Art essay

MIKE KELLEY

STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM

DELMONICO BOOKS PRESTEL Munich, London, New York

MIKE KELLEY

Mike Kelley is organized by Stedelijk Museum Director Ann Goldstein, in cooperation with The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. The curator of the first concept is Eva Meyer-Hermann.

Edited by EVA MEYER-HERMANN and LISA GABRIELLE MARK

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Foreword Ann Goldstein

WORK, 1974–2012 John C. Welchman

FAKE ROCK: MIKE KELLEY’S MUSIC Branden W. Joseph

MIKE KELLEY AND THE COMEDIC John C. Welchman

MIKE KELLEY: SUBLEVEL George Baker

INTERVIEW WITH MIKE KELLEY Eva Meyer-Hermann

Checklist of the Exhibition Exhibition History Performances, Readings, and Other Events Videography Discography Selected Bibliography Photo Credits

CONTENTS

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One of the most significant and influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley made an indelible contri- bution to contemporary art. Over a career that spanned thirty-five years, he produced a staggering, dazzling, fearless body of artworks in every form and medium, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, performances, videos, photographs, collaborative pieces, critical texts, and music. Kelley acutely examined systems of cultural identity, production, power, and belief. He looked at history, art, craft, literature, popular culture, sexuality, philosophy, education, class, and religion, exposing their connections and contradictions, and in so doing, our own.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954, Kelley attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the early 1970s and moved to Los Angeles in 1976 to pursue his master’s degree at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), a school known for its roots in Conceptual art, also fundamental to his own practice. He studied with such artists as Laurie Anderson, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, Douglas Huebler, and Judy Pfaff, and his classmates included Ericka Beckman, James Casebere, Timothy Martin, John Miller, Tony Oursler, Lari Pittman, Stephen Prina, Jim Shaw, Mitchell Syrop, Benjamin Weissman, Christopher Williams, and Megan Williams, among many others.

Living and working in Los Angeles for over three-and-a half decades, Kelley was a dynamic and powerful presence through his artworks, writings, teaching, curatorial projects, and music, as well as his numerous collaborations with artists such as Cameron Jamie, Paul McCarthy, Oursler, Anita Pace, Prina, Mike Smith, Sonic Youth, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, among others. He raised the bar by embracing virtually every medium and discipline available to him—producing a rich, complex, and voluminous body of work—but also by constructing and conducting himself as an artist with courage, conviction, and impeccable professionalism.

Kelley’s work has been influential not only to his many peers and students in the United States and Europe but also to subsequent generations of artists who have been challenged and inspired by his provocative oeuvre. With this exhibition, which opened less than a year after his sudden and tragic death, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is honored to bring his work to an even wider audience. It is especially fitting that the first major retrospective of Kelley’s work in nearly twenty years is initiated in Europe, where he has been represented in a wide range of exhibitions and included in numerous public and private collections, including those here in the Netherlands.

Kelley’s remarkable oeuvre is the inspiration and driving force for this exhibition, which former Stedelijk Museum Director Gijs van Tuyl envisioned and initiated with the artist in 2006, based on a deeply rooted respect and enthusiasm for his work as well as a recognition of his international significance. It was van Tuyl’s wish that when the Stedelijk reopened after its expansion and renovation, its first major international exhibition would be a large-scale survey of Kelley’s work. It is appropriate that this project was initiated at this institution, with its esteemed history of exhibiting internationally renowned artists and its impressive holdings of contemporary art, which include two major works from Kelley’s epic project Day Is Done, 2005.

FOREWORD

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generous efforts and assistance from the artist’s galleries, including Electronic Arts Intermix, Emi Fontana"/"West of Rome, Los Angeles and Milan; Gagosian Gallery, New York and London; Jablonka Galerie, Berlin and Cologne; Metro Pictures, New York; Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles; and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.

We are especially grateful for the steadfast commitment of the Stedelijk Museum’s dedicated Supervisory Board, including Chairman Alexander Ribbink; current members Cees de Bruin, Rob Defares, Marry de Gaay Fortmann, Guusje ter Horst, Constantijn van Orange-Nassau, and Willem de Rooij; and recently retired members Yoeri Albrecht, Jacobina Brinkman, and Maria Hlavajova. We also extend our warm appreciation to the City of Amsterdam and Alderman Carolien Gehrels for their enduring support of the museum. We are deeply grateful to the Turing Foundation, which honored the Stedelijk with the prestigious and generative Turing Art Grant in 2009, which made this exhibition possible and led the way for subsequent funding. At the Turing Foundation, our special appreciation goes to Pieter and Francoise Geelen, and Milou Halbsema and Ellen Wilbrink. I also want to express our sincerest gratitude to Cees and Inge de Bruin-Heijn, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and All Art Initiatives for their generous support, as well as to Rabobank, principal sponsor of the presentation of the exhibition here in Amsterdam.

Van Tuyl invited independent curator Eva Meyer-Hermann to serve as guest curator for the project. She had previously organized the acclaimed exhibition Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms for the Stedelijk Museum in 2007 and conceived the Kelley survey as a thematic retrospective titled Mike Kelley: Themes & Variations from 35 Years. I am exceedingly grateful to Meyer-Hermann for her invaluable and exhaustive contributions to the foundation and development of the exhibition and to this catalogue, for which she serves as coeditor. A highlight of the publication is the very important and insightful interview that she conducted with the artist in November 2011, the last before his death.

Before I came to the Stedelijk to serve as director in 2010, while I was still working at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), I was connected to this exhibition as one of the partici- pants in the international tour. It certainly added to my excitement at assuming my position that I would inherit this project, largely because I knew and admired the work—and Mike—so deeply. It has been a privilege to be able to honor and fulfill the museum’s commitment to him and shepherd the exhibition to fruition, buoyed by the anticipation of seeing our beautiful new galleries filled with his extraordinary work.

In its early stages, this project was enriched immeasurably by the consultation and participation of the artist himself. Following his untimely death at the beginning of 2012 and in consideration of the profoundly transformed circumstances, the exhibition concept shifted from a thematic approach toward an overview that would focus primarily on bodies of work in roughly chronologi- cal order. My colleagues and I were privileged in that the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts joined us to bring the project to fruition as a celebration of his life and work. We are truly indebted to Executive Director Mary Clare Stevens and to the trustees of the foundation for their tremen- dous support and for collaborating with me in organizing the exhibition. I want to express my utmost gratitude to Paul Schimmel, Jim Shaw, Mary Clare Stevens, Marnie Weber, and John C. Welchman for their kindness, encouragement, and indefatigable efforts. Though they were thrust into an extremely difficult situation, they have assumed their new roles with tremendous thought- fulness and care, committed to maintaining the best interests of Kelley’s work and legacy. I also wish to extend my deepest appreciation to the Kelley Studio, including Scott Benzel, Tim Jackson, Mark Lightcap, and Abel McHone, as well as Lilit Barseghyan, Matt Connolly, Molly Fitzjarrald, Kate Hoffman, Sarah Lee, Tobjorn Velvi, Jennie Warren, and all of the individuals who worked with the artist over the years. Not only have they enriched this project; it could not have been realized without their invaluable knowledge, expertise, and passion.

Our deepest gratitude goes to each of the institutional and private lenders for their generosity and goodwill. Many of them had longtime, close personal and professional relationships with the artist; this project is enriched by their insights, support, and counsel. We are also indebted to the

We are delighted that following its presentation in Amsterdam, the exhibition will tour to Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. We extend our appreciation to Alfred Pacquement, Sophie Duplaix, Didier Ottinger, Yvon Figueras, and Annalisa Rimmaudo at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Glenn Lowry, Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, Peter Eleey, Ann Temkin, and Ramona Bronkar Bannayan at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; and Jeffrey Deitch, Bennett Simpson, Susan Jenkins, Rosanna Hemerick, Naomi Abe, and Jang Park at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for their steadfast support and close cooperation.

The most comprehensive publication on the artist to date, this beautiful volume was envisioned by Kelley to be an overview of this work, which would have been impossible without the collaboration and expertise of many individuals. We are proud that it is copublished with DelMonico Books"/"Prestel and we are deeply grateful to Mary DelMonico for her enthusiasm and dedication. We extend our sincerest appreciation to Eva Meyer-Hermann, for her tremendous contributions and distinctive vision, and to Lisa Gabrielle Mark, who brought this publication to fruition with her magnificent expertise and unwavering commitment to excellence. This remarkable book is designed by acclaimed Los Angeles–based graphic designer Lorraine Wild of Green Dragon Office, who worked closely with Kelley on most of his publications of the past two decades; theirs was a remarkable collaboration between and artist and a designer, and this book testifies to Lorraine’s inestimable talents, empathy, and loving devotion to the artist’s vision. We also wish to thank Ching Wang of Green Dragon Office for her extraordinary and exhaustive efforts and Stedelijk Museum Project Manager Sophie Tates for her early editorial assistance. We are very proud that this catalogue significantly advances

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Throughout the years of its organization, this project has been honored by many other individuals, who in numerous ways have contributed to and enriched it with their inspiration and support: Juana de Aizpuru, Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Richard Armstrong, Joe Austin, Stephanie Barron, Ulrike Baumgart, Arno Bergmans, Caitlin Bermingham, Petra Blaisse, Michael Black, Michael Yasmine Bouzou, Wendy and Robert Brandow, Blake Byrne, Eileen and Michael Cohen, Stuart Comer, Rena Conti, Benoit Dagron, Donna De Salvo, Eric Decelle, Ernst van Deursen, Douglas Druick, Julia Dzwonkoski, Sjarel Ex, Fiona Elliott, Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz, Harald Falckenberg and Larissa Hilbig, Angelika Felder, Rosamund Felsen, Emi Fontana, Mark Francis, Petra Franz, Larry Gagosian, Vicky Gambill, Susanne Ghez, Barbara Gladstone, Joni and Monte Gordon, Michael Govan, Trulee Grace Hall, Bärbel Grässlin, Thomas Grässlin and Nanette Hagstotz, Channing Hansen, Richard Hawkins, Joanne Heyler, Julian Heynen, Stephanie Hodor, Maja Hoffmann, Barbara Honrath, Ghislaine Hussenot, Rafael Jablonka, Cameron Jamie, Marc Jancou, Natascha and Allard Jakobs, George and Debbie Kelley, Franz König, Kasper König, Walther König, Rem Koolhaas, Barbera van Kooij, Karola Kraus, Jutta Koether, Marion Lambert, Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo, Margaret and Daniel S. Loeb, Carey Loren, Patricia Marshall, T. Kelly Mason, Alberta Mayo, Paul and Karen McCarthy, Dana Miller, John Miller and Aura Rosenberg, Ivan Moskowitz, Matt Mullican, Fredrik Nilsen, Albert Oehlen, Magnus Olafsson, Sam Orlofsky, Tony Oursler, Anita Pace, Patrick Painter, Peter and Mischi Pakesch, Anne Pontégnie, Emily and Mitch Rales, Bob Rennie, Carey Fuchs, and Wendy Chang, Janelle Reiring, Michael and Ellen Ringier, James Rondeau, Vivian Rowan, Ralph Rugoff, Christina Ruf, Beatrix Ruf, Karel Schampers, Johannes Schmidt, Wilhelm and Gaby Schürmann, Prof. Bernhart Schwenk, William Vargas Silva, Per Skarstedt, Barry Sloane, Mike Smith, Valerie Smith, Norah and Norman Stone, Elisabeth Sussman, Benedikt Taschen, Diana Thater, Franco Ubbriaco, Joel Wachs, Kiyoshi Wako, Alissa Warshaw, Adam Weinberg, Ari Weisman, Detlef Weitz, Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner, Christopher Williams, Helene Winer, Iwan Wirth, and Christopher Wool.

Initiated during his lifetime and, sadly, realized after his death, this exhibition is underscored by Kelley’s expansive brilliance, tremendous integrity, intellectual acuity, and impeccable profession- alism. He left us much too soon, and while his absence is still painfully present, we are grateful that he left us with an extraordinary oeuvre and a legacy that will only become more and more vivid as time passes. It is our sincere hope that this project begins to fulfill our responsibility to honor his exceptional example as we celebrate his life and work.

ANN GOLDSTEIN Director

the scholarship on Kelley’s work, and we are profoundly grateful to John C. Welchman, Branden W. Joseph, and George Baker for their outstanding essays. Those essays—together with Welchman’s remarkable project descriptions and Meyer-Hermann’s in-depth interview with the artist— ensure that this will be a significant and lasting resource.

Six years in the making, this project has been graced by the support of numerous colleagues here at the Stedelijk Museum, and its successful realization is a testament to the dedication of the entire staff. I thank former Business Director Patrick van Mil, Interim Business Director Erik Gerritsen, and Managing Director Karin van Gilst for their advice and encouragement. I am deeply indebted to Executive Assistant Saskia van der Geest for her indefatigable efforts and professionalism, as well as to the members of our management team: General Counsel"/"Board Secretary Vanessa van Baasbank, Head of Collections and Presentations Nicole Delissen, Head of Operations Nicole Kuppens, Head of Development Maudy van Ommen, Head of Education and Visitor Services Rixt Hulshoff Pol, Head of Marketing and Communication Emelie Schuttevaer, and former Manager of Human Resources Petra de Graaf. Assistant Curator Claire van Els provided essential support during the last months of the exhibition’s development and installation. Management of the project was ably overseen by Project Managers Lucas Bonekamp and Anniek Vrij, along with Project Assistants Menno Dudok van Heel, Henri Sandront, and Els Visscher. I am particularly grateful to Senior Registrar Ankie van den Berg for organizing the transportation of hundreds of objects, and to our remarkable exhibition installation and art handling team, including Feroza Verberne, Hans Lentz, Gert Hoogeveen, Moniem Ibrahim, Joppe Claassen, Marc Bongaarts, Jan Koops, and Johan Rietveld. I also extend my deepest appreciation to our magnificent conservation staff: Sandra Weerdenburg, Susanne Meijer, Rebecca Timmermans, Monica Marchesi, Tessa Rietveld, Soji Chou, Meta Chavannes, Louise Wijnberg, and Netta Krumperman.

Curator of Public Programs Hendrik Folkerts, along with his colleagues Britte Sloothaak and Menno Dudok van Heel, enriched the project with a wonderful roster of related public programs. I also wish to thank our education department colleagues, including Rixt Hulshoff Pol, Marlous van Gastel, and Dorine van Kampen. It is a particular delight that our fantastic peer educators, the Blikopeners, have included work by Kelley in their “Blikopeners Spot.” Deepest gratitude goes to our development team, including Maudy van Ommen and Kyra Wessels, for their invaluable support and fundraising efforts. I wish to acknowledge the terrific work done by our marketing and communications team, including Emelie Schuttevaer, Marie-José Raven, Annematt Russeler, Willemien Broekman, and Inge Willemsen. I also thank Head of Corporate Security Geert Schreurs and Head of Finance Dennis Ewald.

My appreciation also goes to Philippa Polskin, Stuart Klawans, Jennifer Essen, and Justin Holden, and Lillian Goldenthal of Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors. And I am always grateful to our fabulous graphic designers, Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen of Mevis & van Deursen, Amsterdam, for their inspiration and for the beautiful design of our exhibition-related materials.

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Destroy All Monsters (DAM) EARLY PERFORMATIVE SCULPTURES AND OBJECTS (1977–79) Birdhouses (1978–79) PERFORMANCES (1976–86) The Poltergeist (1979, with David Askevold) The Little Girl’s Room (1980) Meditation on a Can of Vernors The Banana Man (1983) Confusion (1982–83) Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985) The Sublime (1984) Australiana (1984) Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86) Half a Man (1987–93) DRAWINGS Incorrect Sexual Models (1987!/!2003) Pay for Your Pleasure (1988) From My Institution to Yours (1987!/!2003); Loading Dock Drawings (1984) Seventy-Four Garbage Drawings and One Bush (1988) Sack Drawings (1988) Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof (1989!/!2009) Liquid Diet (1989!/!2006) Reconstructed History (1989) Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (1990) Banners from College Campus Flyers (1990–93) Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood and Manipulating Mass Produced Idealized Objects (both 1990) Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) (1990) Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991) Mike Kelley’s Proposal for The Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1990–92) Lumpenprole (1991)!/!Riddle of the Sphinx (1991–92) Lump Drawings and Related Works (1991) Ahh!…!Youth! (1991) The John Reed Club (1992) Documenta IX (1992) Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media- Engram Abreaction Release Zone (1992, with Paul McCarthy) Beat of the Traps (1992, with Anita Pace and Stephen Prina) Roth!/!Mouse!/!Wolverton Drawing Exercises (1993) VIDEO The Uncanny (1993!/!2004) Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered (1993–94)

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Untitled (Dust Balls), Silver Ball (both 1994), and Related Works The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1994) Towards a Utopian Arts Complex and Educational Complex (both 1995) We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic (1995) Untitled, (1996–97) Land O’ Lakes (1996) The Poetics Project (1977–1997, with Tony Oursler) An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard M. Powers and Francis Picabia (1997, with Paul McCarthy) Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (1998, with Paul McCarthy) Odd Man Out (1998–99) Sublevel (1998) Missing Time Color Exercises (1998!/!2002) Categorical Imperative and Morgue (both 1999) Unisex Love Nest (1999) Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999) Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction “Chinatown Wishing Well” Built by Mike Kelley after “Miniature Reproduction ‘Seven Star Cavern’ Built by Prof. H. K. Lu”) (1999) PHOTOGRAPHY Runway for Interactive DJ Event (1999–2000) Katy Keene Drawings (2000) Memory Ware (2000–2010) Black Out (2001) Lingam and Yoni (2002) Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Additions (2002) Light (Time)-Space Modulator (2002) Carpet and Wood Grain Paintings (2003) A Fax Transmission from: Oct. 21, 1986, 1:07pm (1986!/!2004) Kandors (1999, 2007, 2009, 2011) Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #1, #2–32, #33, #34, #35, #36, #36B (2000–2011) Hermaphrodite Drawings (2005–06) Rose Hobart II (2006) Profondeurs Vertes (2006) Petting Zoo (2007) Horizontal Tracking Shots (2009) Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Party Palace (2009) A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009, with Michael Smith) Mechanical Toy Guts (1991!/!2012) Mobile Homestead (2005– )

The material, generic, and conceptual profusion of Mike Kelley’s work as an artist over some four decades is remarkable and sometimes confound- ing. As plans for the exhibition developed, Kelley produced or sanctioned most of the headings of the illustrated summaries on the following pages in discussion with Eva Meyer-Hermann, which I have some what revised and augmented. They are intended as a road map for his work in performance, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, large- scale intermedia installation, music, and sound—as well as their many overlaps and combinations. Neither complete nor exhaustive, these outlines—with some projects discussed in little detail and a few barely mentioned—nonetheless offer brief descriptions of Kelley’s richly var- iegated practices and indicate the relations staged between them. Texts and images are arranged in generally chronological order. So while a few of the subject headings (Performance, Drawings, Photography, Video) summarize Kelley’s use of these particular modes and materials, which span his career, the majority pick out individual bodies of work, organized under the titles used by the artist to designate specific works or projects (e.g. Unisex Love Nest, Light (Time)-Space Modulator); works made over the course of several years under recurring thematic headings (Kandors, Extracurricular Activities Projective Reconstructions); major collabora- tions (Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. or A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, with Paul McCarthy and Michael Smith, respectively); and both focused (Liquid Diet, Hermaphrodite Drawings) and more complex, multipart exhi- bitions (Half a Man, Educational Complex, Black Out). Written shortly before he passed away, one description (for The Little Girl’s Room, 1980) is by Kelley. I have also included bibliographical references to extended analyses by the artist and others of the work discussed in each individual entry; again, these are brief selections signposting the most relevant texts and passages in the main anthologies of Kelley’s writings (Foul Perfection and Minor Histories) and the catalogues and secondary literature. Please note that these references appear here in abbreviated form; complete infor- mation can be found in the selected bibliography that begins on pages 393.

WORK 1974–2012

JOHN C. WELCHMAN

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Destroy All Monsters (DAM) This experimental band was formed by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Cary Loren, and Niagara (born Lynn Rovner) in 1973, while Kelley and Shaw were attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. DAM’s improvisational style was rooted in an aesthetics of noise and collage-based composition that created layered combinations of sounds, downplaying conventional musicality. Kelley described DAM as “a pastiche of serious avant-garde music, free jazz, and hard rock, leavened with black humor—a mixture that could definitely be considered proto-punk.” The band took its name from the Japanese film Kaijû sôshingeki (1968), released in the United States in 1969 as Destroy All Monsters. Loren utilized the same name for a magazine he made and distributed from 1976 to 1979. Although Kelley and Shaw moved to the Los Angeles area in 1976 to attend graduate school at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the band contin- ued for another nine years with numerous other members. In 1995, a “deluxe” box set of recordings from its first three years was released on the Ecstatic Peace"/"Father Yod label. The original lineup of Kelley, Shaw, Loren, and Niagara reunited in 1995; since then the band has performed at exhibitions and music festivals. Additional live and stu- dio recordings have since been released, and in 2007 a selection of films documenting DAM in the 1970s was released as Grow Live Monsters (2007, MVD Visual). Exhibitions devoted to the band’s history include Destroy All Monsters Archive (with Shaw and Loren), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (1998), in conjunction with the exhibition I Rip You, You Rip Me: Honey, We’re Going Down in History; Hungry for Death, curated by James Hoff and Loren at Printed Matter book- store, New York, (2009); and Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, PRISM, Los Angeles (2011–12).

page 14 Mike Kelley (right) with John Reed (left) and Jim Shaw (center) in the basement of God’s Oasis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975

page 15 Mike Kelley (foreground) performs with Cary Loren and Jim Shaw (on screen via live video feed) as Destroy All Monsters for A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality, 2009, curated by Mike Kelley and Mark Beasley as part of Performa 09, Gramercy Theater, New York, 2009

pages 16 and 17 Murals from Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha, 2001, an installation by the Destroy All Monsters Collective (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Cary Loren) Acrylic on canvas with video; 4 murals: Greetings from Detroit (p. 16, top), 120 × 228 inches (304.8 × 579.12 cm); Mall Culture (p. 16 bottom), 96 × 138 inches (243.84 × 350.52 cm); The Heart of Detroit by Moonlight (p. 17, top), 120 × 204 inches (304.8 × 518.16 cm); Amazing Freaks of the Motor City (p. 17 bottom), 96 × 138 inches (243.84 × 350.52 cm); video: Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha, (color, sound, 62:11 min.). Dimensions variable

Destroy All Monsters: Geisha This, a compilation of the first six issues of Destroy All Monsters magazine, 1975–1979, 2nd ed. (Oak Park, MI: Book Beat Gallery, 1996).

Liner notes to Destroy All Monsters: 1974–76, Ecstatic Peace"/"Father Yod, 1994, 3 compact discs.

Joseph, Branden. “Live Dead: Mike Kelley’s Music.” See in this volume, pp. 312–31.

Kelley, Mike. “The Futurist Ballet (1973).” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 176–79.

____. “Missing Time: Works on Paper, 1974–1976, Reconsidered” (1995). In Minor Histories (2004); see especially p. 65.

____. “To the Throne of Chaos Where the Thin Flutes Pipe Mindlessly (Destroy All Monsters: 1974"/"77)” (1993). Available at http://www. mikekelley.com/DAMthrone.html.

____, and Dan Nadel, eds. Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973–1977, exh. cat. (2011); see especially Nicole Rudick, “In God’s Oasis,” pp. 4–14.

