thing for the album goo. So these were made by Mike Kelly.
00:16:22
Speaker
just like the Black Flag famous three chunky black line symbol was drawn by Raymond Pettibomb. It was Kelly's name. So the Black Flag is a reference to an anarchist sympathies of the band and Kelly at the time as well, it seems so.
Kelly's Educational Influences and Artistic Freedom
00:16:40
Speaker
So okay, so this is the 90s, 1992, Dirty, the album came out,
00:16:46
Speaker
um It's a long way from 1976 when he landed in CalArts after having studied with a lot of, as per his description, post-war Greenbergian formalist teachers that he was not super fond of. What's Greenbergian?
00:17:06
Speaker
Oh, you don't remember, Emily? We talked about Clayton Greenberg in ah the Guston episode. He was a very, very revered art critic who defined, you know, the painting ah movement that was inspired by what they called European art in America that gave birth to the okay abstract expressionist movement and theorized painting as being an autonomous space that was about painting itself very much into abstraction and that was kind of the inheritance of this generation but also the dread because it was becoming as we saw with Guston lots of painters were kind of coming out of it you know kind of stretching out
00:17:56
Speaker
of this very dogmatic way of creating art. But the art schools are always kind of in a certain delay. So they inherit these dogmatisms quite if few you know quite often and still today, and then impose them on the students. So the story was very different at CalArts, which was a very strange and different school. I don't know. I didn't know this. So I'm going to put this out there. So CalArts was Walt Disney's dream project. And it's Walt Disney, the Walt Disney of Mickey Mouse. What? Yes. That was his dream project. Dream project. You had a dream project of Disneyland.
00:18:34
Speaker
Yes. And of CalArts. Exactly. And apparently CalArts was like a THE dream project. He wanted to create a school with working artists where you could learn your craft in a cross-disciplinary way and where teaching would be an all-immersive operation with artists who were actually creating and being paid for their craft, from what I understood. There's a lot of urban myths about CalArts at the time, so I'm not going to perpetuate those. But it was a weird thing that was created by Walt Disney and his brother Roy. So in 1961, they merged the Schwinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music
00:19:27
Speaker
And in 1970, CalArts opened its doors in Santa Clarita Valley. So this is quite incredible. And it and explains why Judy Chicago, when she got there, she was like, I want to do women's studies, you know, for the first time ever in any university. And they were like, sure, let's do this. They were open to all novelty. She was an artist.
00:19:50
Speaker
She was showing her work and she had a voice and she could go there and and do so. So um I'm just going to read the last paragraph of the CalArts About Us page. In the half century since then, successive generations of innovators from CalArts have set the leading edge of contemporary artistic practice from conceptualism, feminist art and design, video and computer music in the Institute's early years to the Disney Renaissance, Pixar Revolution and SpongeBob, from interdisciplinary performance and digital design to the latest directions in music, AI and interactive media, hybrid arts, whatever that means, yeah and immersive experiences. So they still have that or they want to claim that edge for themselves. So if
00:20:41
Speaker
listeners, any of you out there, have been to collards recently, right back. I'm really curious to know about your experiences. Yeah. Wow. I had no idea. It's crazy, right? So in 1976, the feminist studies were ripe, as well as a sort of a Viennese type of performance, ah of you know, with an embodied, violent, bloody actions that the public perhaps not only witnessed, but endured, as it were.
00:21:10
Speaker
And meanwhile, the women's building was thriving and became a space to experiment away from the male-oriented performance of the time. You know, Vito Acconci was a teacher there, so, you know, he very much brought the performance aspect to it. So this is something I took from an interview that is in the catalogue that they did for the catalogue of the exhibition with Suzanne Lacy, who was one of Judy Chicago's students,
00:21:38
Speaker
and you became a very established performance artist. And the interview is very interesting. I'm not going to disclose it right away, but it's really interesting what she says about you know Kelly in particular. So um this was no longer the 60s, where women were told to stay at home more systematically, which is exactly what she says. It was a period of liberation for quite a few people, not only in terms of gender, so not only the women, but also in terms of ethnicity. So we're coming to grips with lots of questions that still haunt us today in the United States. That's not mentioned the unmentionable. Yeah. Yes. um and yeah Anyway, so Kelly arrived also at a time where formalism and painting were being disputed by his teachers. So very happy to free himself from that Greenbergian formalism
00:22:32
Speaker
He had John Baldessari as a teacher, for example. He was very close to him. ah So Baldessari famously cremated his paintings and baked them into cookies. And although that sounds funny. Oh, my God. You can imagine what it means. yeah He burned years of his practice. He grouped all his paintings together, burned them all, made cookies out of them, put them in a jar and and show them.
00:23:01
Speaker
This was in 1970. And in 1971, he also wrote, I will not make more boring art. And I think he made his students write that on the wall as a sort of a workshopping kind of thing going on. So he proceeded to make text and photography based work and to be incredibly successful at that. There was another artist who I adore. I mean, part of my thesis is on him, Douglas Hubler.
00:23:30
Speaker
um He was at the time ah working on his shift towards more conceptual art. And he famously said, quote, the world is full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add any more. I prefer simply to state the existence of things in terms of time and place, unquote. So this was very important at the time.
00:23:57
Speaker
So use photography, drawing, and text to extend the image through human imagination, such as a work from 1970, which is a single straight vertical line on the center of the paper. So this was sometimes in catalogs, sometimes in exhibitions. and So central vertical straight line in the center of the paper with a sentence below saying, quote, the line above is rotating on its axis.
00:24:26
Speaker
at the speed of one revolution a day. Unquote. So this was the context as well, where Lucilipod had published her seminal book. like This is was a really, really important book at the time called The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.
00:24:47
Speaker
thus commencing an irritating trend of ah exhibition weird exhibition timelines, which is really irritating to me. but and i mind This was the timeline she was writing about, and it had a huge impact on on the conception of art as an immaterial thing.
