Mike Kelley: Laughing at Deadlines

Mike Kelley:Laughing at Deadlines

Tom McGlynn

The first image I ever saw attributed to Mike Kelley, in the early 1980’s, was his appropriation of a well copied and circulated office joke in which a sequentially animated character bounces up and down with laughter with the punch line, “ You want it when?” At the time I thought it a canny choice for conflating art in the age of mechanical reproduction with an art world imperative to mindlessly crank out culture. Inside of this high take on low irony was an intimate identification with a working- class resistance to keeping up with abstract quotas. This resistant impulse could hold true for the office worker and the art worker alike.

Born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Mike Kelley was a brilliant interlocutor for an erstwhile Middle America whose assembly line dreams lay re-possessed in second hand shops and recuperated in its teenagers’ impulsive subcultures. Across this wasted plain Kelley laughed up a tornado of demons that combined (in increasingly antic, recombinant scenarios) lapsed Catholic taste with existential philosophy, crackpot bricolage with the wreckage of Modernist theory, mental institution aesthetics (and ethics) with art institutional critique and adolescent desire with ritualized farce. He did so with an extraordinary sense of composition and color, not so much derived from abstract formal logic as much as it seemed scraped from the inside of his skull, a psychedelic byproduct of a particularly vivid, and periodically bad, trip.

Kelley moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Cal Arts where he was no doubt influenced by the laid back conceptual art of some of the older artists he met there, like John Baldessari. It seems as if this deadpan approach to high concept suited him well since it is a thread that has run through the length of his career. In a 1985 Artforum article entitled “American Prayers” his longtime friend, and the bassist for Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon, mentions his knack for creating “ structuralist devices to make fun of the myth of rational thought which led to the myth of progress”. The imperative of Modernist determinism was yet another deadline to be laughed off. Of course there were other artists who took on this challenge in the mid-1980's like Richard Prince, Sherry Levine, and even to some extent Jeff Koons. While Koons offered a hard, stainless steel, reflective bunny (pedestrian pathos forged into commodity fetish) Kelley went soft, with collections of sewn, knitted and stuffed cuddle creatures gleaned from second hand shops and Salvation Army centers. Both artists understood the logic of pathological recuperation of sentiment and how this became hot content in an increasingly cold-shouldered world. Kelley, at the time, however, seemed to distain highly fabricated and polished artifacts, favoring instead the abject jetsam of what might be termed “surplus sentiment”, thereby not only recuperating empathic longing but also emphasizing the hand-crafted object over the mass produced, the impure and raggedy intention over the slick and obscure object of desire. This type of choice made evident his light- footed genius for being a formidable discussant in postmodern polemics, while simultaneously fashioning and throwing spitballs from the back of the lecture hall. His transgression wasn’t really one of arrested development, however (a common critique leveled at him by his detractors), so much as it was one of intentionally arresting and creatively analyzing the intentions of a culture that had gone seriously off the skids.

Remembering his mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 1993, “Catholic Tastes” I can recall the sense I had that Kelley, whose work I had experienced episodically in regular shows at Metro Pictures gallery in New York, had finally arrived at a point where his sociological slumming and philosophical auditing had reached a perfect balance of pathos and logic, of humane content and a serious study of its conceptual degradation. Although he was consistently and wickedly ironic, Kelley also seemed to manage a soft spot for societal screw-ups, both in the specific and universal sense. His project never became subject to the volatile insider- trading of postmodern theoretical stock, as many of his contemporaries’ work had. Prince and Koons seem long since vested by the dominant market to represent this particular co-opting of radical credibility. Sherry Levine’s 2011 retrospective at the Whitney embalmed any appropriation/transgression in institutional amber. Museums have become the (very expensive) second- hand shops of ruined cultural intentions. In contrast Mike Kelley was not only a clever recalcitrant but also an artist of highly refined intellect and intuition. By trolling marginalized subcultures (most often his own) for a tangential reading of failed intentions, Kelley’s work embodied, projected and almost predicted the most recently missed deadlines of so- called “serious” culture’s mandate for a new and improved future. John C. Welchman, in “The Mike Kelley’s in Mike Kelley” published by Phaidon in 1999 explains the artist’s modus operandi along these lines:

“Repression-production makes a Kelleyan pair with regression-movement, a helter-skelter of returns to anality, infantile object attachments, post-mirror-stage childhood and pre-sex adolescence. For Kelley such moves are not primitivizing, ‘escapist’ or nostalgic…. Instead he insists on tracking the implications of regression not ‘outside’, but ‘within the culture’, correlating them with an enquiry into social ‘failures’ and dysfunctionality; remembering that the act of going back, especially to the fuzzy moment of becoming adult, has an equivalent in the gesture of artistic making”