Welchman, John C., ed. On the Beyond: A Conversation Between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and John C. Welchman (2011), pp. 32, 44–65.

16 17Destroy All Monsters (DAM)

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EARLY PERFORMATIVE SCULPTURES AND OBJECTS (1977–79) This group of works subsumes several categories, the largest being a series of Early Performative Sculptures, sometimes referred to by Kelley or his commentators as

“demonstrated” objects. Some were conceived for the artist’s early performances as instruments to be “played” or activated—whether in the form of drums (Moaning Drum and All Seeing Eye, both 1977); megaphones and their variants (The Base Man, 1979; Perspectaphone, 1977–78); or the handmade, cardboard instruments related to Tube Music—Wind and Crickets (1978–79), The Flying Flower (1977–78), and Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object (1978–79). Others were more complex com- posite assemblages, such as The Spirit Collector (1978) and Spirit Voices (1977–79), which incorporated playback and recording devices (a tape recorder and audio deck, respectively). Kelley classified the Birdhouses as Early Performative Sculptures.

A second category, described simply as “Early Sculptures,” includes Faux Woodgrain Frame (1977), Infinity on a Stick (1977), Last Tool in Use (1977), Nest, Thread Balancer (1977), and Two Sound Producing Objects from A Dream (1978). The referential allu- siveness of these works, signaled in their titles, is underlined by Kelley’s description of one of them—Upward Creative Spiral (1977–79), a phonograph player with a spiral image on its turntable—as an “allegorical sculpture.” A third group of works, including Indianana—main prop (1978), a small circular fortification, and the hourglass-shaped Big Tent Prop (1979), functioned as props for specific performances.

page 18 Kelley in his CalArts studio circa 1977 with the main performance prop from Indianana (1978)

page 19 Performance Related Objects, 1998 Mixed-media Dimensions variable. Wood platform: 6 × 239.75 × 96.125 inches (15.24 × 609 × 244 cm) left to right The Spirit Collector (1978), Spirit Voices (1978–79), Indianana— Three B!/!W leitmotif photographs (1978), Indianana—main prop (1978), Two Machines for the Intellect (1978–79), The Base Man (1979), Tube Music— Wind and Crickets (1978–79), Tube Music—The Flying Flower (1977–78), Tube Music—Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object (1978–79)

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page 20 left to right Perspectaphone, 1977–78, Moaning Drum, 1977

page 21 Clockwise from top left Amber-Gray, 1982; Nest, 1977–78; and Big Tent Prop, 1979

Early Performative Sculptures and Objects (1977–79)

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page 22 Top to bottom Bouncing Sheep Head, 1977–78

Two Sound Producing Objects from a Dream, 1978

page 23 Top to bottom The Monitor and the Merrimac; The Monitor and the Merrimac (Three Leitmotifs), 1979!/!2005; Performance Prop Models, 1979; and The Spirit Collector, 1978

Early Performative Sculptures and Objects (1977–79)

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Kelley, Mike. Interview with John Miller. In Mike Kelley (1992, Art Resources Transfer), p. 8.

Kelley, Mike. Interview with Isabelle Graw. In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 15–16.

Birdhouses (1978–79) I wanted!…!an artwork that you couldn’t raise, there was no way that you could make it better than it was. Its function as art actually makes it more uncomfortable. —Mike Kelley

Mostly made during his final year at CalArts and shown as part of his MFA exhibition in 1978, Kelley’s series of eight birdhouses (Home for a Pair of Birds has been lost) and the associated Existence Problems Chute (1977, also lost) and Chicken Brooder (1978"/"90) use an ironic DIY vernacular, often associated with manly acts of fatherhood, to strike back at the mannerisms of Conceptual art. Cued, at first, by how-to woodworking manuals, the handcrafted, plywood birdhouses were named for seemingly arbitrary conditions, as each structure was designated for use only by certain types of birds (“Upside Down,” “Near” or “Far,” “Wide” or “Tall”), correlated with apparently un- avian concepts (such as “Gothic,” “Catholic,” “Infinity”), or—as in the last of the series, Birdhouse with an Egg Chute (1979)—associated with the ridiculous artist"/"bird two- step noted in the subtitle: A Collaboration: the bird has to build the floor so the eggs won’t roll out. Sometimes exhibited with associated demonstration drawings, also known as

“title drawings,” the oddball blank nostalgia of these fabrications was an early manifes- tation of Kelley’s interest in crafts and other “debased” cultural products. They also inaugurate his career-long investigation of imaginary or remembered architectural forms, detached from—often flouting—the practical requirements of habitation.

page 25 Catholic Birdhouse, 1978

2726 Birdhouses (1978–79)

page 26 Title Drawing for Birdhouse for a Bird That Is Near and a Bird That Is Far and two views of Birdhouse for a Bird That is Near and a Bird That is Far, both 1978

page 27 Title Drawing for Birdhouse for Wide Bird to Tall Bird and two views of Wide Bird to Tall Bird, both 1978 Title drawing: ink on paper; birdhouse: wood, paint Title drawing: 9.5 × 6 inches (24.1 × 15.2 cm); birdhouse: 11.5 × 40.5 × 12 inches (29.2 × 102.9 × 30.5 cm)

page 28 Birdhouse with an Egg Chute, 1979

page 29 Gothic Birdhouse, 1978

28 29Birdhouses (1978–79)

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The various parts of Poetry in Motion (programmed in “An Evening of Performance, Audio Tape, and Film” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions [LACE], March 4, 1978) established the early orientation of Kelley’s performances around a series of exchanges between objects or “demonstrational sculptures,” writing, and vocalization. The projected voice itself was the organizing principle of Perspectaphone, which used large and small megaphone prop-objects to collide notions of amplification and per- spective. In Tube Music, a suite of short performances including Tower of Babel, Wind and Crickets, The Flying Flower, and Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object (all 1978), Kelley “played” various handmade cardboard instruments to open up questions about

“pop spiritualism.” This was also the subject of Spirit Voices (performed with Krieger at LACE, 1978; associated objects, 1977–79)—which used tubes, foil diaphragms, a bass drum, and off-stage “Spirit Collector” to generate, recycle, and interrupt white noise, imbued (or otherwise) with voices from the beyond—and the photographic works that make up The Poltergeist (1979, with David Askevold).

EARLY PERFORMANCES Between the late 1970s, while he was still at CalArts, and the mid-80s, Kelley produced a remarkable cycle of performances that launched his career as an artist. His earliest pieces included Dancing Partner (fall 1976), The Pole Dance (spring 1977, with Donald Krieger and Tony Oursler; remade by Kelley, Oursler, and Anita Pace as a performance for video in 1997), and Oracle at Delphi (spring 1978), which initiated his sustained interest in contemporary dance and “embodiment.” The first performance was an investigation of partnering and personification; the second a humorous critique of pro- grammatic Bauhaus ideas about space, movement, and geometry (especially those of Oskar Schlemmer); the third a lampoon of artsy ritualization. All were antithetical to the reduction and austerity of then-prevalent Minimalist and Conceptualist practice.

PERFORMANCES (1976–86)

Oracle at Delphi, 1978 Performance, CalArts studio view

Two performance views of Perspectaphone, 1978 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 1978; right: with Donald Krieger

Kelley in studio performing Tube Music—Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object, 1978–79

Performance view of Spirit Voices, 1977–79 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 1978, with Donald Krieger

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Performance view of Indianana, 1978 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 1978

top to bottom (left to right) Performance view of The Big Tent, 1979 Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, 1979

Performance view of The Monitor and the Merrimac, 1979 Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, 1979

Mike Kelley in rehearsal for The Parasite Lily, 1980

Performance views of The Parasite Lily, 1980 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 1980; The Kitchen, New York, 1980, with Michael Smith

Performances (1976–86)

PERFORMANCES, 1978–86 Between 1978 and the early 80s, Kelley’s performances became less compartmental- ized and episodic, and their circulation around specific props became more open and hectic as the performative supports morphed first into contextual environments and eventually into installational arrangements of drawings, acrylic paintings, and other materials. Although Indianana (LACE, 1978) still turned on the model of a spiral fort placed in the center of the performance arena, and The Monitor and the Merrimac (Foundation for Art Resources [FAR], Los Angeles, 1979) was likewise oriented to miniature versions of the eponymous ironclad battleships from the American Civil War, The Parasite Lily (at The Kitchen, New York, and part of the performance festival

“Public Spirit: Live Art L.A.,” LACE, 1980) was an introverted bio-Romantic solilo- quy on decay, organized around a cardboard flower and various tokens of “humdrum domesticity” but performed in overblown rhetorical clichés under vampiric pink light. Performed along with The Big Tent (a meditation on the scale of things—and thoughts) at FAR on the same evening as The Monitor and the Merrimac, My Space also featured an exchange with a flower, accompanied by the artist’s frantic drumbeats. As Kelley put it in his annotation to an associated diagrammatic drawing, My Space was “a space where my behavior is not influenced by another living thing.”

Three Valleys (performed in a private space, sponsored by FAR, Los Angeles, 1980) launched another move in Kelley’s burgeoning repertoire of genres: the travelogue— an idiom he also adopted in parts of Monkey Island (1983), Australiana (1984), Black Out (2001), and other projects. While The Banana Man (1983) was initially intended as a performance, Kelley realized that the need for multiple perspectives necessi- tated a change in medium, thus inaugurating three decades of profound experiment with video. Prompted by the logo of a winking, bearded man on the Vernors ginger- ale label, Meditation on a Can of Vernors (1981) inaugurated a celebrated sequence of discursively prolix reflections on social, aesthetic, and philosophical issues: American landscape painting and theories of nature (Meditation); order and disorganization (Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each Set More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last, 1982–83, and Monkey Island, 1982–83); and ideas of transcendence, sublimity, and exploration (The Sublime, 1984), interlaced with conjectures about names and the

“possessive” (Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, 1986). At this point “per- formance” was virtually dissolved into installation and published “script.”

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LATER AND RELATED WORK In addition to live “solo” performances and appearances with various bands (Destroy All Monsters, The Poetics, Extended Organ, and others), Kelley made several radio broad- casts—including The Peristaltic Airwaves, a live radio performance aired on KPFK, Los Angeles, on September 30, 1986—and participated in a number of collaborative and

“interactive” performances, readings, and video presentations with Michael Smith (“The Artist in Television,” Telesatellite Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, 1982); Oursler (“X-C,” Beyond Baroque Literary"/"Arts Center, Venice, California, 1983); Ericka Beckman (“Ericka Beckman"/"Mike Kelley,” Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York, 1983); Bruce and Norman Yonemoto (“Godzilla on the Beach,” Beyond Baroque, 1984); Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose (“100 Reasons—Spank O Rama,” The Lab, San Francisco, 1993); and Paul McCarthy (Heidi House, 1992; Sod and Sodie Sock, 1998).

Beginning with Dancing Partner (1976) and The Pole Dance (1977"/"97), Kelley also made a number of pieces comprising or incorporating dance and movement, several (from 1989 forward) in collaboration with the Los Angeles–based choreographer and dancer Anita Pace. These works include Pansy Metal"/"Clovered Hoof (1989), a zany fashion-show spoof set to music by Motorhead; Beat of the Traps (1992; Kelley, Pace, Stephen Prina), a cacophonous performative overlay of drumming, dance, singing, and recitation; and Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999), which featured two related videos of A Dance Incorporating Movements Derived from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and Choreographed in the Manner of Martha Graham (1999), choreographed by Pace and danced by Pace and Carl Burkley. Kelley also collaborated with choreographer Kate Foley on the dance sequences in Day Is Done (2005).

Kelley’s later performances included Runway for Interactive DJ Event (1999) and The Thin Monotonous Piping of an Accursed Flute at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (in conjunction with the exhibition “Beyond the Pink,” spon- sored by the Cortical Foundation, 1998), as well as the theatrical performance A Haute Voix, a collaboration with Franz West at Espace Franquin, Angoulême, France (2000). Beginning in 2004, Kelley performed in benefits at various private residences in and around Los Angeles for the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS): 2004 (with Extended Organ), 2006 (with Ann Magnuson and others), 2007, and 2009 (at a Listening Party with Raymond Pettibon). His last per- formance work and final appearance as a performer was in Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (The Offer), as part of an evening titled “Extracurricular Activity"…"#32, Plus” at Judson Memorial Church, New York, part of Performa 2009.

Kelley, Mike. Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1986).

Martin, Timothy. “Janitor in a Drum: Excerpts from a Performance History.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 56–88.

Production still from Sod and Sodie Sock, 1998

Performances (1976–86)

Top to bottom Performative object, Two Machines for the Intellect, 1978–79

Two performance views of Three Valleys, 1980 Performance sponsored by Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, 1980; with Jill Giegrich, Tony Oursler, and Mitchell Syrop

Video still from 100 Reasons—Spank O Rama, 1991 (with Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, related to 100 Reasons— Spank O Rama, performance at The Lab, San Francisco, 1993)

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Kellein, Thomas. “Is Evil Really Evil?” In Mike Kelley (1992, Kunsthalle Basel), pp. 7, 11–13.

Kelley, Mike. “David Askevold: The California Years” (1998). In Foul Perfection (2003), pp. 194–204.

____. “The Poltergeist” (1979). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 252–56.

Welchman, John C. “The Mike Kelleys.” In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 52, 84.

The Poltergeist (1979, with David Askevold) In the late 1970s, Kelley worked with David Askevold, who was teaching at CalArts, to create seven photo-based works—some with text borders and some in color—reminis- cent of nineteenth-century spirit photographs. Kelley performed the role of a medium who makes contact with spirits and other metaphysical forces, which manifest as fake ectoplasm ejected from his orifices. As Kelley noted, the images turn on analo- gies between art and spiritualism: “Occult rituals interest me because they are akin to art-making.” They also correlate spiritual emission with sexual release and the erotic drives associated with adolescence. Their interpretation of performer-cum-medium twists the idea of creative expression (now akin to a type of secretion), while captur- ing a sincere attempt by Kelley (along with Askevold) to investigate the “visionary” persona that makes invisible processes visible through psychosocial practices, akin to desublimation and counter-repression.

page 36 The Poltergeist, 1979

page 37 The Poltergeist, 1979 David Askevold’s part of the work

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The Little Girl’s Room (1980) Kelley wrote the following description for the catalogue accompanying Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–81, curated by Paul Schimmel for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, October 1, 2011, to February 13, 2012:

The Little Girl’s Room and Oh the Pain of it All (both 1980) [see p. 110] were first exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in 1980 in a three-artist exhibition titled “By-Products.” The other exhibiting artists were Mitchell Syrop and Tony Oursler, who I had met while attending CalArts. In addition to the works men- tioned I also presented prop sculptures related to the performances Indianana (1978) and Three Valleys (1980).

The Little Girl’s Room was my first attempt to present an “installational” version of a performance script. The project grew out of a dream within a dream in which a “little girl” envisioned the face of a pimplike man whose smile revealed an infinity of sharp teeth. After she awoke from her dream she immediately changed the décor of her bedroom from flowery and girlish to geometric (with “Minimalist” gridlike artworks created by her own hand) and illuminated with black light. This stylistic transformation symbolized her entrance into puberty. According to my notes, I initially intended to have a recording of a reading of the performance script play back inside the room, but I did not do this. On the exterior of the room, drawings, photographs, and objects related to the script were dis- played. My notes also reveal that I intended to use, or refer to, these objects in performance, perhaps at the opening of the exhibition. But I did not do this either. As I recall, I decided that the installation should function on its own, and I never did a live version of the script.

Metaphors linked to adolescence especially interested me at this time. For example, the photographic series The Poltergeist (1979) (made in dialogue with David Askevold) explores similar subject matter.

page 38 The Little Girl’s Room, 1980!/!2011 Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable

page 39 Detail of interior of The Little Girl’s Room

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Meditation on a Can of Vernors (1981) Taking the form of what Kelley described as “essentially"…"a monologue,” Meditation on a Can of Vernors was performed at a private residence in Los Angeles, sponsored by LACE, on June 10, 1981, while an exhibition of related drawings, paintings, objects, and props was shown at Riko Mizuno Gallery, Los Angeles, in June and July of 1981. As with many of Kelley’s performances (and some later works) Meditation was prompted by a popular cultural image, in this case the bearded, winking, gnomelike figure fea- tured since the early twentieth century on cans of the artist’s hometown beverage, Vernors ginger ale. Like the Indian maiden on the Land O’ Lakes butter package, the emblem was one of those points of childhood focus and obsession that stayed with the artist well beyond his adolescent years. Studded with puns and innuendos, Kelley’s script offers animated, sometimes unstable, reflections on the conditions of ruling and overlordship, drawing enumerations of the attributes of kings alongside wisecracks about the “seat of power"…"the hot seat.” Meditation is clearly linked to Kelley’s other aberrant disquisitions on American history, such as The Monitor and the Merrimac (1979), while the qualities of greenness and its diminutive and superficial cuddliness connect the gnome to Kelley’s interests in frogs and other green phenomena convened in Confusion (1982), as well as to the work with soft toys and animals made in the later 1980s. No still or moving images exist of the performance itself, but several “set-up photos” including The One-Eyed King (1981) also respond to the Vernors logo (see Photography). A partial transcript of the spoken part of the performance was pub- lished in High Performance, Spring–Summer 1982, p. 101.

page 40 Top to bottom The Future, 1980, and The Past, 1980

page 41 top The Logo on a Can of Vernors Drawn from Memory, 1981

bottom (Left to right) Early American Landscape #1, 1980; Early American Landscape #2, 1982–83

Singerman, Howard. Review of “Reflections [sic] on a Can of Vernors” at LACE, Artforum, December 1981, p. 78.

Welchman, John C. “History and Time in the American Vernacular: Mike Kelley’s Work with Photography.” In Imaging History: Photography after the Fact (2012), pp. 107–09.

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Kelley, Mike. “The Banana Man” (1983). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 184–87.

Welchman, John C. “Survey: The Mike Kelleys.” In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 63–64.

The Banana Man (1983) Beginning the script in 1981 and shooting in 1982 with the assistance of students while he was teaching in Minneapolis, this complicated study of character from mul- tiple fragmentary perspectives was Kelley’s first completed video-based project and runs for just over twenty-eight minutes. The piece was based on the vaudeville-style figure the Banana Man, who appeared, among several other places, as a periodic guest on the long-running children’s television program Captain Kangaroo. Despite never having seen the Banana Man perform, Kelley created a structure of improvisation and scripted reenactment based on accounts of those television appearances as reported by the artist’s childhood friends. Motivated by a desire to accommodate rapid shifts in viewpoint, Kelley’s decision to use video permitted additional exploration of character and narrative fragmentation during postproduction, as described in the artist’s state- ment later published in Minor Histories.

page 42 Video stills from The Banana Man (1983)

page 43 Production still of Mike Kelley as the Banana Man

pages 44 and 45 left and right Studies for “The Banana Man,” 1981–82 2 of 4 parts: acrylic, ink, pencil on paper 11 × 14 inches (27.94 × 35.56 cm) each; 2 of 4 parts shown

44 45The Banana Man (1983)

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Confusion (1982–83) Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each Set More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last was first performed at the Mandeville [now University] Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego, in 1982 and presented on April 14 of that year as part of Film in the Cities, Minneapolis, and at the Pilot 1 Theater, Los Angeles, in 1983. It was shown as an installation at the Mandeville Art Gallery in April, 1982; the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1982; and (with Monkey Island works) at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, in 1982, as well as in two group exhibitions: 5 from L.A.: Kiki Maclinnis, Michael Kelley, Mary Jones, Michael McMillen, Jeffrey Vallance; and the Fifth Biennale of Sydney, Private Symbol: Social Metaphor, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1984). As with many of Kelley’s earlier performances and associated works, Confusion takes up large, imponderable questions about order, rationality, and sequence, beginning with conjectures about the decay of “linear devel- opment” and “the limit of knowledge” interspersed with a Kelleyan disquisition on

“set” theory and punctuated by the refrain: “it’s so confusing.” Riffing on memory and plagiarism, solipsism, and self-identity, the piece concludes with a cascade of associa- tive allusions to frogs—conceived as bored, existential, cannibalistic, disgusting, and finally as “protean blob[s]” “representative of the universe.” The sets and installations featured a schematic image of a frog face on a quilted bedspread that doubled as a stage curtain; a projector and slide show titled “An Actor Portrays Boredom and Exhibits His Frog Knick Knack Collection,” featuring Kelley’s then-landlord (later made into a set of photographs); a green, circular, segmented table, Six-Seventh and One-Seventh Table (with a wrapped “present” on top in its final incarnation); and a series of asso- ciated photographs, drawings, acrylic paintings on paper, and performative objects. The installation Confusion (1982–83) is in the permanent collection at the Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany.

page 46 Installation view of Confusion 1982–83, University of California, San Diego, 1982

page 47 Top to bottom Performance view of Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last, 1982 Pilot Theater, Los Angeles, 1983

Performance view of Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last, 1982 Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, 1982

page 48 Cluck Cluck Croak Croak, 1982 Acrylic on paper, framed 42 × 55.25 inches (106.68 × 140.34 cm)

page 49 Top to bottom Untitled Photograph, 1982 (from Confusion) 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 20.32 cm) each

View of Mike Kelley’s studio, ca. 1982

48 49Confusion (1982–83)

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Kriesche, Richard, ed. Artificial Intelligence in the Arts: Nr. 1

“Brainwork” (1985), pp. 94–101.

Singerman, Howard. “Charting Monkey Island with Levi-Strauss and Freud.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 89–110.

Welchman, John C. “Image and Language: Syllables and Charisma.” In Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986 (1986), pp. 279–81.

Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985) Taking as its point of departure a series of photographs snapped by Kelley of the “mon- key island” at the Los Angeles Zoo, Monkey Island was a high-energy disquisition on order, organization, and corporeal and epistemological entropy centered on images of “bilateral symmetry” and “infinite multiplication” with figures notating “sym- metrical sets” or various abstract “expansions.” Corralling a heterogeneous range of sources from entomology and anatomy to structuralism and geomorphology, Kelley’s performative monologue—performed at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, in 1983—offered a tartly poetic reverie on the recursive relations between form and content, privileging and cross-associating elements such as compound eyes, sacklike containers (tears, bladders, whales), and emblematic substances and forms (amber- gris and mandrake roots), as well as wider social and developmental issues (sexuality, anthropogeny). Defined by the figure “X,” the diagram of “the insect connection” (one of the three parts of The Landscape Figure) is built, for example, on the polarities between life and death, solitude and society, landscape and biosphere, and the symme- tries between various body parts (nose"/"bladder, ear"/"foot, eye"/"ovary). Monkey Island was shown as an installation at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1983 and at the Fifth Biennale of Sydney, Private Symbol: Social Metaphor, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (April–June 1984).