00:25:04
Speaker
so If the culture at CalArts was subversive, so welcome thing for Mike Kelly to come to, it was still reductive in terms of what the art object object could be. So it was another kind of dogmatism for Kelly, with the exception of performance art, which was dear to Kelly and which he seemed to have absorbed through anarchy and punk.
Exploring Mike Kelly's Exhibition at Tate Modern
00:25:28
Speaker
So Deira, his teachers were to him, he seemed to be unconvinced by the conceptual nature of their teaching. So still, again, he was in a context where he wasn't that happy with a second kind of dogmatism that was deemed incredibly groundbreaking in the art world. Still today, you know, I told you about the performance drawing, you know, there's still, there's there's ah there's a There's an acceptance that you can take the public to, but conceptual art will probably for a long time still be too much. This idea that the art object doesn't have to exist, as Solowith said. So Solowith sold his wall drawings as diagrams. So you specifically bought two pieces of paper. One was a diagram for the installation of the the wall drawing. he
00:26:20
Speaker
did many, many wool drawings that you could make yourself. So the owner of the drawing could make the drawing themselves. so it was And then so you had the diagram and you had the certificate with the title, with the date, the materials that needed to be used. So when you you know spent a lot of money, let's say,
00:26:44
Speaker
on a piece of work, all you had was a binder with two yeah sheets of paper. So that's difficult to accept. But it was, I must say, not to demonise conceptual art. One of the movements that most had the most impact on me because I came to art through literature. Literature was my first love and poetry experimental poetry And then seeing that and being in a country where you didn't have access to a lot of art that you read about, conceptual art can travel really well. You can make it yourself. You can make a soloit in your own room. And by the way, in Portugal, we have a soloit in a restaurant that I'm not going to name.
00:27:25
Speaker
and they don't have the certificate for it. And it's a conundrum. Is it a solo wit? So each time we have dinner there, there's these conversations and there's a ah colleague of mine who says, it is not a solo wit. It doesn't have a certificate. So additional it is not one. I mean, yeah just Yoko Ono keeps popping into my mind. and Yes, she started all this. One of the people. The space that Mike Kelly's exhibition is in is the exact space that Yoko Ono's exhibition was in.
00:27:55
Speaker
in the Tate Modern and there's just so the Venn diagram has a very substantial chunky middle of overlap there, doesn't it? After the break we can look at how this incredible recipe cooked up what is Mike Kelly and is you know demonstrated throughout the exhibition because he explodes onto the scene. like He takes all of it and just does his very own thing with the interpretations of of all that he's experienced at CalArtson before. He's already doing it. i mean you know I don't want to say that he isn't already doing it.
00:28:35
Speaker
before he even gets to CalArts because he is for sure is. for sure but yeah But he comes out of CalArts with you know a lot of these ideas that are just bursting forth from his own from his own art. So more on that after break.
00:29:00
Speaker
So we're back to the cacophony of Mike Kelly's exhibition, which is curated by Catherine Wood, director of program, Fiontan Moran, curator of international art, and Beatriz Garcia Velasco, ah assistant curator of international art at the Tate. And as soon as you arrive at the entrance of the exhibition space, there's already quite a lot going on. There's a very loud, dark pink color on the wall.
00:29:29
Speaker
The text is written in white with Mike Kelly and big letters. And the the name of the exhibition is Ghost and Spirit. And there's a little text that by Mike Kelly, which looks a bit like a sort of a poem that they took up from his writings. And it says, a ghost is someone one who disappears, an empty concept. A spirit is a memory. Think the spirit of something. It's not there, but it is.
00:30:00
Speaker
is what remains. It has a lingering influence. I am a ghost. I have disappeared. I've disappeared, but survive in others. Others are reflections. They're for the purpose of proving my existence. What do you make of this, Emily, knowing that Kelly died by suicide at the age of 57? You know, in terms of who he was at it as an artist, it reminds me, actually,
00:30:28
Speaker
If I can read something I just was reminded of in the catalog. I think it kind of speaks to this point. So this is a quote from the exhibition catalog. This is a quote from Mike Kelly. 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 of fiction, a pack of lies. I was experiencing, I think, what has come to be known as the postmodern condition, a form of alienation quite different from post-war existentialism because it lacks any historical sense and there's no notion of a truth that has been lost. I mean, yeah, right? It's like he does, he feels himself not a part of history, not a part of culture, just very ghost-like. I mean, it really,
00:31:22
Speaker
hammers home to me, you know, what you've just read and why this exhibition is so aptly named. You can see that it was a preoccupation of the artist's idea of haunting culture, being haunted by culture but also the artist as someone who has the duty to be a haunting presence.
00:31:43
Speaker
within that culture yeah and through that culture as if everything anyway is going to die. Everything you value now is going to die. And one of my questions as I was going to see the exhibition was how did this all um How is this all perceived now? This culture, this, you know, I was thinking of Sonic Youth, I was thinking of Stooges. How is this all perceived now, especially by the younger generation? And as I got in, I thought, this is an exhibition from my 18-year-old son, Buffalo New, for sure.
00:32:21
Speaker
And, you know, of course, he's studying game art at UAL and this very good course, I'm really in awe of them because they did take them to the Tate and they did take them to see the Mike Kelly exhibition. And it's interesting because ah apparently they all reacted really negatively. It didn't, he connected a lot. He loved, you know, the I can maybe talk about it later.
00:32:47
Speaker
ah what he loved and what he didn't connect to. But it was interesting to listen to him and to see that one of the things that he really, really loved was a dark humor. Yeah. But there's a lot of it. and There's a lot of it. And it's something of that age, isn't it? I mean, you are so brave and you are so abrasive when you're in your teens, not even yet in your 20s.