Kelley’s work, from about the mid -90’s up until his death in January 2012, along with the work of his friends and contemporaries, like Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon, became rapidly recognized, celebrated and assimilated in an overheated art market underwritten by newly distributed wealth at the top. The ultimate irony of the situation of his success and how it undermined his abject aesthetic had to have seriously troubled Kelley. His project was so intimately linked with shadowing the social failures of the same culture that had come to lionize him. Material success necessitated his setting up an extensive studio with assistants (an assembly line of sorts) to help fabricate his work. There was a sensual diminishment felt in his work, somewhere in the later 90’s when one became aware of how the delegation of fabrication in some of his installations left machined echoes of the whining router and busy drill press. While the installations became more ambitious and scaled –up, it seemed as if his crucial balance of weighty concept with flighty form had become somewhat compromised. This had to be a concern for an artist whose conceptual project was so intimately connected to its irresolute materiality. How does one continue to make impertinent, resistant art when its production moves from a do- it- yourself, creative recuperation of regressive psychological states into a mode of production that might just fit too well within the logic of late capitalism?

Kelley’s persona (of a manic auteur directing his own alter-egos) acts out quite vividly in his film and video works. These works seem conceived as an integral part of his tactics to keep his art aggressively reactive. Perhaps like Duchamp he had enough wit about him to anticipate his own radical artifacts’ shelf life. In these works he seemed focused on activating his special relationship to gross materiality and arch ritual, while pulverizing social protocol with manic individuation. These included works like “Day is Done” which has been both performed live and presented as an art/ video installation, first at the Gagosian gallery in 2005. This work is at times reminiscent of the lunatics’ theatrically taking over the asylum in Peter Brook’s 1967 film Marat/Sade, though in Kelley’s case the scenes are set in a dystopic high school assembly.

Kelley wonderfully spun his own asymmetrical eddy in the churning tides of art world tastes and popular culture. He may have recently felt hard pressed to creatively annotate and critique the implications of regression within contemporary culture when that culture increasingly does such an insane job of constantly relapsing into and recycling its own pathologies. That “fuzzy moment of becoming adult” seems to have become extended indefinitely. “You want it when?” has become “You can have it now!” but it will be forever incomplete. The punch line without the deadline is not as funny.

Timespotting: Damien Hirst’s Finite Jest : The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 , opening at Gagosian galleries worldwide Jan 12, 2012

Timespotting: Damien Hirst’s Finite Jest. by Tom McGlynn

Damien Hirst : The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 , opening at multiple Gagosian galleries worldwide January 12, 2012.

As much as I wouldn't like being an art “handler”, Damien Hirst’s multiple simultaneous arrivals at Gagosian galleries worldwide could do with some unpacking. As his “Spot” paintings sat on the gallery floor in Gagosian’s West 24^th St. location yesterday, ready for installation along with similar works in 10 other locales from London to Athens to Hong Kong, the phenomenological reality of Hirst’s grand gesture was brought home to me. In this as well as the other spaces, these large hand- made objects would be fixed in a specific time and place against the asymmetry of random experience. With his technical orchestration, Hirst minimalizes rational chance by maximalizing a kind of irrational uniformity. Like the form of the paintings, which are fixed symmetric grids of contrapuntal multicolored spots, a tension is felt between this controlled experiment and random life. His is a subverted Newtonian physics. The apple falls predictably straight down, dappled sun is sieved through a prism to reveal its constituent color wavelengths, but all of it happens in freeze frame.

“Anyone looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed” McLuan from The Medium is the Massage.

Was it Stalin who was purported to have made up exact replicas of the same room across Soviet Russia so that wherever he happened to be traveling a sameness of mis- en -scene was established? It’s not too difficult to figure out why a controlling despot would want to maintain the illusion of stopping time. But why does Hirst want to? I don’t think it’s a Dorian Gray scenario. Despite his grandiose artistic ambition I’ve never viewed Hirst as a strictly old school narcissist.

But getting back to the Age of Enlightenment, I’ve always seen Hirst’s projects as conceived under an empirical lens. The late 18^th and early 19^th century theatricality of his prior installations from the shark tank to the vitrines filled with vivisected bovines and clinical displays of pharmaceuticals smack of the curiosity cabinets and studies of learned amateurs. The casts of Enlightenment men were basically alchemists morphing into men of modern science, amateurs in the sense that we would see them in relation to the professional research class we presently maintain. In retrospect there’s a bit of an endearingly awkward, home- made quality to their experiments and models left behind. It is this pathos, of the innocence of old- fashioned empirical investigation, which imbues a lot of Hirst’s work .