Based on a “ridiculous pseudoscientific” experiment with hypnosis, Kelley developed Monkey Island Part II (1985) in response to the dense web of psychological associa- tions generated by the first iteration. “Instead of performing it myself,” he noted, “I plan to use volunteers who under hypnosis will respond to the same images I did previ- ously and then they will produce their own works”. Created for the exhibition Artificial Intelligence in the Arts: Nr. 1 “Brainwork,” organized by Richard Kriesche for the 1985 Steirischer Herbst festival, Graz, Austria, the performance (which took place on July 20, 1985), exhibition, and a related symposium were presented later at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in July, 1985.

page 50 Installation view of Monkey Island, 1982–83 Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1983

page 51 Monkey Island (Los Angeles Zoo #1), 1982–83

page 52 Top to bottom Compound Eye, 1982–83, and Fence Figure!/!Compound Eye, 1982

page 53 Top to bottom Expansions, 1982, and The Bug Eye, 1982–83

pages 54 and 55 Monkey Island: Travelogue, 1982–83 Clockwise from top left The Two Islands Merge to Form a Boat, They Mount the Island, The Baggy Pants Comedian, The Celibate Genius, (p. 54); and The Green-Black-Green Flag, The Singing Root, Spurting Whale, Stand Up! (p. 55)

52 53Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985)

54 55Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985)

56 57

page 56 Ambergris Landscape and Mercurochrome, 1982 2 parts: acrylic on paper 10.5 × 8.25 inches (26.67 × 20.96 cm)

page 57 Top to bottom The Tiny Insect Magnified Becomes Its Own Farm, 1982–83; and The Bells, 1982–83

page 58 Symmetrical Sets, 1982 Includes (clockwise from top) Splitting All, Two Hemispheres, Two Tents, Red Reefs, Two Mounds, Two Buttocks, Ass Insect, Compound Eye

page 59 Shock, 1982–83

page 60 Top to bottom Cell Dividing, 1982 Performance view of Monkey Island Part II, 1985 Los Angeles Municipal Theater, July 20, 1985; hypnotist Melvin Ross with participant

page 61 Detail of The Landscape Figure, 1982–83 3 parts: acrylic on foam core 40 × 30.125 inches each, 40 × 90.25 inches overall (101.6 × 76.52 cm each, 101.6 × 229.24 cm overall)

Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985)

58 59Monkey Island (1982–83) and Monkey Island Part II (1985)

60 61

62 63

Gardener, Colin. “Let It Bleed: The Sublime and Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 112–34.

The Sublime (1984) Named for a concept that perhaps more than any other has been associated with Romanticism, metaphysics, and the transcendent, The Sublime was articulated in three interleaved actions. Kelley’s recitation of a National Geographic article on the discovery in Borneo of the world’s largest flower was punctuated by fifty aphoristic propositions or bathetic put-downs delivered by Ed Gierke, while Mary Woronov—

“pregnant” for most of the performance—generated an interactive substrate of corporeal and physical gestures. Addressing the formation, zoning, and disruption of rational categories and the very capacity of language to describe or represent, the per- formance oscillated, unpredictably, between ideas of grandiosity, infinity, and vastness and their diminished returns as abridgment, redaction, and simulation. Thus, natural wonders are serviced by highlight tourism; literary masterpieces or poetic aspiration reduced to crib notes or clichés; and cosmological speculation cross-dressed in the false comforts of the homely. The Sublime was performed at MOCA, Los Angeles, in association with CalArts, Valencia, as part of the Explorations performance series on March 15, 1984. A concurrent exhibition of props, drawings, and other materials at Rosamund Felsen Gallery; the work was also exhibited at Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York (1983), and Metro Pictures, New York (1984).

page 62 Installation view of The Sublime, 1984 Comprising various works Dimensions variable Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1984

page 63 The Sublime!/!The Sublime Framed, 1983 10 parts: acrylic on paper 140 × 407.5 inches overall (355.6 × 1035.05 cm) overall

page 64 Left to right The One-Eyed Parrot, 1983; and Janitorial Banner, 1984

page 65 Performance views of The Sublime, 1984 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1984; with Mary Woronov and Ed Gierke

pages 66 and 67 Know Nothing and If You Don’t Want to Know the Definition Don’t Open The Dictionary, both 1984

page 68 The Silent Scream, 1984

page 69 Infinite Expansion, 1983

64 65The Sublime (1984)

66 67The Sublime (1984)

68 69The Sublime (1984)

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Martin, Timothy, and Benjamin Weissman. Assignment: Outback. Pamphlet in First Newport Biennial 1984 (1984).

Australiana (1984) This ironic “travelogue”—or “territorial hounding”—comprising some forty works in acrylic on paper loosely associated with a country Kelley had never visited was first shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the Fifth Biennale of Sydney,

“Private Symbol: Social Metaphor” in spring, 1984, then at the First Newport Biennial at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California) in fall of that year and later in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s traveling show Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997 (1997–98). As suggested by the triptych Blackness and Surrounding Blackness (1984), the central panel of which shows a map of the US in white outline over a similarly scaled black outline of Australia on a white ground, Australiana riffed on the antipodean nature of “down under,” offering a series of disquisitions on fundamental antitheses such as good"/"evil, male"/"female, East Coast"/"West Coast, God"/"the Devil, and “upright”"/"“fallen” natures. Kelley noted that he made a deliberate bid to “materialize” the “sightlines” of the exhi- bition “by running strings between various works, literally connecting them” so that

“the disparity between the system of hanging, which reiterated the architecture, and the system of associational ties between the various artworks was much easier to see”—in comparison to the “salon-style” arrangement of Monkey Island. With many of its drawings made using a slide projector—including the large-scale, twelve-panel, black-and-white Cave Painting (1984), based on a scientific illustration—Australiana marks a key point of commencement for Kelley’s characteristic graphic style, which he described as “dead” and “informational” (Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, p. 24).

page 70 Installation view of Australiana, 1984, at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1984

page 71 Junior High Notebook Cover, 1984 Acrylic on paper, framed 60 × 43 inches (152.4 × 109.22 cm)

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Gardner, Colin. “Let It Bleed: The Sublime and Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 112–34.

Kelley, Mike. Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1986).

Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86) The last of Kelley’s pioneering sequence of performances, and the first to focus primar- ily on the installation, Plato’s Cave refers some of the inquiries begun in Meditation on a Can of Vernors, Monkey Island, and The Sublime back to Plato’s parable of the cave (set out in book VII of The Republic), crossing them with questions of lightness and darkness, interiority and exteriority, representation and simulation, the ideal and the contingent. At the same time, Kelley was fascinated by the grammatical form of the possessive that ordered relations between the three proper nouns and the objects they governed. As Gardner noted, “Kelley’s three subjects act as a synopsis of the heroic male archetypes (visionary idealism, spiritual transcendence, bourgeois individual- ism) that dominate Western philosophy, modernist American painting, and American history respectively” (p. 130). The centerpiece of the installation, The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave—which uses banners and bedsheets to conjugate colors (of bodily fluids and racial pigmentation) with Rorschach tests, artistic subjectivity, and mor- tification and religious symbolism—could be accessed only by crawling through a one-and-a-half-foot-high entrance situated below a painting of a cave infested with stalagmites and stalactites (Exploring, 1985). The work was exhibited in Art in the Anchorage, Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, New York, 1985. Plato’s Cave was presented in exhibitions at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles (1985); Metro Pictures, New York (1986); and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo (1997), and performed at Artists Space, New York (1986), with Sonic Youth. An edited version of the script was published as an illustrated book in 1986.

page 72 Screamin’ Smoke, 1985 Acrylic on paper 42 × 107.5 inches (106.7 × 273.1 cm)

page 73 Top to bottom Detail of Sic Semper Tyrannis, 1985

Installation view of The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave, 1985!/!1996 Acrylic and acrylic latex on canvas, cotton, wood, electric lights, fake fireplaces, paint chips, felt 150.39 × 128.74 × 556.30 inches (382 × 327 × 1413 cm) Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, 1997

page 74 Entrance to The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave, 1987 List Center for the Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1987

page 75 Interior view of The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave, 1985–86

page 76 Top to bottom Nazi War Cave #1, 1985, and Nazi War Cave #2, 1986

page 77 Trickle Down and Swaddling Clothes, 1986

74 75

76 77Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86)

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page 78 Clockwise from left Freedom, 1985; A Hippie’s Bedroom, 1985; and Untitled, 1986

page 79 Clockwise from top Rainbow Coalition, 1985; Twinkling Coppers, 1986 (acrylic on canvas, penny and electric lights, 60 × 60 inches [152.4 × 152.4 cm]); and Lincoln’s Beacon, 1985

pages 80 and 81 Alphabet and Bee Beard, both 1985

pages 82 and 83 Performance views of Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, 1986 Artist’s Space, New York, 1986; Mike Kelley with Molly Cleator and Sonic Youth

Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86)

80 81Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86)

82 83

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Half a Man (1987–93) Begun in 1987, Half a Man is a sprawling project comprising distinct groups of works that, Kelley noted, converge “in one way or another” on “issues of gender-specific imagery and the family” (Minor Histories, p. 14). The interwoven groups are akin to episodes in an object-based psychodrama about lost innocence. Each mobilizes a specific material, found object, or technique to generate a distinct set of visual effects. Half a Man was first shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1987, and an expanded version was exhibited the following year at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and Metro Pictures, New York; further modified versions were presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., in 1991 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994.

SUBGROUP I (STUFFED-ANIMAL WORKS) The first cluster of works inaugurated Kelley’s creative use of stuffed animals and yarn dolls, which he described as “pseudo-child[ren], cutified, sexless being[s] that represent[ed] the adult’s perfect model of a child—a neutered pet” (Minor Histories, p. 14). More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) incorporates a dense array of these and other handcrafted objects into an abstractly tactile wall hanging, the title of which alludes to the familial obligation or emotional debt foisted onto children by acts of “giving.” The craft objects in the three-part Frankenstein (1989) assume the mon- strous qualities of accumulation and deformation; Eviscerated Corpse (1989) creates a humorously macabre trail of serpentine forms leading to a central humanoid mass; and Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set (1987) extends its linear sequence of color-coordinated clusters of animals from ceiling to floor. The Manly Craft series (1989–90) addresses (and interrupts) stereotypical associations of craft objects with “women’s work.”

SUBGROUP II (ARENAS, DIALOGUES, AND AFGHAN WORKS) In a series of eleven Arena works, exhibited at Metro Pictures (1990), stuffed ani- mals and other found objects are arranged on or under blankets that have been laid out on the floor. Seemingly passive and innocuous, the series title and the objects’ positions, facing-off, also imply violent or traumatic confrontation. Ten additional floor-mounted works with stuffed toys—including Innards, Transplant, and Untitled (Three Octopi) (all 1990)—are not part of the numbered series but remain closely related. An exhibition at Galerie Ghislane Hussenot, Paris (1990), showed a selection of afghan works along with wall pieces and the “Female Roommate” felt banner. The Dialogues series (1990–91), shown at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne (1991), along with

“Satellite” pieces including Brown Star (1991) and Citrus and White (1991), also pairs stuffed animals with blankets, though portable stereos supply each of the seven works with added sound components. Kelley published the dialogues as “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ (Dinner Conversation Overheard at a Romantic French Restaurant,” in Forehead, volume II (1989), pp. 17–18, and performed two readings of them at Beyond Baroque, Venice, California, in 1989 and then in 1991.

SUBGROUP III (BANNER AND FELT WORKS) Appropriating the style of inspirational fabric banners made by and for churchgoers in the 1960s and 70s and popularized by Sister Corita Kent, these felt compositions use the languages of symbolism (a cookie jar and a Christian dove) and abstraction (a blood-red work alluding to Rothko’s suicide or a nude figure in the style of Matisse’s paper cutouts), as well as pseudo-uplifting slogans (“Let’s Talk about Disobeying,” “I Am Useless to the Culture But God Loves Me"…"”). The two-part Animal Self and Friend of the Animals (1987) features a full-length, snake-bisected likeness of the artist flanked by symmetrical halves of animal forms (Animal Self), while the black-and- white Friend of the Animals shows a bearded, robed figure communing with diverse species. Other works using felt but not the banner format include the wall-hung sequence of shapes in Descending Order and Ascending Hosts (both 1989); a large

page 84 Eviscerated Corpse, 1989

pages 86 and 87 More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, both 1987

8786 Half a Man (1987–93)

88 89

composition with prize ribbons and an oval-shaped void filled by a bound, hanging toy (No Place, 1989); the narrow felt strip of Skinny University of Michigan (1989); a double-sided, upside-down cross (Reversible Cross, 1989); and an untitled yellow-and- black bannerlike piece with a stuffed panty-hose snake (Untitled, 1989).

SUBGROUP IV (PAINTINGS) The paintings associated with Half a Man include the five-work series Unwashed Abstraction (1989), which uses different combinations of similarly washed-out colors; four Poetic Paintings (1988) containing elliptical sayings rendered in 1950s-style graphics that sprawl goofily across monochromatic pools of color; and a number of black-and-white works (some augmented by found sculptural elements) that make use of Kelley’s typically deadpan, diagrammatic humor: The Bounty (1989), Pagan Altar (1989), Hierarchical Figure (1989), and the two-part Wallflowers (1988).

SUBGROUP V (FURNITURE) The final subgroup comprises furnishings for domestic interiors, such as the refin- ished chest of drawers with built-in vanity Antiqued (Prematurely Aged) (1987), which Kelley painted the typically “feminine” shade of bright pink (though it has also been antiqued with dark stain). Nine cutout images of Kelley from various art magazines are set under glass on the top of the chest, suggesting he is a heartthrob for an anonymous teenage girl. The coming-of-age theme carries to the underside (visible in a mirror set under the piece), which is the hiding place for a diary, a case for birth-control pills, and a sex-education manual. By mobilizing a set of associations with adolescent female sexuality, this domestic object personifies the absent figure, but it also tells a tale of sexual discovery and familial repression. The combination of wall hanging and draw- ers with a mirror beneath recurs in the collage-covered Nature and Culture (1987) and the stark-white No Exit (1987). Additional furnishings include two mattresses covered with multicolored modernist patchwork patterns, a keepsake chest of articles and press clippings, and The Wages of Sin, a side table with candles shown alongside More Love Hours.

page 88 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Estral Star #3, 1989; Manly Craft #2, 1989; and Number One and Number Two, 1989

page 89 Four Wire Sculptures, 1990

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DEODORIZED CENTRAL MASS WITH SATELLITES (1991–99) Comprising twelve globe-shaped, suspended accumulations of color-coordinated furry toys clustered around a slightly larger central orb and supplied with its own “atmo- sphere” by ten custom-made, human-size, fiberglass deodorizers, this major installation links Kelley’s breakthrough series using stuffed toys and animals commenced in the late 1980s with his move toward the larger-scale, thematic pieces developed through the 1990s. It also summarizes some of the artist’s main preoccupations as his atten- tion shifted from performance to sculpture and installations. In a signature volley of Kelley’s own form of institutional critique, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites satirically sanitizes not just the soiled craft objects that make up the mass and its sat- ellites, but also the gallery space, and by implication all interaction with the piece by art-world professionals, general viewers, and collectors. First exhibited in its pres- ent form at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 1999, the piece was conceived almost a decade earlier and had a preliminary outing (using different arrays of stuffed animals) at the Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, in 1991. The materials discarded during prepara- tions for the Braunschweig show became the founding elements of an associated work, Runway for Interactive DJ Event (1999), which took off (quite literally) from the clothes and outfits stripped from the stuffed animals used in Deodorized Central Mass.

Kelley, Mike. “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure” (1988). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 12–20.

Kelley, Mike. “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites.” In Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (auction cat.). Phillips de Pury & Co., November 16, 2006, n.p.

Levine, Cary. “Pandora’s Blankets: Mike Kelley’s Arenas in Cultural Context.” In Mike Kelley: Arenas (2010), pp. 2–11.

Singerman, Howard. “Mike Kelley’s Line.” In Mike Kelley: Three Projects (1988), pp. 5–13.

Welchman, John C. “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites.” In Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (auction cat.). Phillips de Pury & Co., November 16, 2006, n.p.

page 90 Top to bottom Arena #10 (Dogs), and Arena #8 (Leopard); both 1990

page 91 Left to right Ouija, 1990 Afghan, kitty litter tray, double cat-food dish, 3 cat toys 41 × 37 × 4.5 inches (104.14 × 93.98 × 11.43 cm)

Mooner, 1990 Afghan, pillow, double cat food dish, 4 cat toys 39.6 × 36 × 4.5 inches (100.58 × 91.44 × 11.43 cm)

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page 92 Top to bottom Arena #7 (Bears), 1990

Dialogue #5 (One Hand Clapping), 1991

page 93 Brown Star, 1991 Stuffed animals, rope, steel, pulley system Dimensions variable

pages 94 and 95 Installation view of Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites, 1991–99 Fiberglass, car paint, electric machine with disinfectant mixture, found plush toys sewn over wood and chicken wire frame with Styrofoam packing material, steel frame, nylon rope, pulleys, hardware, steel hanging plates 10 deodorizers: 85 × 20 × 17 inches (215.9 × 50.8 × 43.18 cm) each Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 1999

page 96 Pink and Gray, 1991 Stuffed animals, weight, rope, pulley system Dimensions variable

page 97 Installation view of Citrus and White, 1991 Stuffed animals, rope, hardware, steel pulley system, 2 fiberglass deodorizers, auto enamel, spraying mechanism 84.625 × 23.625 × 17 inches (215 × 60 × 43 cm) each; overall dimensions variable Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, 1991

Half a Man (1987–93)

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96 97Half a Man (1987–93)

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page 98 left to right Animal Self and Friend of the Animals, 1987

page 99 Clockwise from top left Three-Point Program!/!Four Eyes, 1987; Trash Picker, 1987; Let’s Talk, 1987; and Black-Eyed Susan, 1987

Half a Man (1987–93)

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page 100 Left to right Ascending Hosts, 1989, and Descending Order, 1989

page 101 Stained Glass Mattress, 1989

pages 102 and 103 Wallflowers, 1988

page 104 Pagan Altar, 1989 Acrylic on 3 panels, 2 boards, and 2 bunches of corn 98 × 100 × 8 inches (248.9 × 254 × 20.3 cm)

page 105 Antiqued (Prematurely Aged), 1987

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104 105Half a Man (1987–91)

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DRAWINGS Throughout his career, Kelley made drawings that referenced his adolescent “fan- tasies,” which “found form in endless notebook pages filled with Arshile Gorky–like blob drawings—each blob the illustration of some newly invented genital” (Minor Histories, p. 84). Produced during the period just before the artist developed his signature performance style in the late 1970s, the Early Drawings (1977–82) are not obviously associated with any of his major projects, though a few relate to spe- cific performances, including Perspectaphone (1978) and My Space (1978); The Dream State (1979) uses text that would be redeployed in The Poltergeist. Several of the drawings, such as Slow Blinkers (c. 1978–79), Tender Loving Care (1978), and drawings from the multipart work Oh The Pain of it All (1980) feature lists and speculative descriptions, some generated by a word-association game and rendered in Kelley’s signature capital lettering, so that the image occupies half or less of the sheet—and is absent altogether in the 1980 sheets. Others, including Taking Up Time Making (1978), emphasize the scale and composition of the image anticipating the text"/"image adjudication characteristic of Kelley’s black-and-white acrylic paint- ings, which would achieve their definitive appearance in the mid-1980s. During this period Kelley made drawings for other projects and performances, notably the series of forty black-and-white pieces created between 1981 and 1983 for Monkey Island and the series from 1984 associated with From My Institution to Yours.

The fifty or so Notebook Drawings in graphite, ink, and colored crayon on notebook paper from the later 1980s and early 90s have a wide range of subject matter and styles related to Half a Man; associated stuffed-animal, afghan, and yarn pieces; and other contemporary projects. Several use text only, either thickly hand-painted (as in a sheet marked “Faeces . Penis . Child”) or in the form of pages appropriated from Freud’s writings (or commentaries on them) with all but a few lines—on the Riddle of the Sphinx—canceled out. As with the text pieces, many of the drawings address questions of sexuality, including the crowned male member in a study for Master Dik (1989), a silkscreen on silk from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof (also used in Pagan Altar, 1989). Others investigate “Disobedience,” “Drugs on the Job,” or self-con- sciously skewed, projected associations, such as “Irish Nazi Twisted Clover,” which relates to Kelley’s investigation of “Irishness” in Liquid Diet (1989"/"2006) and his use of the swastika in Reconstructed History (1989), his Jesse Helms Protest Sign (1990), and the Candle Lighting Ceremony of Day Is Done (2005).

Building on a drawing dated “8–13–89, 3:15,” Kelley made a series of Shrink Drawings in March 1994 in pen or pencil marked on photocopies of front and rear schematic body outlines. Of the studies for a series based on medical ailments, pharmaceuti- cal prescriptions, and mind"/"body dysfunctions shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, later that year, six are associated with specific times and dates, while the seventh is described as “Outside of Time.”

page 107 Diagram for My Space Performance, 1978

109108 Drawings

Another group of drawings, dated 1994 and 1995, connects more directly to the clus- ter of issues that would converge in Educational Complex in 1995. Works from this notebook include the antics of lustful clowns and donkeys (derived from the ram- pant donkey mascot of the Bray’s hamburger franchise in Detroit), with speculations on the wider social and cultural implications of “the complex.” One sheet, marked at the top “mixture of all the educational institutions and the DC plan (central),” aligns the stylized elements of modernist centralized architecture with a key associative chain beginning with “Outlying: all secular memories” and then proceeding in a series of linked oval boxes to “Institutional Life,” “Daily Life,” “Symbolic Life,” and

“Unconscious Symbolic Life.”

Drawings featured in several specific exhibitions or projects, including the Garbage Drawings (1988), Sack Drawings (1988), Lump Drawings (1991), Roth"/ "Mouse"/"Wolverton Drawing Exercises (1993), The Poetics Project (1977–97, for which Kelley and Tony Oursler made fifty each), Katy Keene Drawings (2000), and Hermaphrodite Drawings (2005–06).

Welchman, John C. “L’arte e le instituzione: Riempire (e cancellare) dei vuoti.” In Le funzione del museo (2009), pp. 36–37.

page 108 Worldly Problems, 1978

page 109 A Really Big Mess, 1978 Marker on paper 34 × 39 inches (86.36 × 99.06 cm)

page 110 Oh The Pain of it All, 1980 6 pigment prints, 2 ink-on-paper drawings, wood, paint, and 26 black-and-white photographs, 1 with acrylic paint Dimensions variable

page 111 Jesse Helms Protest Sign, 1990 Acrylic on poster board 20 × 15 inches (50.8 × 38.1 cm)

page 112 Notebook Sketch for Entry Way (Genealogical Chart) (Victim Culture), 1995 Pencil on paper 12 × 9 inches (30.5 × 22.8 cm)

page 113 Notebook Sketch for Entry Way (Genealogical Chart) (Welcome to Waste Land), 1995 Ink on paper 12 × 9 inches (30.5 × 22.8 cm)

110 111Drawings

112 113Drawings

115114 Drawings

page 114 Notebook Drawings (Related to Educational Complex: Bray’s Burgers), 1994 12 × 9 inches (30.5 × 22.8 cm)

page 115 clockwise from top left Schematic Architecture 30 (Petting Zoo), Schematic Architecture 6 (Kelley Family Bathroom), Schematic Architecture 1 (Kandor), and Schematic Architecture 3; all date unknown

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Incorrect Sexual Models (1987) Each of these eight two-panel, black-and-white acrylic paintings derives its formal structure from the bilateral symmetry of the human body, with one specific visual pat- tern composed of a few rearranged parts—eyeballs, intestine, brain, kidney—providing the basic template. As modified in the two-part structures, different connotations are distributed across a variety of categories: Homosexual Couple, Hermaphrodite, Envy, Thalassa, Utopia, and Mommy’s Penis. Following a similar technique of mirroring, two additional works in this series reproduce close renderings of Gothic decoration, implic- itly lending this historical style a psychosexual dimension. This group of works was exhibited in the Half a Man section of Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (1988), and later as part of Why I Got into Art: Vaseline Muses at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne (1989). Selected works were also included in Eye Infection, curated by Jan Christiaan Braun at the Stedelijk Museum (2002).

page 116 Installation view of Incorrect Sexual Models, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, 1989

page 117 clockwise from top Hermaphrodite, Utopia, and Mommy’s Penis, all 1987

Kelley, Mike. “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure” (1988). In Minor Histories (2004), p. 15.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Sexual Dysfunction). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 235.