00:33:10
Speaker
And everything is so distant still, you know, the responsibilities, the, and that's exactly the first, the theme of, and especially the first, maybe probably all the exhibition is about adolescence or around adolescence. But the first room really very specifically talks about adolescence, which is kind of like a liminal state between childhood and, and your first adult years. so So just to kind of step back for a second, so the exhibition, so it's it's held in the Tate Modern in the same rooms that Yoko Ono had her exhibition for many months. So I guess that's about kind of give or take five, six rooms. It really brings you through his art
00:33:55
Speaker
his trajectory more or less chronologically, cacophony is exactly the right word. Here the video is from different rooms and the audio from that and you hear other sort of overlaid audio. so his His music is available in different bits and the the second to last room is just an insane feast for the senses. I'm gonna say feast for the senses just for lack of a better term. The first work that you see as you enter the exhibition is I think is one of my favorites. It's called Personality Crisis and it's from 1982 and it's as someone describes in the catalogue
00:34:38
Speaker
aptly, it is that moment in your life when you're a teen. Well, for us, I think it's the passport when you have to order your identity card, and you have to find your signature. And I remember being told and telling my children afterwards, you have to stick to this signature all throughout, you know, because this is your identity. And that's what allows the borders and people who work at the border to identify you.
00:35:07
Speaker
and And the panic where you go like, okay, I have to choose something. And you have three drawings that are signatures. So you see Mike Kelly, you see his name written in very different ways. One of them is completely undone. And I love that work because as someone very aptly says in the catalog, I'm finally getting to it.
00:35:26
Speaker
um it there's huge usually when you when you try to perform let's say a signature it's something very small and it's something that will be your mark and here it's planned out it's augmented it's quite big and it's next to another work which is often quoted when it comes to um Mike Kelly which is Mike Kelly is the poltergeist so him exploring the idea of the poltergeist and it's the central it's several drawings and the central one um a little bit like a church you have like the different areas and then you have the altar
00:36:07
Speaker
and then you have him photographed with cotton wool coming out of his nose and his eyes rolling back into his brain as if he was having a sort of a an exorcism done to him, performed to him, or if he's as if he was being taken over by some malefic power.
Themes of Adolescence and Identity
00:36:28
Speaker
But it's just cotton wool. And he on the route the if I remember correctly on the left side, he talks about adolescence and about the use of the word dreamy and how interesting that is because a dreamy state is kind of an interstitial state. And then on the the other side is more of a theory
00:36:51
Speaker
of the poltergeist. Am I correct in saying that? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's kind of a fun work as well. And then you turn and you have a whole room with memorabilia from several performances. yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just called performance related objects. And it's, you know, kind of from 77 to 79. And apparently it was assembled in this way.
00:37:19
Speaker
by him in 1998 so there's like a lot of objects yeah that that he used in performance and I mean obviously They're a bit out of context because they're not in the performance any anymore. But you can see there's like light fixtures on the ground. And I mean, it it is just jam packed. Like there's just so much to look at, you know, drawings, there's bits of sculpture. it It felt intellectually interesting, but I felt unmoved. You know, I didn't I had a hard time connecting with this room.
00:37:55
Speaker
positively or negatively. you know I just sort of feel like, oh, okay, so these are things that were important to the artist throughout his performative career in particular and his early career.
00:38:06
Speaker
You know, I mean, I think the the bit that you talked about his signature, I mean, even that to me, I mean, I think I applaud you for sort of thinking about that. i You know, I mean, I just sort of thought, oh, like Mike Kelly, he's, he's doing it in cursive, he's doing it in these sort of block letters, and then it's deteriorating. I was kind of like, Oh, okay, interesting. You know, I mean,
00:38:26
Speaker
I got more out of it by what you've just said than when I was standing in front of it. I remember the first thing I thought in that room was, oh my gosh, he draws so well. His drawings are incredible. yeah yeah They're very close to Raymond Patibon. They were very close friends. You can see some of his notebooks.
00:38:45
Speaker
um But it's true that if you don't read about it, you don't know what performance particularly they are, part of they kind of merge into each other. You don't quite know exactly where it stops and where it begins. And then you go into the second room that is dedicated to his banners. There's two rooms with banners. So the the second room and the third room. And Banana Man.
00:39:09
Speaker
Banana man. Banana man. He is up for us. We are the banana people. We are the banana women. Exactly. I didn't really think about that. Yeah. Bless him. Yeah. Banana man. Yeah. So in the second room. I mean, for our listeners, I say this because the banana is on our thumbnail and it's kind of a banana peel that kind of symbolizes this the discomfort that sometimes you have when you enter the art world. Yeah, and my sister just gifted you. I am looking at the banana uses this. It's in it's on my mic. ah Yeah, yeah. But in that second room, you know, you you see
00:39:49
Speaker
In these banners that he's put together first of all, it's like the the first the opening room is white and it feels very light and bright and there's you know, the drawings and the the You know wording etc. And in the second room it's black like the walls are black and it feels much kind of darker and heavier and you There's the the first banners that you have on the right are kind of focusing on some of the tropes of his Irish heritage. the and So you have like a cloverleaf and you have a devil and skull and he's kind of really playing on some of the ideas of of his Irish heritage.
00:40:31
Speaker
And also school banners. I think that's kind of the idea is to go back again to the to the school years. There's been a lot of talk about how sexual some of the works are and how gender-defying they are. And to be honest, I didn't see that at all. And when you take a closer look into especially the Monkey Island performance, which is the second part of the first room,
00:40:59
Speaker
You can see that there's a lot of references to desire, sexuality. So that performance was about these theories that were experimented on monkeys about the relationship, the bonding between the mother and the child. And it's funny to me that the projection that he makes becomes immediately quite sexual.