With regards his place in contemporary art I would say Hirst is a reactionary against progressive Modernism in the sense that Picasso was also a reactionary against it. While Picasso may have wanted to re- enchant modern painting with a primitive animus by appropriating African artifacts from an anthropological museum, Hirst virtually loots the curious cabinets in studies and libraries of 18^th and 19^th century manor houses. Both artists have felt compelled to slow down, stop, or even reverse time in order to avoid the searching clinical light of what Baudelaire once referred to as the “gloomy beacon” of the New.

All of this is relevant to what I would call his present jest-ture of presenting a series of symmetrically conceived paintings in a simultaneous environment. In these shows Hirst’s latest conceptual cartwheel (remembering those notorious spin- art paintings) retains the model of the projection of empirical belief while capitulating to the failure of it promise.

That’s him, the professional amateur, in the spotlight, losing his religion.With Hirst's career you get the sense that he's just trying to keep up a competition that has already run its course. He represents a brand of the institutionally condoned avant-garde, which, by a strict definition of that word, isn’t transgressive at all. There was some poetry in his early work but this recent tactic is a mirroring of a desperate market. He's more of a professional apostate for a religion established by the money changers kicked out of the temple of high modernism. Hirst’s bad faith is augmented by some of the changing social realities of contemporary life and is probably the most interesting aspect of his work in general. The fearful symmetry of his Spot paintings installed in multiple locales worldwide is not the kind that illuminates the tangled network jungles of the post- modern night. Instead it creates a network overlay that functions as an amusing but purely technical representation, like the automata that delighted the pre- revolutionary courts of Europe. His punch card pathos slots too neatly into the crystalline structures of virtual social space that have come to dominate our current cultural and political reality. Our present- everyday- now is far from being physically possible but nevertheless makes claims upon our old- fashioned, empirical reason. In this wide world Hirst could be our most accurate representational artist.

Enter, stage left, a true post- modernist, Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who had some very timely advice of his own to offer, in his day, about cultural spectacle. Here he delineates the function of what he calls “the recuperator” which I think is an apt coda to this essay.

“ Time scares him because it is made up of qualitative leaps, irreversible choices and once in a lifetime opportunities. The (recuperator) disguises time to himself as a mere uniform space through which he will pick his way, going from one mistake to another, one failing to the next, growing richer.” Debord from The Real Split in the International.

Tom McGlynn copyright 2012

Mob at Bullet - Situational Awareness

Bullet Space is currently showing "Mob", a varied collection of works that address both the processes and forms of de-constructive aesthetics. Many of the artists employ appropriation strategies or what Guy Debord of the Situationist International termed detournement. While a concurrent retrospective of Sherrie Levine's famously appropriative art holds sway in a sepulchral installation at the Whitney, these artists seem more interested in prying meaning from a generalized pre-occupation with popular spectacle, and therefore seem more aligned with Debord. His definition of detournement implies an active resistance to ,and upsetting of, spectatorial zombiehood, in order to expose the mechanisms of the modern culture machine.

In the gallery press release, Dixon Mills writes:

"The show still functions as a coherent meta-narrative of sorts, a Tower of Babel in which all the participants speak different languages but nevertheless agree upon their general intention to cause a disruption in relaxed spectatorship, a zoned -out reception."

Martynka Wawrzyniak and Richard Kern puncture the surface sheen of fashion imagery in video and photography respectively. Alexandra Rojas echoes the compulsive overkill of Warzyniak's "Chocolate" video loop with a video of her own, smashing white panels of plywood, which are on adjacent display. In a related aesthetic, Scott Lawrence uses the second skin of clothing to create tableaux that abstract bodily gesture.

Tom McGlynn deconstructs popular and corporate logos, in paintings and prints and T-shirts, to discover the singular "anti" buried within their collective commodity theses. Will Boone offers a negative critique of his own by pairing Black Flag with Black Sabbath and Black Panther logos in the same print. Suzanne Broughel addresses issues of black and white in her work that includes a mandala-like piece made from different "flesh" colored band-aids, while Matthew White's cloud of purple goo hovers above like concretized malaise.

Leo Fitzpatrick's collages from old, yellowed, paperbacks evoke nostalgia for longing in an abject poetry of projected desire. Walter Sipser's drawings seem similar in their humorous yet fatalistic awareness of the impossibility of knowing fundamental truths in a fundamentally shallow society. Quimetta Perle's bejeweled video -eye could be either passively observing the show from the vestibule wall or surveilling the event. Gunars Prande's documentations of erased graffiti walls witness the gagging of customary individual gesture on private property, while Noc 167 represents as as a progenitor of the New York graffiti movements dating back to the 1970's.

Perhaps Andrew Castrucci's "Oxycontin" painting indicates the typical somatic response to the "Society of the Spectacle", a situation that the rest of the artists in this show seem so furiously intent on unpacking.

Oona Perkins

The show is up until December 21. Gallery Hours are 1-6 Friday thru Sunday, or by appointment. For more information: (917) 841 5921

Website: http//www.bulletspace.org