119118

Pay for Your Pleasure (1988) In each of the forty-two brightly colored banners that form the central part of Pay for Your Pleasure, a portrait of a well-known philosopher, poet, politician, or artist is paired with a quotation by that person addressing the presumed sanctity of art and art-making, especially as distinguished from undignified, dysfunctional, or criminal behavior. The texted portraits were originally displayed in a corridor as part of Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1988). Kelley mandated two site-specific requirements: the inclusion of an artwork made by a local murderer or violent criminal (the inau- gural Chicago installation included a painting by convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was awaiting execution at the time) and a donation box for contributions to one or more local victims’ rights groups. Kelley described how the Chicago installation created “a situation where we can at the same time condemn Gacy and have access to his crimes. But since no pleasure is free, a little ‘guilt’ money is in order” (Kelley, Minor Histories, p. 20).

page 118 Details of Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988

page 119 Installation view of Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988 Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 1988

pages 120 and 121 Installation view of Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988 Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France, 1992

Cooper, Dennis, and Casey McKinney. “Criminality and Other Themes in Pay for Your Pleasure.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 135–48.

Kelley, Mike. “Three Projects: Half A Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure” and

“Quotations on Art and Crime for Pay for Your Pleasure” (both 1988). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 12–27.

120 121

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From My Institution to Yours (1987-/-2003); Loading Dock Drawings (1984) For his installation in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art group show Avant- Garde in the Eighties (1987), curated by Howard Fox, Kelley used hand-drawn figures and slogans found on anonymously authored flyers posted around his institutional workplace (CalArts), which had been circulated from office to office by fax. Struck in the common currency of grievances shared by manual or clerical workers, the flyers pair animal imagery or cartoon-like humans with textual references to labor practices and were typically posted at sites of menial labor or “grunt work”—such as that indi- cated in the title of Kelley’s series Loading Dock Drawings (1984). Kelley’s installation alcove contains visual enlargements of the drawings arrayed around a stereotypical symbol of incentive (a carrot dangling from the ceiling) and an emblem of worker soli- darity (a stenciled fist). This dislocation of found material from its original contexts challenges the expectations of museum visitors (following the “From"…"to” construc- tion in the title), and such an obviously inappropriate deployment of tasteless humor signals a fissure between the routines of workers and museum-goers. However, the new arrangement suggests that these folk drawings display an awareness of social difference and indicate an actual, if underutilized, capacity for workers to become organized independently.

page 122 Loading Dock Drawings #1–4, 1984 Acrylic on paper 72.25 × 44 inches (183.52 × 111.76 cm) each

page 123 Installation view of From My Institution to Yours, 1987!/!2003 Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, 2006

Fox, Howard. “Artist in Exile.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 193–95.

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Seventy-Four Garbage Drawings and One Bush (1988) Based on Sad Sack, an American comic strip from the 1940s and 50s created by George Baker depicting the tribulations of a private in the US Army, Kelley’s series of seventy- four works renders only those parts of the original images representing garbage or filth and alludes to the common military term that engendered the strip’s title (“sad sack of shit”). The gesture of removing the main content of the appropriated imag- ery—its characters, symbols, and text—mimics and subtly parodies various modernist strategies in which a repeated procedure displaces more traditional approaches to composition, while also emphasizing those peripheral elements that come to define the predicament of various characters and to color their outlook on life. A closely related series of six larger-scale works, Disembodied Militarism, similarly removes the central elements from the original sequences, rendering only the background sym- bols and marks relating to trash, as well as preserving their spatial relationship within a conjoined sequence of frames. The works were first shown in Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure (1988) and were considered by Kelley as the final body of work in the exhibition.

page 124 Disembodied Militarism #1, 1988 6 parts: acrylic on paper (1 of 6 shown) 54 × 35.75 inches (137.16 × 90.81 cm)

page 125 Garbage Drawing #17, 1988

page 126 Clockwise from top left Garbage Drawings #25, #34, #73, and #36; all 1988

page 127 Clockwise from top left Garbage Drawings #58, #71, and #68; all 1988

Kellein, Thomas. “Is Evil Really Evil?” In Mike Kelley (1992, Kunsthalle Basel), p. 10.

127126 Seventy-Four Garbage Drawings and One Bush

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Sack Drawings (1988) Originally shown in the exhibition Why I Got into Art: Vaseline Muses at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne (1989), the seventeen black-and-white acrylic works on paper in this series stage formal and conceptual associations between several naturalistically ren- dered garbage bags (each tied with ribbon) and other, more loosely defined “sacks”: bodily parts or organs, various types of handmade doll, and a brain obscured by incon- gruous halves of male-female hair. Additional references to caricature and comic books add further layers of graphic intimation to representations of diverse modes of contain- ment, crossing particular instances with more general notions of “baseness.”

page 128 Girl and Figure II (Hair), both 1989

page 129 Ascending and Descending Testicles, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches (102.24 × 81.28 cm)

page 130 Garbage Bag I and Garbage Bag V, both 1989

page 131 Clockwise from top Male and Female Brain Halves, Comedy and Tragedy Lung, and Kissing Kidneys, all 1989

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Sad Sack). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 234.

130 131Sack Drawings (1988)

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Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof (1989-/-2009) This series of silk scarves, produced in an edition of forty in 1989, presents a range of imagery riffing on the theme of clovers and their purported luck, playing on the artist’s Irish-American heritage. One unfortunate specimen breaks into two parts in Unlucky Clover (1989), while a clover-ended green swastika fits into a Nazi-inspired composition in Twisted Shamrock (1989). This series includes a cloven-hoofed devil on multicolored ground, a two-tone skull, a tie-dyed depiction of a heavy-metal enthu- siast, and a rudimentary face made from a potato-qua-hoof print. Presented alongside small- and full-scale renderings on paper of the designs, these ten fabric works were used as costumes in the 1989 performative presentation of the same name (con- ceived by Kelley and choreographed by Anita Pace), organized by Rosamund Felsen Gallery and presented at a private loft in Los Angeles (also presented in conjunction with the current exhibition). The works also appeared with The Riddle of the Sphinx at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia in 1992. In 2009 Kelley produced an edition of related photographs of Pace performing a “dance of the veils,” the “pictorialist” soft focus effects of which were achieved by smearing Vaseline on the camera lens.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Vampires). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 236–37.

page 132 Studies for Pansy Metal!/! Clovered Hoof banners, 1989 Mixed-media 14 × 11 inches (35.56 × 27.94 cm)

page 133 Blood and Soil (Potato Print), from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989

page 134 Clockwise from top left (from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989): Hangin’ – Heavy – Hairy – Horny, Twisted Shamrock, Peat Spade, and Unlucky Clover

page 135 Clockwise from top left (from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989) The Orange and Green, Satan’s Nostrils, Country Cousin, and Master Dik

page 136 Emerald Eyehole, from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989

page 137 Detail from Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989A/A2009

134 135Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof (1989!/!2009)

136 137Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof (1989!/!2009)

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Liquid Diet (1989-/-2006) First shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and other venues in 1989 (and later in the exhibition Liquid Diet and Related Works at Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, in 2006), Liquid Diet includes a large-scale mural in which the artist’s logo (the name “Kelley” marked in white cursive script inside a green clover leaf ) is set in a field of brown concentric circles, forming the backdrop to a low-slung bar or buffet decoratively fringed with more clover leaves. Kelley collided the rote commemoration of Irish heritage in the US—in the ubiquitous annual St. Patrick’s Day booze-up—with a topical allusion to the “dirty protests” by H-Block IRA prisoners who fouled their cells with their own feces beginning in March 1978, the preface to a series of hunger strikes in 1980 that led to ten deaths before the following year’s end. Kelley noted, sar- donically, that if you combine the green of Catholic republicanism with the orange of the Protestant “loyalists”—as he did in another wall-scaled part of the installation (inscribed “This Is What Comes o’ the Minglin”) and three tinted videos with appro- priated news footage about the hunger strikes—the result is brown.

page 138 Installation view of Liquid Diet, 1989!/!2006 Wood, steel, aluminum, wrought iron, acrylic and enamel paint, cloth, mud, ceramic, glass, plastic, cork, beer taps, paper, 3 DVD discs, 3 DVD players, 3 TV LCDs, cable, 3 remote control units, various hardware, up!/!down power transformer 96 × 152 × 288 inches (243.84 × 386.08 × 731.52 cm) Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, 2006

page 139 top to bottom Detail from an early site-specific installation of Liquid Diet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, 1989

Detail of Liquid Diet, 1989!/!2006, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, 2006

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Reconstructed History (1989) This limited-edition artist’s book contains sixty-one photographs and illustrations selected from a much larger group that Kelley found in used and yard-sale books on American history that he then graffitied over. The embossed cover of Reconstructed History, with its crest and scholastic “Lamp of Knowledge,” mimics the look of a high- school yearbook or historical coffee-table tome and features a clear dust jacket defaced with morbid adolescent doodles. The book’s interior, on the other hand, resembles a high-end photography book, with protective barrier sheets between each isolated image. Kelley’s introduction was printed in script on faux parchment, emulating

“Colonial” design. Its style, tone, and range of references—even the original graphic layout using a pseudohistorical typeface—are all duplicitous. The images in the book are not “found” but made, and the voice of the text deliberately stilted. The result is an elaborate hoax, one of the more vivid of Kelley’s many efforts to perform, write, and represent through adopted fictitious personae.

page 140 Reconstructed History: The Lincoln Memorial, 1989

page 141 Reconstructed History: China Relief Expedition, 1989 Black-and-white photograph 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm)

page 142 Clockwise from top Reconstructed History: Dancing The Quadrille, 1989 Black-and-white photograph 10 × 8 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm)

Reconstructed History: The Father of Our Country, 1989

Reconstructed History: With Malice towards None; with Charity For All, 1989 Black-and-white photograph 10 × 8 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm)

page 143 left to right Reconstructed History: The Capitol Building, 1989

Reconstructed History: The Gateway To Freedom, 1989

Kelley, Mike. “Introduction to Reconstructed History” (1990). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 28–31.

Welchman, John C. “History and Time in the American Vernacular: Mike Kelley’s Work with Photography.” In Imaging History: Photography after the Fact (2012).

143142 Reconstructed History (1989)

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Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (1990) First shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1990, along with Center and Peripheries #1–5 and six yarn pieces, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology is a series of fifteen works, each of which pairs a black-and-white acrylic painting of a handmade doll with a small, black wooden box, in which the doll matching the rendering is deposited. The graphic style of the oversized “portraits” facilitates easy recognition, while viewed together they approximate a line-up of criminal suspects, an effect accentuated by their being installed on the wall, touching the floor. The floor just in front of the paintings accommodates the dark Minimalist forms, each containing a small hatch on the top, suggesting the act of identifying the actual doll. Complementing the imagistic substitution for the doll, the physical enclosure and its faint promise of visual reunion create a heightened sense of separation from the actual object. The result is an oddball reflection on the processes of emotional exchange and empathetic investment bound up in the production, circulation, and reception of the craft object—coupled with an attempt to strike back at the contagious and ineffable humanizations they engender. About the concept behind Empathy Displacement and Center and Peripheries in an unpublished conversation with Eva Meyer-Hermann, Kelley stated, “You have a blank disembodied power, and it’s about hierarchy or bureau- cracy, where power is central, anonymous. And yet the peripheral is"…"peripheral, but in this case it’s defined symbolically through things that are abject. Like garbage.”

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Empathy). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 217–18.

page 144 Installation view of (clockwise from top) Carnival Time, 5 Paragraphs and 3 Euphemisms, Untitled (Yarn), and Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology, all 1990 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1990

page 145 Top Untitled (Yarn), 1990

Bottom, left to right Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove), #5, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove), #7, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove), #3; all 1990

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Banners from College Campus Flyers (1990–93) I wanted them [the banners of campus flyers] to be contemporary but invisible, and to be about something that people would associate with college life.…!When you look at them you don’t just think about the people that made them, you think about the whole group to which these people belong to, or to which you assume they belong. —Mike Kelley

This series of works appropriates imagery from a seemingly random selection of fly- ers distributed on a college campus, including ads for a roommate and for an actor to play Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as notices for various events—one sponsored by a fraternity, another for a festival celebrating the African-American community. Each flyer was made into a large felt banner measuring approximately eight by five feet that accurately reproduces the original designs (colors, symbols, text, and layout). In certain instances, a black box covers redacted information. Three of the banners— corresponding to flyers announcing a luau, a Christian drama group, and a musical instrument for sale—were included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

Kelley, Mike. Interview with John Miller. In Mike Kelley (1992, Art Resources Transfer).

page 146 Untitled (Female Roommate), 1990 Glued felt banner 93.75 × 70.5 inches (238.13 × 179.07 cm)

Untitled (Pasolini), 1990

page 147 Untitled (Chokwe Lumumba), 1990

148 149

Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood and Manipulating Mass Produced Idealized Objects (both 1990) Part of the Half a Man project, this diptych of two black-and-white photographs (one sepia-toned and always placed on the right) document ritualistic acts performed by two naked figures involving stuffed animals positioned on open blankets. The female figure strikes a pose with her back to the camera, straddling a large bunny rabbit, while the male performer squats down to position a smaller toy beneath his exposed backside—which is covered with dark, viscous pigment. As the titles suggest, these activities allude to a common belief that children have access to a more vivid imagina- tion, including sexual fantasies. The setting for the photographs is an empty room with unadorned plywood walls and a simple door, as in a basement or other utility space that kids might coopt for their personal experiments. In his notes on the project, Kelley described the images as a kind of deliberately “fake pornography” set up as a knowing self-parody. Each photograph is an edition of ten, plus one artist’s proof.

Kellein, Thomas. “Is Evil Really Evil?” In Mike Kelley (1992, Kunsthalle Basel), p. 8.

left to right Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects, 1990

Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, 1990

Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) (1990) Comprising twelve felt banners (each with wooden pole and wall-mounted brace), two modified oil paintings, a small run of posters, and a two-sided panel shown alongside a pair of dog beds, a basketball, and footballs, the main source of the imagery in Alma Pater is assorted memorabilia and merchandise from the University of Michigan, where Kelley studied art in the 1970s. In addition to school colors, insignia, and mascots, the piece also engages with a wider range of symbols associated with fra- ternities, including commissioned oil paintings of “glorified” horses (with additional sympathetic elements added by Kelley) and an effigy-hanging contest advertisement on a wood panel, redolent of the stirring communal sentiment engendered by mock- ing one’s opponents. Alma Pater was originally included in the 1991 exhibition El jardín salvaje (The savage garden), curated by Dan Cameron at the Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Madrid.

Kellein, Thomas, ed. Mike Kelley (1992, Kunsthalle Basel), pp. 72–76.

Kelley, Mike. “Alma Pater (Wolverine Den).” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 32–39.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 236.

Installation view of Alma Pater (Wolverine Den), 1990 12 (one banner not shown) felt banners with flag poles, 2 framed oil paintings, 1 2-sided painted plywood panel, 1 basketball, 2 dog-bed baskets and cushions, wooden benches Dimensions variable Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France, 2009

150 151

Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991) For the 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Kelley laid out 114 found, hand- made dolls on thirty-two folding utility tables, organizing them “according to material usage and construction technique.” Intended to counteract the empathy viewers felt for the objects, the set-up of the tables and the selection and arrangement of the dolls compose a spatial diagram of the relative morphologies of the craftwork. Adding to the impersonal effect generated by analytic anonymity, sixty black-and-white photo- graphs of individual dolls—each including a ruler for scale—and one acrylic work on paper document the items as if they were collected specimens waiting to be catalogued.

Kellein, Thomas, ed. Mike Kelley (1992, Kunsthalle Basel), pp. 91–95.

Kelley, Mike. Interview with Isabelle Graw. In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 25–32.

Welchman, John C. “The Mike Kelleys.” In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), p. 74.

page 150 Details of Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991 60 black-and-white Photographs 14 × 11 inches (35.56 × 27.94 cm) each

page 151 Installation view of Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991 Found handmade stuffed animals, thirty-two tables, drawing; 60 photographs Dimensions variable; drawing: 60 × 83.5 inches (152.4 × 212.09 cm); photographs: 14 × 11 inches (35.56 × 27.94 cm) each Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1991

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Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1991) In May 1990, Kelley wrote to Aleks Istanbullu of Frank Gehry and Associates with a proposal to make a “decorative” intervention in a suite of five conference rooms in the then-new Chiat"/"Day office building in Venice, California, designed by Gehry in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1985–91). Kelley ran riot with the original thinking behind the interior design—an open-plan space with skylights and standard furniture intended to facilitate both employee interaction and the expression of individual “creativity”—by offering “to ‘deconstruct’ this space, to cut holes from one room to another, remove the ceiling, etc.” Kelley also envisaged a series of wall paintings using “blow-ups of office cartoons of the type usually found in secretarial cubicles or pinned up next to the office copier or fax machine” (Minor Histories, p. 315). But, unlike Gehry, his “intention was not to reveal the formal struc- ture of the building, but to expose the hierarchy of the workplace” (Minor Histories, p. 326). Though the on-site project did not eventuate, Kelley built a full-scale model, Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry, for the exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992.

Kelley, Mike. “Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry” (1990). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 312–15.

“Missing Space"/"Time: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Kim Colin and Mark Skiles” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 324–39.

Schimmel, Paul. “A Full-Scale Model for a Dysfunctional Institutional Hierarchy.” In Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), pp. 211–19.

Welchman, John C., ed. On the Beyond (2011), pp. 38–40.

pages 152–55 Details of Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry, 1991 Conference rooms, copy room, office furnishings, murals

154 155Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1991)

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Lumpenprole (1991)-/- Riddle of the Sphinx (1991–92) Lumpenprole was an exhibition of four works at Galerie Peter Pakesch in Vienna in 1991, which traveled to the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, Belgium. The Riddle of the Sphinx was made (like Lumpenprole) and originally exhibited at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, in 1992. Both projects are installations composed of a large knitted blanket stretched across the floor with unidentifiable objects positioned beneath it creating lumps and protrusions in the cloth’s surface. While clearly allud- ing to the repression of objects and their relations—which are partly visible but finally unknown—both pieces also connect with Kelley’s interest in unconscious processes manifest in tasteless humor and off-color jokes, apparent in his Ageistprop panel (1991), Polish Joke drawing (1991–92), and the Speech Impediment banner (1991–92). The thematic thread that knits these works together turns on the notion of the lumpen- prole, the reactionary part of the working or “under” class, which Marx characterized as unredeemable “refuse” because of its resistance to social change.

Rosenthal, Norman, et al. Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art (2000), p. 118.

page 156 Installation view of Lumpenprole and Ageistprop, 1991 Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France, 1992

page 157 AgeistProp, 1991

page 158 Installation view of Riddle of the Sphinx, 1991–92 Yarn, found objects, framed calendar print 180 × 312 inches (457.2 × 792.48 cm) Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1992

page 159 Polish Joke (Floor Piece), 1991–92 Acrylic on paper 60 × 45.5 inches (152.4 × 115.6 cm)

158 159

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Lump Drawings and Related Works (1991) In the Lump Drawings, I took on the task of “rendering” abstract biomorphic shapes. I used standard illustrative tropes to provide these shapes with distinguishing surface details and the illusion of three-dimensional form. The point was to fix shapes generally used to signify the formless. —Mike Kelley

Kelley investigates the visual properties of amorphous masses in a grouping of twenty-three black-and-white acrylic works, including a series of six Lump Drawings, originally shown together in 1991 at Galería Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid. The Lump Drawings present different kinds of stand-alone agglomeration—caked, steaming, oozing, smoldering, etc.—the graphic appearance of which resembles popular cul- tural representations of odoriferous matter. While some works in the wider group also refer to “lumps” (Odorless Lump, Wedged Lump, and Capitalist Lump, all 1991), others resemble anatomical parts, excrement, Extraterrestrials, or, somewhat incongruously, a cornstalk with cherries. Another subgroup composes diagrammatic relationships among different sorts of clumped or aggregated materials, sometimes incorporating fragments of text relating to financial, legal, or political institutions or those associ- ated with them. One half of the asymmetrical Untitled (Liberal Puritan!…!) (1991), for example, shows a gooey ball of filth suspended in the air and surrounded by flies; the other depicts an odorous, spirelike geological form above block lettering: “Liberal Puritan Citizen Monument.” The Madrid exhibition also featured Black Soul (1991), a work with three framed drawings—a glass chamber filled with bulbous filaments, a bloblike design reproduced in mirror-image, and a skeletal figure with top hat and bow tie smoking a cigarette—each variants of pulmonary structures that elicit a morbid quality of extinguishment.

Kelley, Mike. “The Meaning Is Confused Spatiality, Framed” (1999). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 118–36.

page 160 Church and State, 1991 Acrylic on paper 60 × 72 inches (152.4 × 182.88 cm)

page 161 Odorless Lump, 1991 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches (102.24 × 81.28 cm)

page 162 Untitled (Communicating Vessels), 1991

page 163 Untitled (Liberal Puritan!…!), 1991 Acrylic on paper 60 × 84 inches (152.4 × 213.36 cm)

162 163Lump Drawings and Related Works (1991)

164 165

Ahh!…!Youth! (1991) Kelley’s famous group of eight Cibachrome prints of mug shots featuring thrift-store stuffed animals is punctuated by a faintly sociopathic, yearbooklike portrait of the artist. The contextless, frontal images, arranged like specimens, offer an unequal and uncanny meeting place between anxious artist and a menacingly anodyne, cro- cheted menagerie. The photos were redeployed on the cover and six of the eight panels of the CD insert design of Sonic Youth’s ninth album Dirty (Geffen, 1992), and early pressings of the CD also included a “secret” image (literally, a “dirty picture,” also by Kelley) hidden in the tray liner. European, United Kingdom, Canadian, Japanese, and Australian editions, as well as the vinyl version and a two-CD deluxe reissue (2003), contained variations on the original artwork.

Ahh!…!Youth!, 1991 The John Reed Club (1992) This collection of eighty-four small works on paper imitates the design and layout of 1950s-era Marvel Comics by narrating the story of a hapless band of heroes—Bozo the Stained Glass Window, Captain Spit, Super Spore, and Famous Art—who fight villains but seem to create as much havoc as they prevent. With a refrain of references to the work of early-twentieth-century American poet and Communist activist John

“Jack” Silas Reed, Kelley’s project imagines a radicalized variant of postwar American popular culture in which the social and aesthetic values associated with consumerist excess have been replaced by amateur-style visual techniques, fragmented narration, and dogmatic quips affirming revolutionary aspiration. The series was presented as part of the two-person show Mike Kelley and John Boskovich at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1992.