00:41:20
Speaker
and which I find in really bad taste. I mean, not because I'm a mom. The limits between family life, sexuality, identity and freedom or liberation are so tenuous and so importantly discussed and moved and and interrogated, but I just thought he was very cartoonish. Yeah. And quite, you know, and, and also I miss the performance itself. So another thing to say about Mike Kelly and the Banana Man performance really brings that home is that, and the last film you see when you leave the space, there's a video of of ah of a later, much later performance.
00:42:06
Speaker
is that he was an incredible performer. That's one of the things I took. yeah He was this nerdy kid with acne scars, but also quite charismatic and and attractive and and magnetic. The way he moves is incredible.
00:42:23
Speaker
There's a moment in the bananama Banana Man video where he's discussing a car crash. So to simulate the car crash, he blows up a balloon. Two bits of the balloon go to one side and then to the other. And he's discussing where who to save first in the car crash. So like pretty dark stuff. But the way he moves and the way he moves his hands is like when kids reenact things for you and they don't quite have this um kind of rigid way of moving your hands like grown-ups have, they kind of bend their hands a little bit, which again gives this impression of maybe being, you know, defying his gender and defining the way defying the way a man should behave and move as a performance artist. He seemed to have had a very big charismatic presence and personality that I found lacking in the exhibition, except in that room,
00:43:22
Speaker
Banana Man, where you have the banners, where you have really funny drawings, a bit petty bonusque. And then you have like this, um this fascination he had with faces, like as soon as you put two holes and a curved line, you have a face. And that influenced so many artists and still does. He's an artist artist.
00:43:43
Speaker
Those are very, very funny and interesting works with a lot of darkness in the background. But i I found that room to be the most enjoyable. There's a quote from that room that I think speaks a little bit to what you're talking about in terms of, you know, kind of how he moves. But he says, an adolescent is a dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality, as far as I'm concerned.
00:44:08
Speaker
So, I mean, you know, an adolescent is a dysfunctional adult, and you can see that playing out, right, in so so much of what he does, but certainly, I guess, you know, in the movements that you're talking about, kind of the way he's holding his hands and all that kind of stuff.
00:44:24
Speaker
You know, I felt much more connected to him in that room, obviously, because like, as you say, you could watch the film and, you know, really, you know, experience as much as is possible in 2D, you know, his presence and charisma. And, you know, there was this part of me that was just like banana man, and he has like the ah penis section coming out. Again, this sort of sexual, yeah. And, you know, like, you know,
00:44:53
Speaker
It doesn't, it didn't do much for me. The next room yeah is the one that I love, so that was my favorite room. So this is the room where ah you see the the the abandoned toys, the stuffies, that have been, excuse me, put into collage, like ah there's a very big collage of it on the right hand wall in front of, or sorry, just behind the kind of melted candle wax structure, sculpture rather. And then there is ah off to the left, there are more stuffed toy sculptures. Some of them are toys hidden under blankets on the floor. And, um you know, there's one that was there's like sort of they make a giant snake kind of feature that goes from the wall to the floor.
00:45:46
Speaker
And then there's also the felt banners, which are sort of like, very much from Christendom. You know, I mean, you can imagine like the felt banners that they have in, um in churches. Yeah, exactly. But they're kind of, you know, they have his own spin on them with you know, kind of a different take on the... There's one that says, fuck you, with the you as an asterisk, asteris and then underneath there's a sentence saying, now give me a treat, please. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's there's... Which signifies how he stands in relation to adolescence, education, parental education, and the church, I think. Yeah, exactly.
00:46:33
Speaker
There's one that says pants, shitter and proud PS jerk off. Yeah. got And I, and I also wear glasses, I think is what it also said. So that's sort of a black and white one, but yeah, there's the, um, the, the, the,
00:46:51
Speaker
piece that has all of the stuffed toys in a big collage. The wall piece, yeah. The wall piece, yeah. Which is like a rug, crocheted kind of but rectangle or square, yeah. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, yeah square rectangle, not sure. But it's called More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Sin, sorry, the Wages of Sin. So easy. And it's from 1987.
00:47:20
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is so this is a bit of what how he talks about this piece. So he says in this piece, composed of a large number of handmade stuffed animals, and fibercraft items.
00:47:36
Speaker
The toy is seen in the context of a system of exchange. Each gift given to the child carries with it the unspoken expectation of repayment. He goes on, but it's essentially, you know, this guilt payment from the parents, which is interesting. You know, I mean,
00:47:55
Speaker
I find it so sad. I know. Of all the things you can say about gifts, especially gifts within, you know, this parent-child relationship, that's what you choose to say, like, oh, this is a guilt trip for the kids to then have the burden of the gift, carry it, and then have to behave accordingly. And also, this is a seminal work. So this is the moment where it pivots for him, yeah and where people love him. They love the plushies. So the plushies come from thrift shops. So these are discarded plushies. And they also make up one of the last works of the of this room, which is called our dot dot dot youth.
00:48:43
Speaker
It has in it one of the plushies that became the the the cover of dirty. Sonic Youth's 1992 album. And it's a lot of plushies, it's like portraits, like taking the plushies seriously, so making drivers. Like a driver's license shop. Like a driver's license shop. And then you have Mike Kelly's face amongst them. And I think that's my favorite work. I love that one. I love it. I love it. I love it to pieces. You know, as ever is the case. I didn't know really much about Mike Kelly before I came into this exhibition.
00:49:17
Speaker
And usually what I try to do is not learn much before I go. I just want to have the experience, see what I think. And when I went into that room, you know, before I read anything, I was like, oh, wow. So these are the tools of how I viewed the stuffies is like the tools of childhood, because all this all the stuffies are knackered, you know, eyes missing, threadbare. They look like they have been through the mill of childhood, you know, and then some and and, you know, how my initial instinctual read on that was they have done their job.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, you know exactly. They've gone through the emotions. They've borne the brunt of a child's anger or fear or a need for comfort or obsessive love or you know, or or neglect, maybe, you know, I mean, like, they have, they have done their due duty as stuffies for a child and and what they can do. And then when I read um in the catalogue, they described the stuffies as, and this is a quote from
00:50:26
Speaker
from the catalog, Mike Kelly's bears and snakes and dogs are menacing and seething with resentment. And that just couldn't be, that is just not how I experienced them. Maybe that was the intention.
Artistic Disconnection and Cultural Commentary
00:50:41
Speaker
This is very interesting because I think one of the issues for me with Mike Kelly is the discourse First, Mike Kelly's discourse and then the discourse in general around the work is so divorced from the experience of the work for me that it becomes mind boggling. So Mike Kelly is one of these adored artists. So when I said that we were doing the episode on Mike Kelly, everyone gasped, everyone I spoke to was like, ha pause.
00:51:10
Speaker
You know, and I didn't know... Pause for reverence, yeah. Pause for reverence, exactly. I didn't know much about Mike Kelly, and there's three artists that are usually brought up by male, other male, interesting feminists.
00:51:25
Speaker
ah good people that I respect when and when talking about art, which are Philip Guston, Bruce Nauman and Mike Kelly. Those are kind of the three that I noticed that men who are interesting, open, ah ready for you know gender questioning, etc. They're the ah the quoted artists.
00:51:47
Speaker
And I get why, but for me, going through Banana Man, which I found at a certain point, the ability to run with a very sad joke, daunting.
00:51:58
Speaker
and then getting to the plushy room and everything that is said about it kind of made me think of my ah my child my teenage years. and you know And when I realized that the nerdy kid that I fell in love with was actually the same as the kid who played football, just with another counter-cultural thing going on, more interesting formally to me,
00:52:21
Speaker
but kind of the same thing, kind of the same macho, kind of the same sex obsessed, you know, on anistic person, you know, and it kind of made me think that this is not as There's a lot of desire to be open and to be different and to be a feminist and to be rebellious and to not and to go against the establishment, um particularly in this piece. So the piece was that the thing that Mike Kelly said about the plushy piece, or the mural, the the one that is called More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repayed and the Wages of Sin in 1987, is that he hated the fact that people loved it.
00:53:04
Speaker
And at a certain point he fixated on the fact that a few people said that that piece was about abuse and that therefore he had been abused. And it made me think of that thing where 10 people pay you a compliment and then an 11th person comes and says, you look like shit. And then you're like focusing on the 11th person.
00:53:24
Speaker
and forgetting everything else that people said about the piece and he says so himself about this piece so I listened to an interview where he says my art is reactive so he reacted about that and he said I never did anything autobiographical if anything as we've said He likes to deconstruct the notion of identity. There's a really interesting interview in the catalog with Suzanne Lacy where she hypothesizes that he was even against the feminist because at a certain point the feminist movement was about essentialism, which is like the essence of female people is this, which now is still a big deal in feminist movements. You have the non-essentialists and the essentialists.
00:54:11
Speaker
um And when you say you're a feminist, usually you add up like non-essentialist feminists. So I don't define womanhood and femalehood. I'm more interested in the cultural construct of femalehood or womanhood. um So he is deconstructing identity, suddenly there's this huge biographical read by some people of his work that he had been abused. And then he starts building. So the rest of the work that you see in the exhibition, a lot of it is about this idea that he suffered trauma. And so he was interested in this big idea of the time in psychology, which was repressed memories. And there was this big backlash against it because
00:54:56
Speaker
It was discovered that psychologists and therapists were kind of feeding. questions that had in within them already this grain of suggestion of you have been abused haven't you because you keep talking about holes you know like this thing of like holes therefore vaginas therefore penetration therefore you were abused by your father and so there was this massive over exploration of these things in psychology and he thought okay okay so i'm gonna do some autobiographical stuff i haven't done it's
00:55:31
Speaker
yet which again I'm thinking no you have because you are talking about yourself as this counter-cultural kid who did performance you listen to some kind of music but like Irish you know lapsed Catholic etc but anyway that's neither here nor there so then he goes so that's the the following room which is the ah very this concertingly big room that is incredibly difficult to curate and kudos to the curators who really try because this is ah the the ceiling is incredibly high. It's a vast room that has these spaces.
00:56:07
Speaker
spaces um and it's difficult i mean the yoko ono show was you know admirably curated was really great because it's not easy to install work in there they kind of get lost in the space but kelly does have big insulation works so from that period onward you have his reaction to this to people loving this work and his parents um misgivings with it. And so he worked for a long time on reconstructing his childhood school buildings from memory.
00:56:50
Speaker
And so he realized that he could not. And so he went and took the floor plans of those places, had them all kind of glutinated, and then built a massive structure that couldn't be, it's called something complex, and couldn't be in the show, educational complex. Thank you. It's from 1995. It's in the catalogue.
00:57:14
Speaker
and it's too fragile to be shipped. So you don't have that. You have yet another work that takes up the whole center of that space, which is called Sub-Level. And it's about the basement at CalArts as sort of like a hint towards the idea of the subconscious and the superego and whatnot. And the places that he can't remember are covered in pink crystals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he loves the color pink, because pink is vaginal, is the flesh, it's whatever. So I enjoyed that too. I mean, I enjoyed looking at it, you know, I sort of appreciated the, the um you know, kind of having this very plain sort of
00:58:01
Speaker
plywood exterior that's quite cool with the interior of this beautiful pink crystal. I love a pink crystal. The words quartz, you know, so I mean, there was there, you know, that was enjoyable to appreciate. This is a landscape marked not by memory, but by forgetfulness. So he was interested in Yeah, in the the the huge blank spaces. And again, I mean, that links to what you were saying in terms of the plushies and, you know, some of the critiques of the holes and that are left in people's memories and what gets left out.