1 B The John Reed Club, 1992 Pencil and colored pencil on paper 12.75 × 10.25 inches (32.39 × 26.04 cm), framed

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Documenta IX (1992) In 1992, at the ninth edition of Documenta, curated by Jan Hoet, Kelley exhibited a series of wooden sculptures “designed specifically for the viewer to enter or lie upon.” Primaling Cabinet and Orgone Shed (both 1992) “were small solitary spaces”—the lat- ter “a combination Orgone box and backyard garden shed, so it has overtones of the proverbial ‘woodshed’—where one is taken to get a spanking, or goes to ‘play doctor’— but conflated with new age self-help references.” Sources for the “psychoanalytic” or pathological overtones of these works included the “cubbyhole” architecture discussed by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1955), Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream (1970), and Wilhelm Reich’s Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (1973). These “handyman specials” look back to the DIY enigmas of the Birdhouses (1978–79) and forward to the degree zero of customization that results from the miraculous recon- stitution of blank and unremembered spaces in the work associated with Educational Complex (1995) and the hypergeneric architectural spaces of Day Is Done (2005).

“Missing Space"/"Time: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Kim Colin, and Mark Skiles” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 324–39.

page 166 Orgone Shed Plans, 1992

page 167 Orgone Shed, 1992

page 168 Colema Board Details and Colema Bench, both 1992

page 169 Installation view of All Gussied Up, Orgone Shed, Torture Table, Primaling Cabinet, Brown Is the Color of My True Love’s Soul, Private Address System, and Colema Bench, made for Documenta IX, 1992 Metro Pictures, New York, 1992

168 169Documenta IX (1992)

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Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone (1992, with Paul McCarthy) Made in 1992 for the exhibition LAX at Krinzinger Galerie, Vienna, this collaboration between Kelley and Paul McCarthy is ostensibly based on Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880), a novel about familial bonds and geographic displacement, and its reinterpre- tations in American popular culture, including the 1937 Hollywood version starring Shirley Temple. Drawing on this well-established iconography and incorporating additional references to horror films, modernist architecture, Disney imagery, and other cultural sources, Kelley and McCarthy fabricated a theatrical set that served as a site for performance-based activity and filming and later became the central element in their installation Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone (1992). The video element of the installation is composed of a loosely structured narrative sequence, running over 62 minutes and featuring styl- ized enactments of the novel’s original characters—Heidi, Grandfather, Peter, and Klara. Additional footage not included in the installation was compiled in Heidi’s Four Basket Dances (1992).

Kelley, Mike. “Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone” and “Heidi’s Four Basket Dances” (both 1992). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 208–13.

Martin, Timothy. “Heidi: The Wages of Neutrality.” In Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works (2000), pp. 20–29.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Heidi). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 219–20.

page 170 Detail of Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone (1992)

page 171 Details of Heidi House Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 1992 (top), and The Power Plant, Toronto, 2000 (bottom)

172 173

Beat of the Traps (1992, with Anita Pace and Stephen Prina) A collaboration between Kelley (script, rock drum score), Anita Pace (choreogra- phy, dance), and Stephen Prina (composition, vocals, guitar), Beat of the Traps was a one-and-a-half-hour, multisensory, performative investigation of the rhythm, sym- metry, and other patterns of rock drumming and its fêted history. Prina contributed the score Square Root Function I, based on number sequences, for two snare drums and two wood blocks that were performed live by two drummers (M. B. Gordy and Jonathan Norton) and tape-backed, vocal interpretations of the A- and B-sides of Billboard magazine’s top pop single of the week. Kelley’s gushing, anecdotal text— scored to drum solos extracted from Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, The Who, with “encore pieces” from Albert Ayler and Captain Beefheart—was delivered by actor Alan Abelew, while Pace choreographed herself and Carl Burkley in dances structured by “repetition and reversals” in relation to each of these elements. As the artists note in their project proposal (1991–92): “Overall the piece becomes a dance performance, a drum recital, a rock drummer’s solo, a music fanatic’s fantasy, and a review of the week’s top pop single.” Beat of the Traps was performed at Expanded Art II, Wiener Festwochen, Remise, Vienna (1992), and the Gindi Auditorium, University of Judaism, Los Angeles (June 1992).

View of Beat of the Traps, 1992, with Anita Pace and Stephen Prina Wiener Festwochen, Expanded Art, Vienna, 1992

Roth-/-Mouse-/-Wolverton Drawing Exercises (1993) This series of eight “exercises” in acrylic on paper was shown in the traveling exhi- bition Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Robert Williams & Others, a survey of art influenced by gearhead and “Rat Rod” car culture curated by Craig Stecyk for the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, along with work by Jim Shaw, DeWain Valentine, Billy Al Bengston, and others. As noted in “Foul Perfection,” his essay on caricature, Kelley was interested in the “grotesque displacement of the order of the body” and the tension it creates between “attraction and repulsion.” Roth and Mouse in particular, he suggested, coupled grotesque images with “the dirty, the crimi- nal, and the hedonistic,” producing “positive” rather than “disgusting” effects. Taking off from cartoonist Basil Wolverton’s “monstrous exaggerations,” Kelley’s paintings feature hybrid, composite figures with phallic features, bug eyes, and indeterminate or distorted appendages.

Kelley, Mike. “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature” (1989). In Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection (2003), pp. 28–29.

page 173 left to right Roth!/!Mouse!/!Wolverton Drawing Exercise #4, 1993 Acrylic on paper, framed 35 × 23 inches (88.9 × 58.42 cm)

Roth!/!Mouse!/!Wolverton Drawing Exercise #8, 1993 Acrylic on paper, framed 35 × 23 inches (88.9 × 58.42 cm)

174 175

VIDEO

Beginning in the early 1970s with The Futurist Ballet (1973), shot in real time on a reel-to-reel portable video system and the sole surviving piece from this era, Kelley’s work with video has been diverse. First, he directed stand-alone, single-channel vid- eos, including his first solo videotape, The Banana Man (1983). A second sequence of works, dating mostly from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, involved various forms of collaboration with friends and fellow artists. Kelley appeared as an actor in Tony Conrad’s Beholden to Victory (1980–83); Tony Oursler’s EVOL (1984); Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Kappa (1986), which he also codirected; Paul McCarthy’s Family Tyranny!/!Cultural Soup (1987); Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone (1989); several videos by Ericka Beckman, including You the Better (1983), Cinderella (1986), and Blind Country (1989); and Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s 100 Reasons—Spank O Rama (1991), for which Kelley read a list of one hundred synonyms for the word paddle from his book Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. Other collaborations, such as Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone

Still from The Futurist Ballet, 1973 Video, b&w!/!sound; 27 min. Left to right Mike Kelley, unknown, Jim Shaw

Stills from Kappa, 1986 (with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto) Video, color!/!sound; 26 min.

Two stills from Paul McCarthy, Family Tyranny!/!Cultural Soup, 1987 Video, color!/!sound; 15:03 min.

Still from Raymond Pettibon, Sir Drone, 1989 Video, color!/!sound; 57 min.

Three stills from Mike Kelley and Ericka Beckman, Blind Country, 1989 Video, color!/!sound; 19:57 min.

(1992), Heidi (1992), the unfinished Heidi’s Four Basket Dances (1992), Fresh Acconci (1996), Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna Cut) (1999), and Out O’ Actions (1998)—all with McCarthy—involved planning or scripting and directing in addition to acting. Fresh Acconci, for example, appropriates scripts from five of Vito Acconci’s landmark perfor- mance videos of the early 1970s, including Claim Excerpts, Pryings (both 1971), and Theme Song (1973). Recycling the original monologue or dialogue and basic stage direc- tions within new logics of casting, style, and mise-en-scéne—inflected by the tropes of soft-core pornography—the authorial voice is not that of Kelley and McCarthy but an imagined younger artist whose relation to Acconci’s venerable generation teeters between influence and plagiarism. Third, Kelley made a number of sketches or propos- als for videos that remain unrealized, including Zoo TV (proposal, 1996).

176 177

Selections from Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done and The Offer (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33), released in 2011; Kandor 10!/!EAPR #34 and Kandor 12!/!EAPR #35 (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, 2011), and EAPR #36 (Vice Anglais) (part of Exploded Fortress of Solitude, Gagosian Gallery, London, 2011).

The statements by Kelley for these videos up to around 2000, including those written before the end of 1991 for the screening “Videotapes by and with Mike Kelley” at the Broadway Kino in Cologne in November of that year, are collected in Minor Histories (2004). The collaborations between Kelley and McCarthy were the subject of the exhi- bition and catalogue Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in 2000. The music, lyrics, and themes of the installational videos of Day Is Done are discussed in texts by Kelley and Welchman in Mike Kelley: Day Is Done (Gagosian Gallery"/"Yale University Press, 2007), which also includes the libretti.

In 1999 Kelley commenced another mode of engagement with video, which became something of a standard operating procedure in his work during the last decade and a half of his life, when he made Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses specifically for inclusion in the architecturally scaled sculpture of the same title. Other works conceived as elements integrated into installational or sculptural contexts include Superman Recites Selections from “The Bell Jar” and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999) and the ongoing Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series—which commenced with #1 (A Domestic Scene) (2000) and includes EAPR #2–32 (brought together in the mega-installation Day Is Done, presented at Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2004–05, and as a feature-length DVD); EAPR #33 (The Officer), performed live along with scenes from the Day Is Done videos as part of Performa 09 in New York City, shot on video over the three-night run and later cut together as the single-channel video The Judson Church Horse Dance:

Two stills from Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000 Video, b&w!/!sound; 29:44 min.

Still from Day Is Done: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2–32, 2005!/!2006 Video, color!/!sound; 120:50 min.

Six stills from Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Heidi, 1992 Video, color!/!sound; 62:40 min.

Two stills from Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Out O’ Actions, Volume I, 1998 Video, color!/!sound; 4:25 min.

Still from Superman Recites Selections from “The Bell Jar” and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999 Video, color!/!sound; 7:19 min.

Video

Kelley, Mike. “Video Statements and Proposals.” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 173–250.

Chris, Cynthia, and John C. Welchman. “The Freshness of Acconci,” Texte zur Kunst, September 1999, pp. 276–80. (Text in German.)

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The Uncanny (1993-/-2004) The Uncanny was an “exhibition within the exhibition” of sculpture, objects, and photographs curated by Kelley at the Gemeentemuseum for Sonsbeek ’93 in Arnhem, the Netherlands (1993), based on a collection of figurative images he had assembled while working with McCarthy on Heidi. While Kelley called his show “old-fashioned” and “somewhat of a joke on site-specificity as a gesture of ‘resistance,’” it was also a substantial research project in dialogue with Sigmund Freud’s signature essay “The

‘Uncanny’” (1919) that arose from Kelley’s long-standing interest in the iconography and social effects of mannequins, dolls, and other figurative forms usually considered marginal to the fine arts tradition. The works exhibited in 1993 ranged from a series of Egyptian Ushabtis (1000–600 BCE) and a Chinese warrior figure from Xian (220–210 BCE), to figurative sculptures by John de Andrea, Robert Gober, Duane Hanson, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, and Paul Thek, as well as photographs by Hans Bellmer, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and others. The final room of the exhibi- tion displayed fourteen separate collections made over the years by Kelley, ranging from his “childhood rock collection to a contemporary collection of business cards,” which he referred to as “harems,” “a term used to describe a fetishist’s accumulation of fetish objects.” The exhibition and Kelley’s associated text, “Playing with Dead Things,” relate to a number of similarly predicated studies published around the same time, including Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992) and Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty (1993). The Uncanny was restaged in 2004 at Tate Liverpool and at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. Kelley showed many of the same artists from 1993 but added works by Nancy Grossman, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Ron Mueck, Malcolm Poynter, Mark Quinn, and others; a series of medical, scientific, or sex dolls, models, and mannequins; and two additional Harems.

Grunenberg, Christoph. “Life in a Dead Circus: The Spectacle of the Real.” In The Uncanny (2004), pp. 57–64.

Kelley, Mike. “Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny” (1993). In Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection (2003), pp. 70–99.

____. “A New Introduction to The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny (2004), pp. 9–12.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Puppets [Dolls and Mannequins]). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 223.

____. “The Uncanny and Visual Culture.” In The Uncanny (2004), pp. 39–56.

____, ed. “I’ve Got This Strange Feeling"…"[A discussion between Jeffrey Sconce and Mike Kelley].” In Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (2005), pp. 263–75.

page 179 Cover of catalogue for The Uncanny, the original Sonsbeek exhibition, 1993

page 180 Installation views of Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny Top and middle Gavin Turk, Death of Che, 2000 (foreground, courtesy MUMOK), and Cindy Sherman, Untitled #261, 1992 (rear wall); Sarah Lucas, Pauline Bunny, 1997 (foreground), and Jake and Dinos Chapman, Ubermensch, 1995 (middle ground); Duane Hanson, Football Vignette, 1969 (foreground); all Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, 2004

bottom Chinese Warrior Figures from Qin Shi Huang Tomb (copies of terracotta, 220–210 BCE, courtesy Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, London), Tate Liverpool, 2004

page 181 Details of the Harems room, part of the Uncanny exhibition Top to bottom: Sonsbeek 93, Arnhem, Holland, 1993; Tate Liverpool, 2004

Two stills from Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011 HD Video, color!/!sound; 25:14 min.

Two stills from The Judson Church Horse Dance: Selections From Day Is Done and Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (The Offer), 2011 HD video, color!/!sound; 1:10 min.

Video

Five stills from Day Is Done

180 181The Uncanny (1993!/!2004)

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Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered (1993–94) This series of seventy-four works in mixed-media on paper, made during Kelley’s undergraduate years at the University of Michigan (1972–76), was first shown at Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany, in 1995. Some twenty-seven were modified in 1993 and 1994 and bear double dates. The iconographical references range from self-portraiture, art history, and popular culture to psychological states and sexual ambivalence, while their forms and materials include collage, abstraction, gestural- ism, patterns, image-texts, and star-shaped canvases. Kelley’s decision to “paint over’” his earlier pieces works both to block them out and start them again; his gestures are, therefore, acts of rupture, erasure, and continuity.

Kelley, Mike. “Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered.” In Minor Histories, pp. 60–71.

____, ed. Mike Kelley: Missing Time. Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered (1995).

page 182 to to bottom Elegy to the Symbionese Liberation Army, 1975

In Anticipation of America’s Bicentennial, 1975 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm)

page 183 Shrimp, Head, Pot, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 18.75 × 27 in. (48 × 69 cm)

184 185Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered (1993–94)

page 184 Clockwise from top left Hand, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches (60.96 × 48.26 cm)

Poodle Profile, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches (60.96 × 48.26 cm

Cottage Cheese, 1974!/!1994

New!, 1974

page 185 Clockwise from top Bed Wetter One, 1974

Rib Cage, 1974

Hermaphrodite, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 in. (60.9 × 48.2 cm)

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Untitled (Dust Balls), Silver Ball (both 1994), and Related Works The thirteen silver-gelatin photographic prints comprising the Dust Balls series were shown in 1994 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, along with the suspended sculptural object Silver Ball (1994)—a “big, lumpy, silvery-colored thing"…"very physi- cal"…"a very particular size and weight”—and at Metro Pictures, New York, in 13 New Untitled Black and White Photographs in December of the same year. The images fea- tured pieces of fluff harvested from the lint trap of Kelley’s laundry-room dryer that he broke into tiny lumps and then shot “against a reflective surface so that they wouldn’t have any ground.” Kelley “wanted them to look like they were floating"…"[and] printed them that way too.” His aim was to generate “an ethereal, floating quality” so that viewers would not only be unable to decode the iconography of what they were looking at but would have no sense of scale. The photographs thus mediate one of the clos- est appositions between sculpture and photography in Kelley’s career—pivoting on the different valences of “silver” they share with the hollow, asteroidlike ball. The tin foil ball itself was something of a cross between an errant asteroid and a UFO, while

Installation view of Silver Ball, 1994 Aluminum foil, polyurethane foam, wood, chicken wire, speakers, 4 boom boxes, space blanket, 3 baskets, artificial fruit Ball: 57.87 × 57.87 × 53.15 inches (146.99 × 146.99 × 135.05 cm); blanket, basket, boom boxes, area: 13 × 46.85 × 81.9 inches (33.02 × 119 × 208.03 cm) Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1994

its hollow interior “looked like a cave,” and was “lit with lights, like they do in tourist caves.” Multiple speakers connected to a boom box were buried in the foil, producing several channels of droning voices uttering “meaningless things” (actually the cut-up text “Light and Color, Mostly” [1993, in Minor Histories], mixed with electronic and organ drones) which “caused the whole thing to buzz.”

The Felsen exhibition also featured egg-shaped paintings made with shiny enamel paint applied directly onto metal surfaces, with imagery taken from science-fiction aliens transformed into biomorphic abstractions; several works on paper featuring schematic humanoid forms surrounded by colorful auras; graphic works on stomach maladies and medications; Two and Three Dimensions (1994), in which a bookcase and ovoid wall painting engage in sonic “call and response”; and Channel One, Channel Two, and Channel Three (1994), a set of square-form viewing tubes set on saw horses. Here Kelley brought together his interests in Ufology, biomorphism, and what he terms

“highish tech,” at the same time offering a volatile “mixture of body-loathing, tech fetishism (and technophobia).” The synaesthetic cacophony that results is underwrit- ten by the kind of descriptions in the UFO literature that interested Kelley the most: those that “propose connections between light, sound, color, and physical effects.”

Untitled #1 (Dust Ball Photos), 1994 1 of 13 black-and-white photographs on museum board 31 × 22.5 inches (78.74 × 57.15 cm) each

189188 Lump Drawings and Related Works (1991)

pages 188 and 189 Detail and installation views of Two and Three Dimensions, 1994 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1994

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page 190 left to right Pepto-Bismol, 1994 Acrylic on paper, framed 60 × 40.5 inches (152.4 × 102.87 cm)

Visceral Egg, 1994 Acrylic on paper, framed 60 × 40.5 inches (152.4 × 102.87 cm)

page 191 Top to bottom 3-24-94, 10:00 AM: Disembodied thought processes, fuzzy eyes, clenched teeth, tight jaw, tense neck and sore back of skull, upper and lower back pain, 1994 Acrylic on paper, framed 48 × 60 inches (121.92 × 152.4 cm)

All or Nothing, 1994 Acrylic on paper, framed 48 × 60 inches (121.92 × 152.4 cm)

Untitled (Dust Balls), Silver Ball (both 1994), and Related Works

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1994) Shown at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, in 1995, this series of thirteen oval acrylic paint- ings on wood, supplied with portentous allegorical titles—Fecundity, The Dawning of Sexuality, Summer’s Rage—mimicked works Kelley made as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. The colorful works were exhibited alongside a simi- larly shaped series of six and a half black-and-white paintings, Paintings in Time (a pair and contrast to the Timeless Paintings, 1995), dated between December 25 and 31, 1994. Most were copies of a minor painting on paper, Low-Definition Presidency (1993), though one (dated Christmas Day) had a different image and another (dated December 31) was deliberately made and designated as “half ” a painting. Timothy Martin discussed the relation of these works to Kelley’s art school training imagined as “a timeless, fully mastered, and naturalized” mode suggesting “the perpetual return of the same: that is, seasonality.”

Kelley, Mike. “Goin’ Home, Goin’ Home.” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 72–81.

Martin, Timothy. “Mike Kelley: The Thirteen Seasons.” Insert in The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1995), n.p.

page 192 The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #13; Art, 1994 Acrylic on wood 62.6 × 40.16 inches (159 × 102 cm)

page 193 Installation view of The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, 1995

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Towards a Utopian Arts Complex and Educational Complex (both 1995) The exhibition Towards a Utopian Arts Complex at Metro Pictures, New York, included a large architectural model; two series of paintings; fifteen photographs of fake news- paper articles; photographic reproductions of artworks made by kindergartners, some of which are accompanied by written analyses; two pieces employing gridded armatures; and a set of clear-coated panels with acrylic appliqués. Departing from Kelley’s interest in Repressed Memory Syndrome—a psychological theory aligned with what the artist considered to be a broader culture of victimization that produces and enshrines dysfunctional behavior and is obsessed with the sexual and physical abuse of children in particular—the show imagined a scenario in which Kelley’s own educational history and art training might have turned on a series of psychic trau- mas, the repressed memories that he attempted to identify and re-create. This project was included in Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, at Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, in 2008 and Museion, Bolzano, Italy, in 2009.

OBJECTS The architectural model Educational Complex contains miniature versions of every school Kelley attended (plus his childhood home) merged into a vast, compartmental- ized cluster of buildings: “Those sections of the different structures that I could not remember have been left blank, the stated reason being that they were sites associ- ated with some kind of abuse” (Minor Histories, p. 158). Installed nearby, Entryway (Genealogical Chart) (1995) convenes a family history in the style of city border signage bearing various symbols of civic organizations, while Primal Architecture (1995) con- tains fifteen luminescent blobs attached to an interlocking horizontal steel armature.

PAINTINGS I decided!…!to embrace the social role projected on me, to become what people wanted me to be: a victim. Since I am an artist, it seemed natural to look to my own aesthetic training as the root of my secret indoctrination in perversity, and possibly as the site of my own abuse!…!My education must have been a form of mental abuse, of brainwashing.

—Mike Kelley

The ten mixed-media works in Timeless Paintings (1995) combine techniques of painterly abstraction with symbolic and diagrammatic elements related to childhood and adolescence. Kelley’s student work from the 1970s provides the primary source for these multilayered images, made by directly applying Hans Hoffman’s “push-pull” method of painting. Another series, Cult Paintings (1995), comprises six irregularly shaped panels that also explore Kelley’s artistic training, filtered through references to a range of cultish behaviors. The iconic Untwisted Cross (1995) reworks the child- like sketch of an animated skull and swastika into a visual meditation on permissible forms of aesthetic and psychosocial rebellion, while Cornholier Than Thou (1995) and other works in this group rely on vaguely antiestablishment imagery set in stereotypi- cally “expressive” styles, including finger-painting and blocks of color.

page 195 top to bottom Educational Complex, 1995

Installation view of Towards a Utopian Arts Complex at Metro Pictures, New York, 1995

page 196 Notebook sketch, ca. 1995 Ink on paper 12 × 9 inches (30.5 × 22.8 cm)

page 197 Studio view of Educational Complex, 1995

page 198 Entryway (Genealogical Chart), 1995 Acrylic on wood with steel frame 101.5 × 115 × 3 inches (258 × 292 × 0.8 cm)

page 199 Untwisted Cross, 1995 Acrylic on wood 64 × 47 inches (162.56 × 119.38 cm)

Kelley, Mike. “Architectural Non-Memory Replaced with Psychic Reality” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 316–23.

Kelley, Mike, and Anne Pontégnie, eds. Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009).

“Missing Space"/"Time: A Conversation Between Mike Kelley, Kim Colin, and Mark Skiles” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), 324–38.

Vidler, Anthony. “Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex.” In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 94–105.

Welchman, John C., ed. On the Beyond: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and John C. Welchman (2011), pp. 35–44.

196 197Towards a Utopian Arts Complex and Educational Complex (both 1995)

198 199Towards a Utopian Arts Complex and Educational Complex (both 1995)

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We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic (1995) We Communicate is a series of Ektachrome photographic prints, viewed on a wall or a computer monitor, documenting paintings made under Kelley’s tutelage by kinder- gartners while he was an undergraduate art student at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. Kelley used photographs of the works made more than two decades later to offer a neutral form of material stability for a set of images that he subjected to plausibly outlandish analyses based on extensive readings in child art analysis and art therapy. The series of purportedly expressive children’s paintings—which, it might be supposed, arise “spontaneously” and “characterologically” from the young subjects who made them—are overcoded by the overweening analytical paradigms of child psychology, which transform them into supposedly unpremeditated testimony to the phobias, traumas, and fantasies of the young subjects.