00:58:42
Speaker
and how that gets expressed ultimately, I guess. but i To be honest, that that's the part that really moved me the less in the exhibition. Then there's another piece which is a big, big, big, big cloud made of tinfoil yeah where he recorded himself. So there's sort of a picnic blanket with wits with pa pot and pans, I think, on this on the ground. But again, using this sort of reflective silver element that has they you put in cars to protect them from the sun. And then the tinfoil um structure from which a sound comes, which is him reading about
00:59:31
Speaker
UFO sightings and UFO conspiracy theories then in the back you have the candor piece which is a whole thing that he did like two pieces that he did about Superman and then there's a really weird piece that is a sort of a sort of like a painting like something that you put on a wall rectangular with these beads and these yeah like a big collage exactly which is the text explains it's an african-american technique of for making funereal objects and then there's another piece where there's um a milk jug
01:00:13
Speaker
that you buy in the supermarket without its label with two eyes and a mouth and then there's a sort of a vase covered in the same beads and the text says that he's taking in this African-American craft ah to produce those objects, those venereal objects, but of course you're more drawn to the smiley face that is much more pleasurable to look at than And of course i'm so this is the time, beginning of the 20th century, where you know it's appreciation and not appropriation. But again, I found this in really bad taste. I'm like...
01:00:52
Speaker
okay dark humor for sure but at the moment and especially you know dragging that sort of craft that is completely out of context and saying oh you look at that and you're more interested in that it's presuming a lot from the spectator yeah and it's presuming and I think it's the problem with Mike Kelly is that he's incredible for someone who is so wants to be so free and liberated He presumes a lot of behaviors from which he draws the form and the materials of the piece. And then he imposes a certain behavior on the spectator or he presumes that the spectator is going to have a certain culture and a certain behavior, which I found really presumptuous, I guess. Just to say that we have the the photographs as well. So there's the photo show.
01:01:48
Speaker
It's called Photo Show Portrays the Familiar from 2001. And these are just the black and white photographs from from familiar places to him in Detroit. So they're kind of- I think I blanked out on those. That that was actually, I mean- Tell me more. As someone who enjoys photography, i and I enjoyed them. I mean, he hasn't, you know, he has an eye, but ah So it says in the text for the work, he also plays with the meaning of familiar in an artwork title, which is sometimes used to describe a type of uncanny ghost or spirit. So the images are of his family home, of the skyline, of a statue, of, you know, just kind of, you know, of a restaurant facade. I mean,
01:02:43
Speaker
various scenes around Detroit basically that were familiar to him growing up. Formerly I'm not sure that people will get that from the objects themselves. I think that would be for me the real issue and if you need that much text and that much information then it seems that Kelly is talking to a very small number of people. And there's one work, it's um there's two images that are quite beautiful, very colorful on the other side um of the sub-level, so that big installation of the sub-level of CalArts, which are called um Form and Content, I think. or No, Form and Color, which is a play of form and content, which is this
01:03:32
Speaker
big debate in visual arts of like, is the content more important? Is the form, does the form drive the content? Does the content drive the form? be Because one of the pictures is um saturated and and very precise and the other one's a bit blurred out and and very much like ah an abstract painting and there are photography or in check prints.
01:03:54
Speaker
um and there's another example of that, but I won't won't dwell on it too much right next to it, which is a sort of a painting, drawing. And this and and this it's this so Kelly was so abrasively cultured, like he talked a lot about post-modernism, post-structuralism, all the art that was going on in every period of his time was very ah mournful about Jeff Koons and the like. He really hated it. He hated being associated with but what he called Brit Pop. And he describes Brit Pop in a very abrasive interview that's on YouTube called 105 Minutes with Mike Kelly or 105 Questions with Mike Kelly, ah where he
01:04:39
Speaker
describes Britpop as basically artists wanted to fuck Kate Moss, god which brushes over the fact that there's not only male straight people in the Britpop movement, but also ladies who are straight, who maybe do not fancy women. So there's a lot of abrasiveness that comes from being so aware of all these movements that do not trickle down to your general audiences. And it's interesting, I mean, kind of what you were saying earlier about him really being the artist's artist, you know, speaking to some of these big debates within, you know, contemporary art.
01:05:19
Speaker
I mean, i yeah, that that makes a lot of sense for why maybe I, as not someone who is steeped in that, didn't feel connected to a lot of what was going on. But I also think there's just that dichotomy and this goes back to his formal education, though he's a punk rocker.
01:05:38
Speaker
of, you know, all of this really basic, you know, pop culture stuff, you know, I think from his perspective, mit I don't know couldn't possibly speak from but it's like, on the one hand, he's saying, you know, I want to work through the medium that everybody can connect to because it is pop culture is what is you know, so close to every single person. But yeah, he's like, how, how is he doing that, working through that medium, and still kind of connecting it to these very heart i ideas high art ideas? And I mean, for me, I'm lost in the middle somewhere, you know? Yeah, but I see why. yeah I see it like a lot of people, a as you've said, you know, really adore
01:06:24
Speaker
his work and that's great and but yeah i feel i feel definitely lost in the middle there i see the low kind of art quote unquote that he's drawing from and you are certainly illuminating some of these you know higher ideas in you know art theory but But yeah, I don't see how, i don I don't have an entry point really on either of those spectrums. There's a good example of that, which is I think maybe a stronger piece for audiences, which is, so at the end of that big room, there's the candle piece where he imagines um ontown yeah Superman's hometown exactly in these very colorful
01:07:09
Speaker
bell jars that contain the sissy and the video projections and holograph hologramic images as well. And then next to it, there's a 1998 video, if I'm not mistaken, I think it's 98, where it's a video of Superman. So he hired a very muscly man dressed as Superman who reads exits of the bell jar by Sylvia Plath.
01:07:35
Speaker
And I think that's more, but and it's it's it's annoying because again, it's one of those kind of very clever and very direct performances that he was capable of. And it's very, it's it's like a side note to the big hand or extravaganza. That's where he lost my son, I think. um He told me, well, you know, the Superman thing doesn't really interest me. Like I'm not into that kind of thing. And it's a very obvious,
01:08:03
Speaker
bashing of the alpha male, super powered, strong, potent, formidable figure that he's kind of like gnawing at because he's reading an extract of ah of a feminist icon such as Sylvia Plath and particularly Beljar, which is such an incredible piece of angst and depression and self-loathing and it's a whole journey and then you see ah Superman being a really bad actor so he's really bad at reading and I think that would have been
01:08:40
Speaker
more empowering for the spectator if it had had a more... I guess the curators were very um respectful of what was considered masterpieces and also we mustn't forget that this is a traveling exhibition that went to the Bours du Comères in Paris which is the Pinot collection and Pinot was one of the first people to buy his big installations so maybe there was an obligation there to show the big installations But I think sometimes as a curator myself, I always like to think, okay, so what would be the piece that would be a sort of entry point into the the work, whether you love it or not, whether you connect to it or not, but at least for you to be more immersed in what it means to be Mike Kelly and how he was devouring the feminist movement. I mean, the plushie piece is a piece that takes up
01:09:38
Speaker
the craft that was the feminine craft, which was knitting, embroidering, sewing. It's not, you know, it is there for a reason. And maybe I would have put those two pieces in dialogue be less chronological and also less chronological.
Critique of Masculinity and Cultural Norms
01:09:53
Speaker
I mean, this is 1998. I mean, and maybe have helped people kind of get into the grittiness and the need and the desire, because I think with Mike Kelly, what's really beautiful is this desire to question this wild maleness that he was caged in. I mean, you are. I mean, if you talk to men nowadays, we're still having this conversation. It's not easy, you know, and it's interesting to hear a man talk about that.
01:10:23
Speaker
So for me that's an issue because at that point I was really tired of candor, I was tired of sub-level. If you're tired at this point, good gosh. And I feel the same way. Good grief! This is the second to last, this is kind of the last big room, there's still a film at the very end and kind of a whole way of of some notes and things like that. but um But yeah, so this is the last big room. And oh my God, is it big? And cacophonous to the max. So you it's called ah extracurricular activity, projective reconstruction. Is that? I think that's it. And I think that was supposed to be a big happening that he wanted to produce for 24 hours.
01:11:12
Speaker
Yeah, um which go ahead, explain it. You're American, it's your duty. Oh boy, this is a big task. So basically, this is a room that again, the walls are black, and there's lots of low lighting and specific lighting on certain objects. So it's not sort of a bright light space.
01:11:34
Speaker
There's video, there's sculpture, there's movement, there's there's lots of photography. But basically, the room is looking at a that line between culture and reality and how we see ourselves in it, I think is a lot of what he's working with here. So there's there's a quote from him that says, the folk entertainments I represent are true in the sense that most people have done or experienced such things themselves during their lifetime. I don't see them simply as shallow any more than I see, quote, false memories as shallow. They're truly felt experiences. Movies and pop songs are similarly real on the emotional level.
01:12:19
Speaker
I'm playing with the equivalence of art and true recollection. So, I mean, it's it's a difficult room to explain. I mean, there's lots of music, lots of motion, lots of lights going on. I mean, you know, by the time you're at this part of it, as we've said, you're a bit tired, you're a bit like, what, what? And then you come here and it's like it takes all, it took all of my wherewithal.
01:12:42
Speaker
to sort of hang with it. So it's like there's um you walk in and there's like these hanging screens that have people posed in these sort of um Roman Catholic you know, Mother Mary kind of poses, I guess, and they're sort of cycling through and it's people sort of mimicking that. there's There's a bit in the corner which is basically a big piece of red fabric that's like a curtain and it's twirling around on like some kind of metal
01:13:19
Speaker
Hanger thing there's a spotlight on it and in the spotlight you see the shadow of it looks like a woman who is a Stripper and she's in a state of disrobe or maybe you're looking at someone don't say Yeah, that's right. Yeah, she is dancing. So there's that going on you get images of Like stills, I guess maybe from like horror movies or movies There's a film there's a reenactment of a that horror movie scene where you're almost being killed or you're running away. Yeah, there's a child Yeah, and there's a teenage woman Yeah, and there's there's also just like, you know, there's there's images of like a Dracula or a vampire movie. Mm-hmm. And then the person dressed up is that person in the movie there's there's reenactments of
01:14:15
Speaker
I think it was from Carrie, maybe? I don't know. But it's like high school, you know, people on a stage and it's from a movie and then you get it recreated. And so I guess, yeah, I mean, kind of looking at how we see ourselves in the culture. And it's all based on these school events, plays that you put on rituals and rituals that you but that allow you to be someone else and to wear makeup and for men to be women and for women to be older and to perform these these plays and these
01:14:58
Speaker
um to inhabit these characters that are of the culture, but that are also caricatures of the culture. And there's this very strange, so there's a lot of photographs of real yearbook yeah images of the colleges.
01:15:17
Speaker
and then the reenactments photographed, I find it so vampirical. There's something about it that is kind of sucking the life out of it. His exercise of never wanting to believe in anything and never wanting to represent anything other than reacting to something that already exists means that there's no real position. I went back after Trump got elected and I thought, okay, am I going to see this in a different way and I felt the need of someone one taking a position somehow and you can argue that he does take it obviously because what are we doing
01:15:57
Speaker
being here in this life, rather than reacting to things that existed, that pre-existed and that will exist beyond us. Sure, of course, that is arguably something that you can think, but at a certain point, it comes to you and you're making a decision. And that became really apparent when I went back to the exhibition. And and it's going back to the last thing I read about the show was this Zan Lacy interview that I really, really urge you to read if you have the catalog.