Kelley, Mike. “We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses” (1995). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 258–73.

We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal Of The Pre-linguistic, 1995 15 Ektacolor prints mounted on museum board, Xerox papers, and computer disk Overall dimensions variable

Untitled (1996–97) For this Persian rug project, Iranian craftsmen wove two identical carpets patterned after an Ottoman period example in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection that was modified by the artist, who replaced the red background with green and added a clover at the center in place of the original’s Islamic medallion. The resulting hybrid object was shown in Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006. Kelley’s interest in Persian rugs reemerged in his 2011 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, where they func- tion as mythological symbols of taking flight.

Daftari, Fereshteh. “Islamic or Not.” In Without Boundary (2006), pp. 18, 27, 34–37.

Untitled, 1996–97 Handwoven silk (made in Ghom, Iran) 40 × 60 inches (101.6 × 152.4 cm)

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Land O’ Lakes (1996) This series of works refers to Land O’ Lakes butter packaging, which contains the figure of a Native American maiden in traditional dress kneeling in front of a wooded lake while holding a smaller version of the same rectangular box that houses the butter. Although this logo has been slightly modified over the years, the present-day maiden image is very similar to the original artwork made in 1928 by Arthur Hanson. The artist’s asso- ciations with the image developed from his childhood sexual fantasies, prompted by the popular trick of folding the butter carton in such a way as to make the figure appear more buxom. Kelley explained, “Prompted by the fact that when the butter carton is folded her bare knees become her naked breasts, she was the object of my childhood sexual fantasies.” In 1996 he made a series of mixed-media works on paper based on this figure, culminating in the additional drawing Slightly Psychedelic Depiction of the Sexualized Land-O-Lakes Girl (High Priestess), the sculpture Straight Depiction of the Chaste (Unfolded) Land-O-Lakes Girl (Debuttered), and two acrylic paintings on panel, Double Horizontal Chaste Form (Unfolded) of the Land-O-Lakes Girl Illustrated with the Image of the Land-O-Lakes and Upright and Inverted Form A) Upright Chaste Form (Unfolded & Debuttered) of the Land-O-Lakes Girl. B) Inverted (Sexualized) Chaste Form (Unfolded) Illustrated with the Image of the Spit-Into Pumpkin Containing the Name of the Lost Love (High Priestess). The Land O’ Lakes girl first appeared in Kelley’s oeuvre in two works from the project Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1994, Reconsidered, and the same eroticized figure inspired a photographic work from 2001 made on Peche Island in the Detroit River as part of Black Out (2001).

Kelley, Mike. “Black Out” (2001). In Minor Histories (2004), p. 159.

____. “Land O’ Lakes"/"Land O’ Snakes” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 82–93.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Land O’ Lakes). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 221.

page 202 Installation view of Land O’ Lakes at Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 1996

page 203 Land O’Lakes Drawings, 1996 Mixed-media on paper 23.5 × 18 inches (59.69 × 45.72 cm) each clockwise from top left Untitled #3, 4, 6, and 5

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page 204 Poetics Drawings, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches (66.04 × 50.8 cm) each Left to right Plaid Dialogue, Virgin, Blue Plaid Cap!/!Brown Plaid Body

page 205 Poetics Drawings, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches (66.04 × 50.8 cm) each top to bottom (Left to right) Fluid Structure; Ecstasy and Me; Grid; To the Tune of Batman; Red, White and Blue; and Backward Masking

pages 206–207 Installation view of The Poetics, 1997 (with Tony Oursler) Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997)

Kelley, Mike. “An Endless Script: A Conversation with Tony Oursler.” In Introjection (1999).

The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings 1977–1983. Los Angeles: Compound Annex, 1997; featuring Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, John Arnheim, Don Krieger, George Lockwood, Mark Madel, John Miller, Tim Silverlake, Simon, Jim Shaw, Bill Stobaugh, and Mitchell Syrop.

Tony Oursler!/!Mike Kelley: Poetics Project (1997).

The Poetics Project (1977–97, with Tony Oursler) This multifaceted collaboration between Kelley and Tony Oursler took as its point of departure an experimental “rockumentary” about the scene around the artists’ rock band The Poetics, in which the fellow CalArts students participated from the late 1970s until the group folded in 1983. Using a wide spectrum of video styles and subjects—talking-head interviews (both “real” and scripted); Southern California locations (some adapted to imitate the feel of art videos from the late 1960s and early 70s); simulated, 80s-style rock video; footage of the wake of former Poetics member Bill Stobaugh; and documentation of the process of producing The Poetics CD box set The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings from 1977–1983 (1996)—the project took on the mythologies of rock’s charisma and the overblown permissiveness of the art and rock relationship. The installation was first seen at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona (1997), Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, California (1997), and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York (1998). A version made for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997), was shown the same year at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and later at Metro Pictures, New York (1998), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000). In 2003 the project was exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London.

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An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard M. Powers and Francis Picabia (1997, with Paul McCarthy) This mazelike three-part installation, in which a corridor painted with re-creations of works by sci-fi illustrator Richard M. Powers connects two rooms containing reproductions of works—one of abstract paintings, the other of nudes—by Cuban- born avant-garde artist Francis Picabia, was shown in the exhibition Display at the Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen (1997), and at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2000). In addition to its investigation of how popular culture infiltrated “high” art and vice versa, the piece collided experiences of pictorial and architectural spatiality, including inner and outer “landscapes,” picture- window vision, flatness, extension, and hierarchy.

Goldstein, Ann. “Painting as Architecture.” In Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works (2000), pp. 39–49.

Kelley, Mike, and Paul McCarthy. “An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard M. Powers and Francis Picabia.” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 340–46.

pages 208 and 209 Details of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard M. Powers and Francis Picabia, 1997 Acrylic on canvas, wood panels Dimensions variable Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, 1997

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Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (1998, with Paul McCarthy) A collaborative project between Kelley and Paul McCarthy for the Vienna Secession in 1998, Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. re-creates a military encampment using numer- ous canvas tents to evoke barracks, a mess hall, and a shower room, forming a central yard with an overlooking watchtower—all of which served as the stage set for a series of performance scenarios shown on videos within the installation. References to World War II–era military camps—mainly modeled after the humorous portrayal of military life in the comic strip Sad Sack—are merged with other cultural sources, including the shower scene in Porky’s (1982); the writings of Clement Greenberg, Georges Bataille, and Wilhelm Reich; Halloween-style rubber masks; the Vienna Actionists; military-themed gay porn; and modernist sculpture and architecture. Feature-length and short videos document the project’s installation and the scripted and improvisational performances.

Mike Kelley!/!Paul McCarthy: Sod & Sodie Sock (1998).

____. “Sod and Sodie Sock (Working Title, 1999–2002).” In Minor Histories, pp. 248–50.

Prinzhorn, Martin. “Fighting on Two Different Fronts: Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O.” In Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works (2000), pp. 50–57.

pages 210–211 Installation views and details of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Sod and Sodie Sock Comp. O.S.O., 1998 Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable Vienna Secession, Austria, 1998

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Odd Man Out (1998–99) Commenced in 1998, this series of eight installation-based works, one video (Return of the Repressed, 1999), and several two-dimensional pieces was first exhibited in the exhibition Odd Man Out at Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica (January–February 1999). Kelley’s conceptual premise is spelled out in A Stopgap Measure, a manifesto- style rant on a protest poster proposing that Hollywood actors become sex workers to help society overcome sexual repression and other dysfunctions (on the reverse of the poster is printed “Meet John Doe,” a compilation of press accounts of the 1998 Steven Spielberg stalker case). Using assemblages of pillows and other fabrics sewn with ori- fice-like openings, the components of the floor pieces are arranged atop blankets, each with a unique soundtrack playing from a boom box. With cutouts from various movie posters mounted nearby, these pieces—including Untitled (Priest!/!Yankee Zulu), Party Girl, and Composite Femme Fatale—are enabling objects for Kelley’s sexual pro- gram. One of the “surrogates,” Timmy the Tooth (1998), incorporates a modified tent that simulates entry into a body cavity.

Kelley, Mike. “A Stopgap Measure” and “Meet John Doe.” In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 292–95 and 296–309.

Mike Kelley and John Miller: Consolation Prize (2000); see especially Roy Arden, “Consolation Prize: Mike Kelley & John Miller,” pp. 12–16; Shep Steiner, “Mike Kelley: The Use-Value of Irony, or Sexual Revolution the Monkish Way,” pp. 35–41; and William Wood,

“Final Answer,” pp. 43–47.

page 212 Installation view of Odd Man Out at Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles, 1999

page 213 Detail from A Stopgap Measure, 1999 2-sided poster 36 × 24 inches (91.44 × 60.96 cm)

pages 214 and 215 The Secret, 1999

214 215Odd Man Out (1998–99)

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Sublevel (1998) I wanted to get across a subterranean feel of two kinds of depth, something akin to the relationship between the subconscious and the unconscious: a below-meaning and an even further, inaccessible zone. Smallness, closeness, and darkness in architecture always evoke this kind of psychological effect.—Mike Kelley

This large plywood and resin construction, mounted atop car jacks, simulates the inaccessible basement at CalArts, a subterranean space that evoked for the artist unconscious psychic processes. Fabricated in 1998 and first shown in the exhibition Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne (1998), and Kunstverein Braunschweig (1999, along with Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites [1991"/"99])—the gridlike architectural model, with adjoining alcoves and bright pink cavities, can be viewed either from above or underneath. An

“aluminum cell” illuminated by red and blue flashing lights and containing probelike objects is accessible to viewers by crawling the length of an adjacent plywood tunnel. A drawing featuring floor plans of the basement area of CalArts and tunnels under the infamous McMartin preschool is affixed to the exterior of the tunnel. The Keep (1998), a wooden structure shown with Sublevel, is bored with peepholes like a hillbilly latrine and contains colored glass bottles and a stack of magazines, with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue on top. The Braunschweig exhibition also presented Geode, pieces from the Bouquet series, The Pink Crystal Speaks (all 1998), works from the Missing Time Color Exercise series, and the two-part acrylic painting In Reference to the Natural Composition of the Decayed and Tattered Pants Worn by “The Thing” (Elmer, 1951) and In Homage to Ivan Albright’s “Fleeting Time Thou Has Left Me Old” (1946) (both 1998). Kelley’s associated statement discusses the effects of repressed memory and projec- tive imagination.

Kelley, Mike. Interview with Isabelle Graw. In Mike Kelley (1999, Phaidon), pp. 20–21.

____. “Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas” (1998). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 102–11.

Kothenschulte, Daniel. “Black Nostalgia.” In Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1999), pp. 16–20, 52–55.

Singerman, Howard. “Memory Ware.” In Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), p. 321.

page 216 Sublevel, 1998 Plywood, resin, car jacks, steel 84.6 × 324.4 × 233 inches (215 × 824 × 592 cm)

page 217 top to bottom Sublevel, 1998 Detail of collage showing the McMartin Preschool floor plan incorporating a map of the suspected tunnels underneath, and the layout of CalArts’s sublevel

Sublevel, 1998 View of tunnel entrance

219218 Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas (1998)

page 218 View of the CalArts Sublevel model located on the underside of the base supporting Educational Complex, 1995

page 219 Bouquet #1 (Red), 1998 14 parts: plastic cups, aluminum foil, acrylic 4 × 19.7 × 23.6 (10 × 50 × 60 cm)

The Keep, 1998 Mixed-media 88.6 × 60 × 47.6 inches (225 × 152 × 121 cm)

page 220 Free Gesture Frozen, Yet Refusing to Submit to Personification (Orange Fingerpainting), 1998

page 221 Free Gesture Frozen, Yet Refusing to Submit to Personification (Green Fingerpainting), 1998

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Missing Time Color Exercises (1998-/-2002) Combining Kelley’s penchant for vernacular smut with a formal aesthetic typically associated with Color Field–type paintings and the Minimalist grid, the first series of six works employing an incomplete collection of issues of the adult humor maga- zine Sex to Sexty was shown at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, in 1998. After laying out the covers he had collected in a chronological grid, Kelley filled in the missing issues with solid blocks of color based on the existing chromatic sequences. When the artist was given the missing magazine issues he made a companion series, Missing Time Color Exercises (Reversed) (first shown at Metro Pictures, New York, in 2002). Due to some incorrect assumptions informing the earlier series, these seven additional works are not precise but rather approximate reversals. The raunchy periodical—published between 1965 and 1983 by Fort Worth–based SRI Publishing and originally aimed at a lower-class male readership typically residing in rural America—compiled bawdy jokes, caricature studies of hillbillies, and graphic sexual cartoons, many of which were inspired by reader suggestions. Introducing a recent compilation of the maga- zine’s cover art by Pierre Davis, Kelley noted, “The magazine holds a special place in my heart. It is a truly unique publication, one that I responded to—even as an adoles- cent—because of its contrary aesthetic. It stuck out on the liquor store magazine rack, unlike anything else there. Sure, there were plenty of other joke books and men’s mag- azines—but nothing as purely ‘off ’ as Sex to Sexty.” 

Kelley, Mike. “Presenting the Preservationist Journal of Hick Erotic Folklore.” In Sex to Sexty (2008), pp. 20–21.

____. “Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas” (1998). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 102–11.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Color; Sex to Sexty; Sexual Dysfunction). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 214–16 and 234–35.

page 222 Missing Time Color Exercise #2, 1998

page 223 Missing Time Color Exercise (Reversed) # 2, 2002

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Categorical Imperative and Morgue (both 1999) Produced for the two-person exhibition Mike Kelley / Franz West at Hôtel Empain, Brussels (1999–2000), these works were made with three-dimensional (Categorical Imperative) and two-dimensional (Morgue) leftovers from Kelley’s storage—things

“picked up specifically for the production of art” but never used. Intended both to “clean house” and as a means to confront his artistic decision-making processes, Kelley produced the “composed” series Black and Yellow, which he rejected as too close to the “nostalgia” of the junk aesthetic; a number of works formed as piles or accumula- tions; and finally a set of “sculptures in which various objects … arranged on obviously new, furniture-like constructions” took on narrative effects. An associated audio tour (incomplete at the time of the exhibition but presented performatively) expounded on Kelley’s long-standing interest in formal and conceptual categorization. Caught between subjective history, grand aesthetic scheming, and misbegotten psychological association, Kelley viewed these pieces as illuminating “failures.”

Kelley, Mike. “A Minor History: Categorical Imperative and Morgue” (1999). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 138–43.

page 224 Studio view of Categorical Imperative, 1999 (with Franz West) Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable

Installation view of Categorical Imperative at Hôtel Empain, Brussels, 1999

Unisex Love Nest (1999) First shown at Steirischer Herbst 99, Palais Attems, Graz, Austria, in 1999, Unisex Love Nest is an updated relic from the free-love sexual utopias of the 1960s in the form of a white-walled chamber featuring small windows set with lacy curtains, floral decal decorations, and a blanket-draped double bed neatly mobbed with throw pillows and two diminutive soft toys. Based on a photograph of a girl’s room found in a women’s magazine bought while waiting in a supermarket check-out line, the love nest turns out to be, at best, a projection commencing at the earliest moments of self-conscious sexual formation and, at worst, a screen memory for the truly improper. Kelley has addressed the forms and implications of a personal space for retreat, sexual or oth- erwise, elsewhere in his work beginning with one of his earliest memories of sexual exploration with childhood friends among the “dust bunnies” under his bed and culmi- nating in the underground fuck room under the Chinese Wishing Well in the “Framed” section of the sculpture Framed and Frame (1999). In Graz, the installation served as an environment for a feature-length videotape compilation, Cross Gender!/!Cross Genre, composed of selections of period, cross-gender-related films, documentation, and interviews, presented as part of Re-Make!/!Re-Model: Secret Histories of Art, Pop, Life, and the Avant-Garde—a series of panel discussions focusing on the politics of queer aesthetics. The video raises explicit questions about the construction of sex- ual identities, viewed from the confines of suburban “normality,” taking us back by a different route to the sexually conventional structures of the authoritarian family attacked by Wilhelm Reich.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Unisex Love Nest). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 235–36.

Installation views of Unisex Love Nest, 1999 Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable Palais Attems, Graz, Austria, 1999

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Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999) For this large-scale installation, presented at Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France (1999), Kelley remade human-sized versions of some of the playroom objects associated with Harry Harlow’s primate experiments of the 1960s, arranging them in a space reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi’s abstract designs constructed for dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. The mixed-media sculp- tural objects are surrounded by a steel armature, observation platform, and adjoining metal staircase, which together suggest sterile prison or institutional architecture. Kelley used this ensemble to stage A Dance Incorporating Movements Derived from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and Choreographed in the Manner of Martha Graham (1999), choreographed by Anita Pace and performed by Pace and Carl Burkley. A vid- eotape of this performance set in a studio space is projected onto a Plexiglas panel in two versions: one in color intercut with scripted actions performed by four actors; the second a black-and-white version of the dance only. Amid a “pseudoscientific” space defined by objects reminiscent of depth-psychology experiments, the expressive move- ments of both dancers and actors alternate between displays of violence and affection.

Kelley, Mike. “Test Room” (1999). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 230–33.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Harlow, Harry F.; Graham, Martha). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 218–19.

page 226 Installation view of Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, 1999 Mixed-media installation with video projection 138 × 709 × 287 inches (350.52 × 1800.86 × 728.98 cm) Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France, 1999

page 227 Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (Graham Action), 2001

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Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction “Chinatown Wishing Well” Built by Mike Kelley after “Miniature Reproduction ‘Seven Star Cavern’ Built by Prof. H. K. Lu”) (1999) First exhibited in 1999 at Le Magasin Centre d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, this installation explores the conceptual space between real and imagined places. It con- sists of a life-sized reconstruction of a wishing well on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown, Los Angeles (titled Seven Star Cavern and attributed to different artists) and an adjacent enclosed area with barbed-wire fencing, flood lights, and Chinese-themed decorative forms. These distinct elements—a recognizable visual attraction and its prohibitive enclosure—are analogous to the framed object and secondary framing device speci- fied by the title. The faux-concrete landscape with spray-painted highlights is adorned with inexpensive Chinese sculptures in jade, brass, and porcelain, nestled alongside various basins and buckets that collect well-wishers’ coins. Further complicating the play between fantasy and authenticity is the dualistic quality of the site—at once an interwar rendition of a Chinese quarter, utilizing discarded film sets and constructed when the original district was seized to build Union Station, and an important center for Chinese immigrants and Chinese American culture. The installation also includes a mattress, pillow, and condoms—details that conjure a general sense of adolescent promiscuity but also allude to the site’s physical proximity to the former locations of Madame Wong’s and Hong Kong Café, two venues at the center of the Los Angeles punk scene in the late 1970s and early 80s. By separating the thematically interweaved elements of the wishing well and the enclosure, Kelley introduces an obvious split between sculptural object and protective apparatus, which, when reintegrated within the viewer’s mind, replicates a sense of wishfulness akin to adolescent desire.

Kelley, Mike. “The Meaning Is Confused Spatiality, Framed” (1999). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 118–37.

page 228 Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction “Chinatown Wishing Well” Built by Mike Kelley after

“Miniature Reproduction ‘Seven Star Cavern’ Built by Prof. H. K. Lu”), 1999 2 parts: steel cyclone fencing, wood, electrical fixtures, paper lanterns, faux concrete, wood, paper pulp, acrylic, statuary, spray paint, mattress, afghan, pillow, Vaseline, condoms 113 × 191 × 161 inches (287 × 485 × 409 cm), “Framed” section; 137 × 226 × 209 inches (348 × 574 × 531 cm), “Frame” section View of “Framed” section (top) and “Frame” section (bottom)

page 229 View of interior of “Framed” section

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PHOTOGRAPHY Since 1976, when he began using 35-mm black-and-white photography for the first time (a rare example is published in Mike Kelley: Photographs, Sculptures, 2009), Kelley worked with photography, maintaining an archive of material—found, appro- priated, or snapped himself—that informed numerous projects throughout his career, including works brought together in Black Out (2001) and the installational videos and sculptures of Day Is Done (2005). One of his first deployments of photography was as a depersonalized representational strategy for his drawings (as in The Poltergeist [1979], Oh the Pain of it All [1980], and other works). But as he noted in his 1996 essay “The Poetry of Form,” Kelley also used photographs shot from “library books” in three ways (in addition to their function as research images): “as source materials” for his black- and-white image"/"text and associated paintings, such as the documentary photographs of extraordinarily scaled phenomena—giant flora, grandiose landscapes, an enormous American flag, a constellation of stars—used for a pair of six-part, composite images for The Sublime (1984); “as slide projections” shown during performances; and “as illus- trations for published texts,” such as the dozen cave photos, some from The Poetry of Form series, published in his book Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1986). Before the end of the 1980s, Kelley exhibited “selected photographs as finished art- works” infrequently, noting that “the rarity of this presentational method didn’t stem from any prejudice against photography; I simply did not have the financial resources to have photos printed at that time.” In addition to Plato’s Cave, Kelley’s books with photography include Reconstructed History (1990), and The Uncanny (1993).

page 230 The Poetry of Form: Part of an Ongoing Attempt to Develop an Auteur Theory of Naming, 1985!/!96 34 gelatin silver prints, with title text on mats 16 × 12 inches (40.64 × 30.48 cm) each Clockwise from top left: The Clansman, Bristly Joe, The Bashful Elephant, and Mutt and Jeff

page 231 Left to right The One-Eyed King, 1981 Black-and-white photograph 9.25 × 6.75 inches (23.5 × 17.15 cm)

Studio photograph related to Meditation on a Can of Vernors project

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The crudely simulated ectoplasm in Kelley’s first photographic piece, The Poltergeist (1979), made alongside an investigation into the same theme by David Askevold, is an early manifestation of his interest in the iconographies of goo, excreta, floating spots of light, and other subjects on the threshold of formal dissolution discussed in his writ- ings on Ufology and elsewhere. Two years later Kelley developed a new photographic genre that he described as “set-up photos.” One-Eyed King (1981), which responds to the leitmotif of the winking figure in Meditation on a Can of Vernors (1981), and Neoclassical Soap Box (1981) are in-studio sketches that mobilize props and adjacent materials in recombinant arrangements soliciting an aesthetic of interchangeability at odds with the finality of the photographic print.

Kelley’s dissent from the documentary and aesthetic conditions of the photograph took another turn with his allusions to the popular cultural deployments of photog- raphy in An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard M. Powers and Francis Picabia (1997, with Paul McCarthy), which examined the “categorical crisis” between high and low art, and A Stopgap Measure (1999), based on the harvesting of celebrity images by Hollywood “stalkerazzi.” In We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic (1995), Kelley used photographic reproductions of chil- dren’s paintings, viewed on a computer monitor, to underline the would-be analytic neutrality of the photographic image.

In five of the six parts of Black Out, named for the accidental partial erasure of a series of photographs of the Detroit River, Kelley deployed the tools of quasi-sociological investigation and pseudoanthropology to bring photography into crucial new relations with repression, historical fantasy, chance, and archival dissimulation. The ideas of

“missing time” and photographically mediated “local culture” developed here would feed into the “projective reconstructions” of some thirty-two newspaper and year- book photos of holiday and downtime social activities that kick-start the Technicolor tumult of Day Is Done.

Kelley, Mike. “The Poetry of Form” (1996). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 94–101.