01:16:28
Speaker
The last thing she says is, there are many formal elements in that kind of early feminist performance work, but its critical reception was based on its content. So going back to the idea of content and form, its critical reception was based on its content. For us, so the feminists, content led to the development of forms, but these were often unrecognized.
01:16:54
Speaker
The art world gives credit to the formal innovators, not the content innovators. Mike Kelly may have been able from an abstracted distance to deal with the content of gender and cultural expressionism through craft, but this became celebrated as a formal innovation.
01:17:12
Speaker
Now he's the one known for it, not the girls. wow yeah Because he's so free formerly. He loved surrealism. He wanted to be free. And you know there's um a Duchamp quote that I'm going to butcher right now, where he said that whenever he felt that he was getting close to establishing any form of taste, he would move away from that form and go to something else. This idea of not clinging to an aesthetic and to work on what an aesthetic creation and pervasiveness meant in the culture. um down you know that that There was it,
01:17:54
Speaker
but now I need more. I need something else. I'm not content with it. And I don't think it's Mike Kelly's fault. I think the art would, I mean, he was a countercultural kid who was represented by Gagosian, which at the time was the biggest gallery, one of the first galleries to have Galleries all across the world now. It's kind of normal, but he was the first one to have galleries everywhere I remember looking you know in art fairs and seeing oh, he's in New York. He's in Sao Paulo.
Impact and Reflection on Mike Kelly's Work
01:18:27
Speaker
He's in Hong Kong he's in How weird you know this is a powerful gallery that suddenly was showcasing
01:18:35
Speaker
a person who was very reluctantly someone who saw himself belong to the art world. And I think going back to that triad of Guston, Mike Kelly and Bruce Nauman,
01:18:49
Speaker
those are artists who are very reluctant with the idea of the art world, its mechanisms, its dogmatisms, and its money and the people who held the power through money in it. and But he ended up in the most powerful gallery. So the discourse around Mike Kelly for me is full of hurdles and yeah of loopholes and blind spots. Yeah, i I agree. I mean, i it does feel like, yeah, maybe if I saw it in a different era, maybe the era that it came out in, maybe I would feel differently about it. But I think, you know, it just, I enjoyed the ideas.
01:19:34
Speaker
and the execution of them did not speak to me in the way that you know I would have hoped. But it still did. Look, we were having a fascinating, and in my humble opinion, conversation about it, which is a brilliant thing in and of itself. The experience of it is the is the rub at the end, and that's what ours to take away. you know And that's what we're talking about here, is our experience of this exhibition.
01:20:02
Speaker
and You know, something that you you clipped on Instagram on the exhibitionist's feed recently was a snippet from a conversation with the talk art guys. It was the Jesse Darling interview. Ah, yeah. And it was, you know, saying exactly that. It's like you see a movie, you listen to a song, you know, your experience of it is valid, whether it's good, bad, ugly, indifferent.
01:20:33
Speaker
And that that same ah that same authority and that same breadth of experience and ownership needs to be taken in the art world as well. And I was so happy that you clipped that because it felt like something that I really needed to hear. And I think it was something that I hadn't appreciated fully.
01:20:56
Speaker
that you know that that reverence and the the cultural you know kind of aura around certain artists can be impenetrable at times, you know and and and not really in the art world. So I haven't felt that you know surely as in depth as I imagine you know people who are more versed in the art world do. But um but yeah, it's like this this experience that we've had,
01:21:23
Speaker
at this exhibition of Mike Kelly's is ours. And that's what we're that's what we're talking about here. So maybe I'm hedging my my ourselves against any recriminations over. I don't want to you know offend anyone who loves Mike Kelly. He's he's he's definitely lovable, for sure. If, you know, if he's speaking your language. Yeah, he was beloved. I mean, one thing to say about him is that when I started researching him,
01:21:53
Speaker
I um came across a number of articles that were written about him when um People learned about their ah his passing and they're so tender. He was so beloved. He must have been a really good friend. He must have been someone perhaps a bit fragile, perhaps a bit vulnerable and and putting himself out there. you know So, I mean, ah this is not this is our experience. yeah This is our take on it. We're two women in their late forties with a certain, you know, you're American and Portuguese, European,
01:22:30
Speaker
And this is, we have expectations from exhibitions and artists and it doesn't mean that when our expectations aren't met, it immediately, you know, evacuates the artist from the platform. I was very happy to go to the, and I think I'm going to go back to the exhibition to be honest.
01:22:49
Speaker
with with people you know with people from the family you know that haven't seen it yet. I'm really interested in kind of really taking it all in because it's going to be the last opportunity I will have to experience his work in such a massive way. Again, liking, disliking, not really the point. you know It's about coming together and and trying to to give that space to someone who worked so hard all their lives through probably intense bouts of depression. So know you know that that' that's what it's all about. And this is so enjoyable, Emily. Again, I'm so glad you're back.
01:23:27
Speaker
Oh, it's really nice to be back. and and And yeah, thank you so much. And thank you to Liberté for such a brilliant episode. And ah yeah, kind of adding more color to the to the podcast. That was great. I loved her um her reminiscence of the Picasso exhibition that really sort of got her, you know, so interested in exhibitions and they need the unique the uniqueness of them so yeah so that was great but thank you this is great I mean lots more to talk about with Mike Kelly and and more exhibitions coming up so thanks so much for everybody for listening and thank you Joanna
01:24:09
Speaker
Well, thank you, Emily. This was indeed, again, a pleasure. The next episode is an interview with the great, the one and only, Stephen Elcock. And if you don't have his last book, Elements, you must purchase it right away or borrow it or, you know, however you get your books.
01:24:31
Speaker
or however you get your hands on books, just do it. It's such an enjoyable experience to leaf through all those images. We'll be back again after Stephen Alcock with more exhibitions for you. So