Mike Kelley: Photographs, Sculptures (2009).

____. “History and Time in the American Vernacular: Mike Kelley’s Work with Photography.” In Imaging History (2012), pp. 105–24.

Welchman, John C. “Documents, Dreams, and Fantasies: Passages through the Involuntary from Photography to Sculpture in the Work of Mike Kelley.” In Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art (2012).

page 233 From Ectoplasm Photographs series, 1978!/!2009 15 chromogenic prints 14 × 10 inches (35.5 × 25.4 cm) each

page 234 The Sublime, 1984!/!1998 21 Fuji crystal archive color photographs 20 × 24 inches (50.8 × 60.96 cm) each Shown are (clockwise from top): The Rising Sun, The Innermost Ring of Youth, The Stars, Troll, and The World’s Largest Flower

page 235 From Three Valleys series, 1980!/!1998 21 Fuji crystal archive color photographs 20 × 24 inches each (50.8 × 60.96 cm)

page 236 From Timeless!/!Authorless series, 1995 15 black-and-white photographs on museum board 31 × 24 inches (78.74 × 60.96 cm) each clockwise from top left #2, #14, #15, #13

page 237 From Gothic (Friday’s Goth) series, 1997 8 gelatin silver prints 24 × 20 inches (50.8 × 60.96 cm) each Clockwise from top: Wednesday’s Goth, Monday’s Goth, and Thursday’s Goth

Photography

234 235Photography

237236 Photography

238 239Photography

page 238 Photo editions from Black Out, 2001 Top to bottom Duck Blind (Grassy Island Detroit River), 1999

Abandoned Faux Rock Building, 1999

page 239 Photo Show Portrays the Familiar, 2001 clockwise from top left Statue of the Virgin Mary, St. Mary’s School, Wayne, MI; Bray’s Hamburgers, Westland, MI; Halloween Decorations, Bob-Lo Island; Grandma’s House, Norwayne, MI; and Bronze Sculpture by Fritz Koenig, Westland Mall

page 240 Seated Figure with Curtain, 1976!/!2011 Pigment print 14 × 9 inches (35.56 × 22.86 cm)

page 241 Standing Figure with “Allegorical Drawings” Wallpaper, 1976!/!2011 Pigment print 14 × 11 inches (35.56 × 27.94 cm)

240 241

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Runway for Interactive DJ Event (1999–2000) “A lighthearted response to the current embrace of DJ and rave culture by the art world,” Runway was performed by Kelley and others at the opening of his one-person exhibi- tion at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (1999) and shot on three video cameras with stills taken by Andrea Stappert. Kelley arranged doll clothes leftover from Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991–99) in loose categories on an improvised fashion- show-ramp-cum-stage-platform located in a corridor-like basement, the window of which gave onto the lawn where a tent had been pitched over a dance floor. Visible only by crawling through a hedge by the window, the unannounced performance took the form of a fashion show infused with “interpretive dialogue,” for which Kelley and local artist Kalin Lindena were ramp models, while DJs Oliver Blomeier (in the basement) and Marco Olbrich (in the dance tent) provided musical accompaniment, communi- cating back and forth by intercom. Runway was exhibited as an installation at Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (June–July 2000), for which Kelley reconstructed the model ramp. A monitor underneath showed the performance-based video.

Kelley, Mike. “Runway for Interactive DJ Event” (2000). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 244–47.

page 242 Two installation views of Runway for Interactive DJ Event, 2000 Installation: wood, doll clothes and accessories, video, and costumes 327.5 × 89.125 × 38 inches (831.85 × 226.38 × 96.52 cm) Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 2000

page 243 Views of Mike Kelley and Kalin Lindena performing on runway in the basement with DJ, Oliver Blomeier, at Kunstverein Braunschweig, 1999

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Katy Keene Drawings (2000) In this series of thirteen drawings, shown at Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2000), Kelley let loose on the cultures of surface and superficiality, which he had pilloried in Hollywood False Front (1984), and the clichéd surf-and-sunshine lifestyle in draw- ing #11 (Cal Living). Kelley appropriated and reworked material associated with the comic-book character Katy Keene, created in 1945 by Bill Woggon and featured in the eponymously titled series published between 1949 and 1962. Building on the original illustrations of Katy wearing fashionable outfits and accessories, most of which were submitted by readers, Kelley added unusual motifs or jarring juxtapositions to suggest a series of characterological metamorphoses—from pinup queen into an undead witch or a caterpillar, even into an Abstract Expressionist ink-spill pattern. He also paired his own head with Katy’s body in Katy Keene #7 (Scorpion Bride), #11 (Cal Living), and #5 (Two Brides).

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (New York [City]). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 222.

page 244 Katy Keene #11 (Cal Living), 2000 Drawing on paper, framed 21.8 × 26.2 inches (55.37 × 66.55 cm)

page 245 Katy Keene #7 (Scorpion Bride), 2000 Drawing on paper, framed 21.8 × 26.2 inches (55.37 × 66.55 cm)

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Memory Ware (2000–2010) Named for a genre of Canadian folk art in which everyday utilitarian objects such as vases are coated with a claylike substance into which are embedded small objects including as shells, beads, and buttons, this body of work consists of both wall-hung and freestanding pieces. Kelley’s appropriation of this folk tradition in two dimen- sions eliminates recognizable underlying objects and expands the original method to include a wider variety of keepsakes—buttons, lapel pins, jewelry, and other trinkets acquired from thrift and junk stores—as well as different scales and concentrations. The accumulations are spread out and embedded into a plain background of pulped paper, creating an “allover” mosaiclike surface with minimal relief in which innu- merable specific objects might be recognized but none provide iconographic or compositional focus. The Memory Ware sculptures, by contrast, juxtapose dense clusters of found objects with minimally or nondecorated areas and reintroduce the coherence of an overall structure, whether with shaped vessels (such as a bleach bottle or pie tin), central organizing concepts (such as John F. Kennedy), or semiab- stract forms deciphered through their titles (e.g., SS Future Primitive). Several related sculptures made use of art materials leftover from previous projects, while the John Glenn sculpture in John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972 [Wayne!/!Westland Eagle]) is the largest Memory Ware piece. Kelley continued to produce Memory Ware works after 2003, including Memory Ware #60 (2010), shown in his 2011 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.

Kelley, Mike. “Memory Ware” (2000–01). In Minor Histories, pp. 150–55.

____. Mike Kelley: Memory Ware (2002).

page 246 Lazy Susan, 2000 Papier-mâché, acrylic, containers 30 × 80 × 80 inches (76.2 × 203.2 × 203.2 cm)

page 247 Memory Ware Flat #42, 2003

page 248 SS Cuttlebone, 2000

page 249 In Memory of Camelot, 2000

page 250 Memory Ware Flat #48, 2008

page 251 Memory Ware Flat #18, 2001

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250 251Memory Ware (2000–2003)

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Black Out (2001) This multipart installation was made for an exhibition marking Detroit’s tricentennial, Artists Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2001), and re-created with additions at Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica (2002). The show arose from a pseudoscientific “expedition” to islands in the Detroit River and was named for eight horizontal-aspect, gelatin-silver photographic prints in the Black Out (Detroit River) series. Intended as straightforward documentary images of the shoreline viewed from the boat in which Kelley was traveling, a camera or pro- cessing error rendered all but thin slivers of the resultant photographs black. Another series of photographs, including Butter-Colored Vision of the Land O’ Lakes Girl, Peche Island (2001), crossed faux documentary with projective imagination, departing in this instance from the artist’s adolescent sexual fantasies about the Land O’ Lakes Indian maiden on the packaging of the eponymous butter.

page 252 Studio view of John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972, Wayne / Westland Eagle), 2001

page 253 Installation view at Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles, 2001

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A third component, Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972 (Wayne!/!Westland Eagle), was begun in 1998, when Kelley took some 150 photographs of articles and their accom- panying images from his hometown newspapers that represented in some manner what he described as “local culture.” Printed three different ways—high contrast and both “warm” and “sepia-toned”—and arranged in “different associational systems,” the photos can be accessed from the pullout drawers of a display cabinet. Offering a more specific and eccentric commentary on Kelley’s own formation, Psychic Waveforms (Gerome Kamrowski’s Sculpture Garden, Ann Arbor, MI) is based on photographs of the sculpture garden at the Ann Arbor home of Gerome Kamrowski—Kelley’s former teacher in the art department of the University of Michigan—which were also subject to a phantom technical “addition” in the form of mysterious, chain-link-like patterns. The final part of Black Out is John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972, Wayne!/!Westland Eagle), which features a statue of Glenn, based on a modernist monument to the former astronaut and sena- tor in a local high school, made from debris dredged from the Detroit River; a series of ramp-like structures used to display materials left over from the fabrication of the sculpture; and a pair of cabinets that house the newspaper clippings of Local Culture Pictorial Guide.

Kelley, Mike. “Black Out” (2001). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 155–63.

Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 280–81, 286–87.

Welchman, John C. “Documents, Dreams, and Fantasies: Passages through the Involuntary from Photography to Sculpture in the Work of Mike Kelley.” In Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art (2012).

____. “History and Time in the American Vernacular: Mike Kelley’s Work with Photography.” In Imaging History (2012), pp. 105–24.

page 254 Psychic Waveforms (Gerome Kamrowski’s Sculpture Garden, Ann Arbor, MI), 2001 Gelatin silver print 23.25 × 85 inches (59.06 × 215.9 cm)

page 255 Butter-Colored Vision of the Land O’ Lakes Girl, Peche Island, 2001 Cibachrome print mounted on board 71 × 49 inches (180.34 × 124.46 cm)

Black Out (2001)

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Lingam and Yoni (2002) Closely related to the works in Black Out (2001), this group of ten sculptures incor- porates dirt and found objects collected from islands in the Detroit River to produce variations on the Hindu iconography of sexual union between male and female parts.

“The lingam’s size was determined by the amount of clean soil in each sample,” Kelley noted, “and that of the yoni by the amount of stone and detritus.” Inspired by an aquatic voyage to recover repressed memories of youth, he employed the lingam and yoni forms as invented artifacts within an elaborate sexual fantasy involving the Native American maiden on the Land O’ Lakes butter package. The initial eight earth-tone works on matching cylindrical pedestals (first shown at Patrick Painter Inc. in 2002) were fol- lowed by two later versions with found lingam objects and brightly colored bases.

page 256 Installation view of Lingam and Yoni sculptures, Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles, 2002

page 257 Lingam and Yoni (Peche Island), 2002 Dirt, found objects, metal, resin, cloth, acrylic medium, epoxy, fiberboard cylinder, and wood veneer 52 × 18 × 18 inches (132.08 × 45.72 × 45.72 cm)

Kelley, Mike. “Black Out” (2001). In Minor Histories (2004), p. 161.

Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 281, 290–93.

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Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Additions (2002) This exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York (2002), worked on the fault line between memory and projection as Kelley indulged in one of his most extravagant rounds of autobiographical revisionism by reconstructing and recycling places and materials from his earlier work. A Continuous Screening of Bob Clarks’s Film “Porky’s” (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnick’s Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull” (1968), and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room (Office Cubicles), titled after notes on various school floor plans, is a series of officelike cubicles; on the walls are hung sketches and architectural drawings from Educational Complex (1995). The black cast-resin blocks, covered with black “gravy” flowing into puddles of dark “forgetfulness,” set on an irregularly shaped white table in Concretized Negative Space (2002), refer to the various floor plans, architectural sketches, and working drawings used to produce Educational Complex. Also included in the show were several Memory Ware Flats (2000–2011) and associ- ated works, such as Endless Morphing Flow of Common Decorative Motifs (Jewelry Case) (2002), and mobilelike hanging sculptures (the Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid series and corresponding drawings), the aluminum, steel, and Plexiglas blocks of which approximate the shape of remembered architectural spaces.

Kelley, Mike. Statement in Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 110–11.

Welchman, John C. “L’arte e le instituzione: Riempire (e cancellare) dei vuoti.” In Le funzione del museo: Arte, museo, pubblico nella contempora- neità (2009), pp. 12–37.

pages 258 and 259 Installation view and detail of A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark’s Film “Porky’s” (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnik’s Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull,” (1968) and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room (Office Cubicles), 2002 Mixed-media 73 × 328 × 144 inches (183 × 823 × 366 cm) Metro Pictures, New York, 2002

page 260 Top to bottom Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid #3: Reconfiguration of Wayne High into the Ritual Presentation Arena of the Educational Complex, 2002

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid #3: Reconfiguration of Wayne High into the Ritual Presentation Arena of the Educational Complex, 2002

page 261 Top to bottom Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid # 2: School System Work Net (With Flashback), 2002

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid # 2: School System Work Net (With Flashback), 2002

260 261

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Light (Time)-Space Modulator (2002) This multimedia installation with three single-channel video projections was com- missioned by CCAC Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and shown in an exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of Capp Street Project. The installation is made up of an eight-meter-long revolving spiral staircase (modeled after one that was removed from Kelley’s Los Angeles home) suspended horizontally from the ceiling. Associated rotating projectors throw three series of slides onto the surrounding walls and floor: one set is made up of 1970s-era home snapshots of the family that used to live in Kelley’s house; the second restages the original snapshots in the artist’s home and stu- dio; and the third combines images from both. Part haunted house, part dysfunctional time machine fusing past and present, the piece also alludes to early Constructivist sculpture, especially László Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic machine"/"sculpture Light-Space Modulator (1922–30).

Kelley, Mike. “Light (Time)-Space Modulator.” In Capp Street Project: 20th Anniversary Exhibition (2003).

page 262 Compound Temporal Conflation (Horizontal) #1–4, 2002!/!2003 4 color photos framed 20.7 × 30.5 inches (52.58 × 77.47 cm) each

page 263 Two views of Light (Time)-Space Modulator, 2003 Multimedia installation with 3 single channel video projections, painted steel staircase, distortion pedal, amplifiers, 98 slide transparencies, 5 glazed ceramic funerary!/!incense urns, aluminum, and Plexiglas projection screens 139 × 315 inches (353.06 × 800 cm)

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Carpet and Wood Grain Paintings (2003) These two groups of work were exhibited along with an “extension” of the Memory Ware Flats series (using colored grout settings) and three sculptures at the Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2003). The Carpets use commercial, full-pile floor carpets

“pressed into a single color of acrylic paint that was brushed, with a push broom, onto a plastic sheet laid on the floor,” while the Wood Grains are a series of panels painted with acrylic using trompe l’oeil techniques and collaged materials to produce faux wood- grain effects, which depart from the final painting in The Thirteen Seasons (1994), Thirteen Seasons #13: Art (1994). They look back to other pieces using these faux tech- niques to solicit different effects: paintings in the Early American Landscape series (part of Meditation on a Can of Vernors [1981], the sculpture Antiqued (Prematurely Aged) [1987], and Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) [1990]). Unlike the Memory Ware and Carpet works, which adhere to Kelley’s initial commitment to a “non-compositional approach,” this group indulges in painterly plasticity and “eye-fooling” jokes. All three aspects of the exhibition are part of Kelley’s attempt to “problematize” his “own histo- ricization in the art world.”

Fontana, Emi. “Deep Surfaces.” In Mike Kelley: Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet (2004), n.p.

Installation view of Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet, at Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 2003

Kelley, Mike. “Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet.” In Mike Kelley: Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet (2004), n.p.

A Fax Transmission from: Oct. 21, 1986, 1:07 p.m., 1986!/!2004 Computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, fax!/!copier, cables, desk, chair, storage bin, paper, inkjet cartridges, light-jet prints, Plexiglas, Formica, wood, metal, fabric, plastic, rubber Cubicle: 86.5 × 113 inches × 48 inches diameter (219.71 × 287.02 × 121.92 cm); storage bin: 31 × 37 inches × 25 inches diameter (78.74 × 93.98 × 63.5 cm); chair: 36 × 20 × 20 inches diameter (91.44 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm)

A Fax Transmission from: Oct. 21, 1986, 1:07pm (1986-/-2004) Presented as a sculptural installation at Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, in 2004 (along with From My Institution to Yours and the Loading Dock Drawings); Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2006); and the group exhibition L’Institut des archives sauvages, Villa Arson, Nice, France (2012), A Fax Transmission takes the form of an office cubicle based on Kelley’s workstation when he was teaching at CalArts in the early to mid- 1980s, complete with computer, monitor, keyboard, a combination fax"/"copier"/"printer, notice boards, a portable storage bin, and copies of drawings or writing on sheets of paper—“office jokes,” many drawn from popular cartoons and comic books—strewn on the floor. The piece makes a pair with From My Institution to Yours, which used a few of the flyers sent from office to office marked with figures, slogans, and quips that Kelley had found posted around the CalArts campus. In contrast to the imagistic singularity and explicit counter-didacticism of the earlier work, A Fax Transmission is envisaged less as an ironic allegory than as a kind of misbegotten testimony to the relegation of popular culture in most “high” art circles and institutions from the 1950s through the 80s. The printed sheets image a literal—and sardonically overabundant—return of the everyday culture (the title of the piece possibly dates their transmission to a lunchtime in the year From My Institution to Yours was completed) that Kelley’s educational milieu and many of his mentors preferred to keep repressed, but with which Kelley engaged unceasingly. The installation also testifies to the constant barrage of opinion, revisionism, and ribaldry circulated in the workplace as well its wide and unpredict- able spectrum of humor: from blue and bad taste to cute and unreconstructed.

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Kandors (1999, 2007, 2009, 2011) [Kandor] is a constant reminder of [Superman’s] lost homeland and functions metaphori- cally as a symbol of his alienated relationship to the planet where he now resides!…!Kandor now sits, frozen in time, a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape that past, and his alienated relationship to his present world. For us, Kandor is an image of a time that never was—the utopian city of the future that never came to be.—Mike Kelley

Referring to the capital of the fictional planet Krypton from Superman comics, Kelley’s Kandors comprise miniature versions of the metropolis, following the story’s premise that the superhero stored the entire city (which had been shrunken by arch-villain Brainiac) in a bell-jar-like hyperbaric chamber at his secret hideaway, the Fortress of Solitude. After scrutinizing various renditions of Kandor as they appeared in succes- sive cells, at different points in the story and throughout its long graphic history, Kelley constructed an elaborate series of three-dimensional sculptures, approximating the size and level of detail of the comic-book drawings as closely as possible.

Kandor-Con 2000 (1999"/"2007) was conceived as a convention-center presentation, the elements of which included an architectural model of Kandor, collages with clus- ters of original illustrations of Kandor, and a video in which an actor playing Superman recites various texts by Sylvia Plath. Kandor-Con 2000 formed one section of a group exhibition on millennial changes at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Zeitwenden, Ausblick (1999–2000). Kelley’s original concept was to develop the electronic and physical means for Superman aficionados to create a community dedicated to this nostalgic image of the utopian imagination; however, neither the website nor the proposed meeting of fans materialized.

Kelley continued the project in Kandors at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin (2007), which reconstructed different versions of the miniature fictional city, scaled in relation to their appearance in various comics panels . Each work included a resin cityscape (some rendered as simplified geometric volumes, others more complex or based on organic forms), a colored glass bottle that fits over the model, a custom base (often fitted with hoses, gas tanks, and other accoutrements). They were exhibited with associated light boxes housing lenticular representations of the corresponding image of the comic- book city that was used as a source and related videos showing whirling dust and

page 266 Installation view of Kandor-Con 2000, 1999!/!2007 Mixed-media installation with video Dimensions variable Ackerstraße, Technical School, Berlin, Germany, 2007

page 267 top to bottom View of Kandor 15, 2007

View of Kandor 1, 200x

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debris inside the relevant bottle. In addition to its fantastical narratives, the series is formally accented by bold coloration reminiscent of comic-book illustrations; tinted resin; handblown glass made by the Kavalier Glass factory in the Czech Republic; and lenticular and videographic imagery. A complete set of Kandors (Kandors Full Set, 2005–09) was shown in the inaugural exhibition of the Pinault Collection, Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection, Venice, in 2009.

In two related 2011 Gagosian Gallery exhibitions (in Beverly Hills and London), Kelley expanded—and exploded—his fugal sequence of cities and cross-correlated the Kandors project with another major series, the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (EAPRs). Kandor 18B and 19B (both 2010) and Kandor 16 and 16B (both 2011) surmount textured, lavalike black pedestals, suggesting that these cit- ies are associated with volcanic eruption or trauma, while the disposition of found objects and miniature figures (on or around Kandor 11 and 18B and other Kandors and Cities) reminds us, conversely, of their domestic scale and relation to Kelley’s other projects and interests. In the Beverly Hills exhibition, Kelley rewound the clock to a putative moment of origin in City 000 (2010)—which he paired with a birdhouse, one of his first sculptural motifs—and supplied several further cryptic layers of “context” that infiltrate the referential space between the Kandors and EAPRs: including Black Landscape, Odalisque, Mexican Blind Cave Worm, and the figure of Colonel Sanders unveiling a miniature Freud (all 2010). In London these references included one more degree of temporal reversion in City 0000 (2011); martial memorialization (Fallen Warrior, Tie a Yellow Ribbon, War Memorial, all 2011); mythological invention (Ozymandias; Magic Is Alive, The Goddess Is A Foot, both 2011); and a set of more spe- cific contextual reimaginations for the cities—Southwest Mission Setting, Black Rock Back House, Kandor 10, and Refrigerated Futurist Cityscape (City 1) (all 2011).

Kelley, Mike. “Kandors.” In Mike Kelley: Kandors (2010), pp. 53–60.

____. “Superman Recites Selections from The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (With Reference to Kandor-Con 2000)” (1999). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 234–37.

Mike Kelley: Exploded Fortress of Solitude (2011); see especially Jeffrey Sconce, “When Worlds Collide,” pp. 156–71.

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Kandor). In Mike Kelley (2008), p. 220.

pages 268 and 269 Details of Kandor 16B, 2011

page 270 Source images depicting the city of Kandor in a bottle, altered, framed, and adapted by Mike Kelley. Each image was made into an animation or lenticular (numbered 1 through 20) and each also corresponds to a Kandor sculpture, as well as informing the City sculptures.

page 271 Kandor 10, 2010 Mixed-media 11 × 16 × 12 feet (27.94 × 40.64 × 30.48 m)

271270 Kandors (1999, 2007, 2009, 2011)

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page 276 top to bottom City 6 (Version 1 of 5), 2007

Detail of City 5 (Version 1 of 5), 2007

page 277 Kandor 2B, 2011

pages 278 and 279 City 0000, 2011 Tinted urethane resin on illuminated base 32 × 130 × 106.5 inches (81.28 × 330.2 × 270.51 cm)

page 272 City 000, 2010 Mixed-media 108 × 80 × 73 inches (274.3 × 203.2 × 185.4 cm)

page 273 Odalisque, 2010

pages 274 and 275 Exterior view of Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude), 2011 Mixed-media 114 × 600 × 900 inches (289.56 × 1524 × 228.6 cm)

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Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #1, #2–32, #33, #34, #35, #36, #36B (2000–2011) First presented at Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan and then in Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2000, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) (2000) was the inaugural installment of what Kelley envisioned as an almost impossibly monumental 365-part project, which he intended to present as a complete cycle in a twenty-four-hour event. EAPR #1 restages a complexly suggestive high-school yearbook photograph documenting what appears to be a school play set in a shabby domestic environment with an open oven at its center. The original photograph is one of numerous images of high-school extracurricular activities appropriated for use in Timeless!/!Authorless (1995). Looking back to Educational Complex (1995), this mixed- media installation, performance video, and suite of black-and-white photographs uses a stylized variant of early TV drama to stage a melodramatic reenactment of the found image, with nods to Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim (1947), and (via the oven) Sylvia Plath.

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2–32 (Day Is Done) (2004–05) was first seen as a labyrinthine sequence of twenty-five interconnected video-sculp- tural installations at Gagosian Gallery, New York (2005). Day Is Done also exists as a single-channel, feature-length video on DVD (2006); its soundtrack was released as a CD, and a book (2007) collects Kelley’s libretti, scene notes, notes on music, and associated texts. The videos are projective reconstructions based on found photo- graphs of extracurricular activities, taken from high-school yearbooks, newspapers, and other sources, that Kelley elaborately restaged. These “nonsensical escapes from institutional daily routine” include various religious events (a gospel dance, choosing a Virgin Mary, the supplicating Joseph, a children’s Christmas play, and a candle- lighting ceremony); pagan and underworld dress-up activities (featuring a roster of vampires—“sick,” “heartthrob,” “lonely”) and goth types; a May crowning ceremony; a wandering ghoul and wizard; episodes organized around a singles’ mixer; “modern,”

“Gothic,” “chicken,” and “horse” dances; and a “structuralist” mime.

page 280 Studio view of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000 Mixed-media installation and video Variable; 120 × 344.5 × 288 inches (304.8 × 874.8 × 731.5 cm)

page 281 Installation view of Day Is Done at Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2005

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Conceived as a “fractured"…"musical,” the narrative framework of Day Is Done unfolds from an annual motivational speech delivered in an unspecified institutional loca- tion that “functions as the opening ceremony for a series of entertainments.” Kelley collaborated with choreographer Kate Foley for the dance sequences and musician Scott Benzel on the ear-twisting but carefully crafted mix of what the artist described as “incongruous” musical genres. Kelley thought of his reconstructions as screen—or false—memories associated with scenes of possible trauma in the blank or forgotten spaces of the Educational Complex. At the same time, these willfully invented “memo- ries” were intended to be plausible by virtue of shared cultural experiences of local downtime or communal leisure.

Commissioned by Performa in 2009, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruc- tion #33 (The Offer) (2009) was presented as part of “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus” at Judson Memorial Church, New York, along with “The Horse Dance of the False Virgin” from Day Is Done and “The Judson Church Horse Dance.” All three pieces were released on DVD. Staged on and around a large ladder, The Offer presented a composition for twelve horn players and one vocalist.

EAPRs #34 and #35 were featured in the exhibition Kandor 10!/!Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34, Kandor 12!/!Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35 at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, in 2011, for which Kelley brought both of his major twenty-first-century projects into daring—sometimes hilar- ious—mutual articulation. EAPR #34 comprises two videos based on an image of what appears to be the harem scene of an amateur stage play—reprising the point of origin for EAPR #1. But the milieu swaps shabby domesticity for the discrepantly authori- tarian, as the first video (The King and Us) features a despotlike character consorting with his “oriental” harem, while in the second (The Queens and Me) a group of “queens” berate and demean a male functionary. Shown like #34, with the set in which it was shot, EAPR #35 (Dour Gnomes) represents a group of zombielike gnomes with conical hats and curled pointy shoes shuffling aimlessly around a grimy cell.

EAPR #36 (Vice Anglais) was also shown in relation to the Kandors works as part of Exploded Fortress of Solitude at Gagosian Gallery, London, in 2011. Loosely bas- ing the work on the sexual escapades of Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Kelley layered EAPR #36 with an academic revisionist study, dressed in the style of a Hammer horror movie and suffused with a darkly pantomimic variant of the British predilection for sadomasochism—underlined and unhinged—in EAPR #36B (Made in England), in which the dialogue of #36 is spoken by a variety of mostly ceramic objects “made in England.”

Mike Kelley: Exploded Fortress of Solitude (2011); see especially Jeffrey Sconce, “When Worlds Collide,” pp. 156–71.

Kelley, Mike. “Day Is Done,” “Scene Notes,” “The Music of Day Is Done,” and “Libretto.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done (2007), pp. 461–65, 487–505, 507–17, and 519–67, respectively.

____. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 150–59.

____. “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene)” (2000). In Minor Histories (2004), pp. 238–41.

Singerman, Howard. “Memory Ware.” In Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 318, 319, 323–24.

Welchman, John C. “Fête Accompli: Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, pp. 466–85.

page 282 Installation view of Day Is Done at Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2005

page 284 top to bottom Views of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #9 (Fresno), 2004–05

Detail from Nativity Play, 2004–05

page 285 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil’s Door), 2004–05

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page 286 Switching Marys, 2004–05

page 287 top to bottom Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #9 (Farm Girl), 2004–05 Chromogenic print and black-and- white Piezo print on rag paper 40 × 53.5 in.

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #28 (Nativity Play), 2004–05

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil: Master of Ceremonies), 2004–05 Chromogenic print and black-and- white Piezo print on rag paper 73.5 × 34.25 in.

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #22 (Picking a Mary), 2004–05 Chromogenic print and black-and- white Piezo print on rag paper 66.75 × 40 in.

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page 288 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 (The King and Us!/!The Queens and Me), 2010 Mixed-media with video and video monitors; includes Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 (lenticular) Dimensions variable Video, color!/!sound; 19:15 min

page 289 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 (The King and Us!/!The Queens and Me), 2010 Lenticular panel, light box 36.75 × 49.5 × 3.5 inches (93.35 × 125.73 × 8.89 cm)

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page 290 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36B (Made in England), 2011 Mixed-media installation with video Dimensions variable

page 291 Production stills from Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011 Video 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 20.32 cm) each

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Hermaphrodite Drawings (2005–06) These sixteen humorously ribald, mixed-media drawings—shown at Gagosian Gallery, London, in 2007—continued Kelley’s long-standing interest in sexual dysfunction, deviance, and plurality. The anatomically indeterminate figure of the hermaphrodite, which first appeared in Hermaphrodite (1974) and other drawings from Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1994, Reconsidered (1993–94), makes a sustained encore in these pruriently off-color sequels. Promiscuously free-associated features are attached to a variety of crudely generalized, multisexed personae—a war victim, “Mr. and Mrs.,” “Putinella Fresca,” and “Chrome Goddess”—as well as to rock stars and artists includ- ing David Bowie (David Bowie’s Skull and Intestinal System, 2006), Rod Stewart (The Ghost of Rod Stewart, Cum Guzzler, 2006) and Henry Moore (Transvestite Henry Moore, 2006).

Mike Kelley: Hermaphrodite Drawings (2007); see especially essay by Steven Stern, pp. 87–91.

page 292 Sister, 2005

page 293 Mr. and Mrs. Hermaphrodite, 2005

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Rose Hobart II (2006) This sculptural installation consists of a large wooden structure—inspired by Thomas Edison’s film-production studio, Black Maria, as well as the shape of the projection itself—into which a viewer can crawl through either of two tunnels to view by way of peepholes normal and reversed versions of the shower scene from the film Porky’s (1982), which was edited and manipulated by the artist to correspond with the A- and B-sides of Morton Subotnik’s musical composition The Wild Bull (1968). The title refers to Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) and is composed of only those portions of the film East of Borneo (1931), in which the actress Rose Hobart appears.

Kelley, Mike. “Rose Hobart II.” In Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 (2009), pp. 114–19.

pages 294 and 295 Video still from and two views of Rose Hobart II, 2006 Wood, metal, carpet, acrylic paint, with video projection and sound 72 × 178 × 240 inches (182.88 × 452.12 × 609.6 cm)

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Profondeurs Vertes (2006) Curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac to accompany the exhibition Les artistes américains et le Louvre at the Louvre in Paris, Profondeurs Vertes is an installation consisting of three projected videos, seven drawings, and one oil painting. Referring to works from the col- lection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) by Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, Kelley foregrounded two paintings: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), a dramatic marine rescue scene that was the artist’s first “historical” tableau, and the green-tinted, “hazy atmospheric tonalis[m]” of Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The Recitation (1891), both of which had a profound impact on him as a boy. Profondeurs Vertes builds on Church’s self-consciously theatrical presentation by dramatizing the DIA paintings using video montage, soundtrack music, and implied “dialogue” with period poetry. The first of the two videos addressed to Watson and the Shark focuses on the nonaction areas of the canvas, while the second addresses the main drama, centered on an African American sailor and the sight lines of its protagonists (also the basis of the seven pencil drawings), which reveal a psychoanalytic dimension of cross-gender eroticism and castration anxiety. The first video is scored with natural sound effects and distanced melodies; the second with what Kelley described as “bombastic ‘symphonic’ music patterned after the film soundtrack music of American composer Bernard Herrmann.” Related to Dewing’s panoramic painting The Recitation, the third video crosscuts between images of its two female figures and accentuates its atmospheric effects. The videos and their soundtracks run simultaneously and are augmented by a final sonic element, emanat- ing from a floor grate: a recitation from the second canto of Les Chants de Maldoror (1868–69) by the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse).

Kelley, Mike. Unpublished statement on Profondeurs Vertes (2006).

Welchman, John C. “Glossary” (Color). In Mike Kelley (2008), pp. 214–16.

Profondeurs Vertes, 2006 Mixed-media installation with video projections, sound Dimensions variable

Petting Zoo (2007) Realized for the fourth edition of the decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007), curated by Kasper König, Petting Zoo offered an ironic restaging of the biblical story of the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The avenging angels warned only Lot and his wife of the impending destruction but told them not to look back as they fled. Lot’s wife disobeyed and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Kelley added a batheti- cally redemptive coda to this fatalistic parable about the defiance of divine decree by arranging for domesticated animals—sheep, goats, and ponies—to flock to a pillar to lick the salt. Situated in an octagonal, rustic barn near Münster’s main train station, Kelley sculpted the pillar after pictures from illustrated children’s Bibles from his own childhood and surrounded it with videos of three rock formations named after Lot’s wife—from the Dead Sea; New South Wales, Australia; and the island of St. Helena. Petting Zoo layers vengeful historical tragedy and personal religious experience with landscape denomination and the would-be therapeutic encounter with animals.

Birds-eye view and interior view of Petting Zoo, 2007, at Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, Mixed-media installation with video projections, sound Dimensions variable

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Horizontal Tracking Shots (2009) In this 2009 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York, Kelley showed a diverse body of paintings related to his Timeless Paintings and Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, which are themed (and named) after the premise that “stage sets, like paintings, are designed to be seen frontally.” One group of works takes the form of colored reliefs set with biomorphic painting elements—reminiscent of the shapes used in The Thirteen Seasons (1994) and other series—that cue the coloration of adjacent flat panels, with baseline moldings offering architectural and stage-set sug- gestions. Smaller paintings draw on characteristically eclectic sources ranging from elementary-school textbook illustration and New Age painting to comic strips and sci- ence fiction. Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms (2009) is a freestanding construction inspired by televisual space that presents a façade of col- ored panels and a verso with three video monitors showing TV color bars interspersed with short video clips depicting traumatic childhood scenes (culled from YouTube). The transformation of Color Field–type painting into spaces redolent with trauma developed from ideas Kelley explored in his series of Timeless Paintings (1995), the official visual production of the Educational Complex.

“Existing in an Ahistorical Fantasy Space of Trauma: A Conversation Between Mike Kelley and Ralph Rugoff.” In Mike Kelley: Horizontal Tracking Shots (2009), pp. 115–27.

pages 298 and 299 Front and back view of Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009

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page 300 Installation views of Horizontal Tracking Shots exhibition, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009

page 301 Naked Majas (Bettelheim’s Genital), 2008–09

Horizontal Tracking Shots (2009)

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Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Party Palace (2009) This sculptural installation was exhibited in the exhibition Rock, Paper, Scissors: Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art at the Kunsthaus Graz (2009), which also showed work by artists who have forged dialogues with pop and rock music including Saadane Afif, Cory Arcangel, Art & Language, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, Renée Green, Lucy McKenzie, Dave Muller, and Albert Oehlen. Projecting edited sequences from various genres of pornography onto an inflatable church, inflatable mushrooms, and other surfaces, the installation excoriates the hedonistic free-for-all of the rock-and- roll lifestyle and its latter-day consumerist denouement, while also paying homage to what survives of the rawness and sensual assertion of the rock tradition. Kelley’s version of the move between rock and a hard place, the piece also investigates—and satirizes—the endlessly reciprocal shuffle between high and low culture and the pro- duction and reproduction of “youth cultures.”

Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Studio Head-Material Forest—The Hardness of Objects,” in Schere, Stein, Papier: Pop-Musik als Gegenstand Bildender Kunst!/!Rock, Paper, Scissors: Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art (2009), pp. 10–28.

Installation view of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Party Palace, 2009 Mixed-media installation with video and sound Dimensions variable Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, 2009

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009, with Michael Smith) A coproduction of the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York, and West of Rome, Pasadena, California, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery is a collaborative, multichan- nel video installation (and associated single-channel “feature”) by Kelley and longtime friend Michael Smith starring Smith’s Baby IKKI, a regressive and indeterminately aged character with whom Smith has been working for over three decades. Staged as a dissidently “existential” six-day pilgrimage to one of the epicenters of “radical self- expression,” the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Baby IKKI wanders through an outlandishly costumed menagerie of self-performing celebrants in a journey loosely themed on the primal elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Smith’s tour de force performance and sheer stamina is meted out through an intricate editing process to produce a quasi narrative that is by turns funny, exorbitant, and challenging. The installational components conflate suggestions of carnival and commune with fairground fantasy and a junk aesthetic, crossing both with the futur- istic architecture of R. Buckminster Fuller.

pages 303–305 Installation view of Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, 2009 Mixed-media installation with video projections, porta-potties, VW Bus Dimensions variable Farley Building, Los Angeles, 2010

304 305A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009, with Michael Smith)

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Mechanical Toy Guts (1991-/-2012) Shown through April 2012 in a dedicated room at The Box, Los Angeles, as part of Beneath the Valley of the Lowest Form of Music, an exhibition about the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) that took place January 14 to February 25, 2012, this sound-animated floor piece was one of the last works completed and exhibited by Kelley. Using sound-emitting toy or novelty items including a kitten, dog, and vari- ous holiday-themed toys gathered over a period of several years, which he stripped down, rewired, retouched, or variously interfered with by scratching, heating, and other means, Kelley created new compositions from a range of found, sped-up, and unpurposed sounds. Many of the sonic elements are the result of Kelley’s activation, amplification, and distortion of various motors used to move particular parts of the toys—mouths, heads, limbs, etc. Discernible jingles and phrases include “It’s a Small World after All,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,”

“Happy Halloween!,” “That’s Funny!,” and “Hello, Friend!.” Each of the six sound tracks, played in sequence from an iPod wired to a speaker, uses materials mixed from some eighteen “skinned” toys displayed on two pieces of cloth, a white velvet L-shaped fragment, and a black fleece swathe with thin tapered arms punctured by four semi- circular cutouts (probably taken by a seamstress for collars or hat brims), the remnants from costume production for projects such as Day Is Done. The piece also includes two chairs taken from Kelley’s studio, a white plastic one sporting a single yellow sock on its left front leg and a black-seated, metal-framed chair with a battered cardboard box labeled “Mechanical Toy Guts” set underneath it. Combining the low-down look of Arenas and his other floor pieces with a sonic dimension supplied by scrambled animal noises and clichéd holiday greetings, Kelley’s DIY circuit-bending layers a final epi- sode of recursive recycling over the spoils of his mischievous eviscerations to produce a darkly ironic parody of innocent childhood diversion and rote holiday rituals.

page 306 Details of Mechanical Toy Guts, 1991!/!2012

page 307 top to bottom Detail of Mechanical Toy Guts, 1991!/!2012

View of Mechanical Toy Guts in Mike Kelley’s studio, Los Angeles, 2012

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Mobile Homestead (2005–2013) Rooted in the conceptual and physical terrain of his childhood, Kelley’s sculptural installation re-creates the architectural style of the postwar suburban home in which he grew up on Palmer Road in Westland, Michigan, twenty miles west of downtown Detroit. The reconstruction has two components: a mobile version of the front of the house, which rode on a flatbed truck through the neighborhoods situated along Michigan Avenue, the route between the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and Westland, in 2010; and the remainder of the house (to which the mobile part is docked), which will be sited on a lot next to MOCAD and used for exhibitions and community-oriented and initiated projects. The MOCAD-adjacent house will be situated atop a complex series of basement and sub-basement spaces, accessible only by vertical ladders. Kelley reserved these zones for secret or ritual uses by himself, friends, or nominees.

Kelley documented the inaugural journey of the homestead, composing a quasi-docu- mentary portrait of people, places, and communities sited, living, or working along this stretch of Michigan Avenue, including the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn. The resulting feature-length videos—two shot during the outbound and return journeys of the Mobile Homestead and a third made during the launch event at MOCAD in September 2010—were shown at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which was ded- icated to Kelley’s memory. The sculpture and the videos provide a commentary not only on the history of Detroit as a historical site of automobile manufacture but on the city’s postindustrial fate, as various communities continue to redefine their role, “place,” and physical and social environments. With typical frankness, Kelley noted the “failure”—as an affirmative or ameliorative gesture—of his “first sustained” work of “public art,” but also remarked that it might have been “successful as a model of my own belief that pub- lic art is always doomed to failure because of its basic passive"/"aggressive nature.”

Kelley, Mike. “Mobile Homestead.” In Whitney Biennial 2012 (2012), pp. 158–63.

page 308 left to right Photo of former Kelley residence on Palmer Road in Westland, Michigan, ca. 1950s

Digital renderings of Mike Kelley’s proposed project Mobile Homestead, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, including underground sections

page 309 The Mobile Homestead parked in front of the original Kelley residence on Palmer Road in Westland, Michigan, 2010, and the Mobile Homestead in front of St. Mary’s Church and School, Westland, Michigan, 2010

pages 310 and 311 Video stills from Mobile Homestead documentaries: Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland and Going East on Michigan Avenue from Westland to Downtown Detroit, 2010–11, Videos, color!/!sound; 76:15 min. each

310 311Mobile Homestead (2005–2013)

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Destroy All Monsters song lyrics by Jim Shaw, transcribed by Cary Loren, including “Self Destruction” and “Teenagers from Outerspace.”

313

FAKE ROCK

MIKE 1

BRANDEN W. JOSEPH

Popular music represents merely one out of a vast range of Mike Kelley’s aesthetic interests, which also include poetry, fiction, science fiction, philosophy, architecture, and cinema, as well as high modernist, popular, and subcultural visual arts. Nevertheless, within Kelley’s oeuvre music argu- ably fulfills a uniquely metonymic function, being both a distinct component of his aesthetic practice and a means of accessing the wider implications of that practice as a whole. Kelley’s musical endeavors can be divided into three stages: an early period of collaborative musical experimentation that complemented his visual and performance art; an interval in which he somewhat dismissively described his music-making as a “pastime”2; and a late phase incorporating music (even the format of the Broadway musical) into multimedia performances and ensembles exemplified by the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions of Day Is Done (2005). Addressing the entirety of Kelley’s musical output in even a cursory manner is much too large a task for a single essay. Offered here instead is a modest primer of acoustical documents—a playlist, if you will—drawn from Kelley’s earliest musical period, running from the mid-1970s Michigan collective Destroy All Monsters (DAM) to the 1970s and 80s Los Angeles groups The Poetics and (much lesser known) Idiot Bliss.

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These lines are merely one of myriad instances—found equally in “Vampire” (ca. 1974–76), “Take Me With You” (ca. 1974–76), “I Love You But You’re Dead” (1975), and more—that testify to the group’s fascination with death or, to be more precise, the corpselike condition of a living death, of being undead. In this case, Niagara’s morbid meditations contrast with a cynically rosy evocation of an earlier era:

Try and go back To that very happy time When babies only lived To tie us all in knots.

In some sense, “Kill Kill” is a song about existing in the aftermath of the 1960s, what Loren termed “the end of an era—paradise lost, the hippie apocalypse.”3 The “babies” about whom Niagara sings so unconvincingly could be flower children (a connection that would have been clearer had Loren’s original lyrics been retained).4 Kelley, who turned sixteen in 1970, spoke of his “resentment at hav- ing missed the short hedonistic flowering” of the 1960s. “Where was my utopia?” he asked. “Where was my free sex? Nowhere to be seen.”5 “It’s time for something beyond hippies,” he observed in 1976. “Everyone hates hippies now…. [m]ostly because of the economic situation, people are very pessimistic and they don’t have the kind of optimism that the hippies started out with.”6

In Michigan, the hippie scene had been dominated by the outlook and activities of John Sinclair, first with the Detroit Artists Workshop and then, more importantly for Kelley, with the White Panther Party. Founded in emulation and support of the Black Panther Party and fronted by “avant- rock” bands the MC5 and, later, the Up, the White Panthers sought to yoke youth culture to revolution. Sinclair’s aesthetics (and politics) were predicated on cultural and communal authen- ticity, the organic unification of art and life. As he noted in 1969, “That’s one thing that’s so beautiful about the blues—the music is so much the life, and the life is so much the music, that it’s still a whole thing when and where those conditions obtain. There is no separation. I mean John Lee Hooker is not separate from his music at all. Nor is Howlin Wolf, or Son House for that matter. Nor is the Up, or some other people you might not know about yet.”7 As evinced by referencing the Up, Sinclair foresaw the white, rock-oriented 1960s counterculture attaining the same level of uni- fication as the “blues people” before them.8 “The MC-5 were a ‘whole thing,’” he proclaimed,

They were one with the music and one with their people; there was no separa- tion, and everybody got down together in the music, which gave expression to their collective consciousness in that time and place. The MC-5’s music was wholly integrated—it was inspired by the people and the social conditions in Detroit, and in a purely musical term it was integrated on a different level, being based on the sound they built up out of their banks of amplifiers and speakers.9

“Kill Kill” epitomizes an aesthetic utterly antithetical to Sinclair’s ideal. Complementing its the- matic devotion to death, the entire track has the air of an expiring practice run-through: Niagara declaims the lyrics with a lassitude quite opposite enthusiasm; the two guitars never meld; and the entire thing simply fades away at the two-minute mark. “Our songs,” recalled Loren, “were often created on the spur of the moment, spontaneous parodys [sic] of classic rock, mondo monster mov- ies, and youth-dementia. We would play these once or twice at the most, recording the best version and then go on.”10 DAM’s notion of life, if it had one, is revealed in “Useless Life” (1975), another Loren tune, this time sung by Kelley. Amid more aggressively noisy instrumentation (Loren and Shaw on guitars, Niagara on screechy violin), Kelley groans:

1. “You Can’t Kill Kill” (1975), released on Destroy All Monsters, Gospel Crusade, CD

If Destroy All Monsters, the group Kelley cofounded while a University of Michigan undergraduate in 1974, had released a single during its early existence, “You Can’t Kill Kill” would have been a worthy candidate—not because it is the most completely realized of DAM tracks, but precisely because it is not. “Kill Kill” represents one of the few songs to assemble the entire core group: Cary Loren, whose lyrics feature on this and most of their other songs, is joined on guitar by Kelley’s art- school colleague Jim Shaw, while the Gothlike Niagara contributes vocals and Kelley mans the drums. As Kelley and Loren lay down a rhythm against which Shaw’s “space” guitar warbles out creaky atmospherics, Niagara sing-speaks in Michigan-accented deadpan:

You can’t kill kill ’Cause it doesn’t happen twice No one dies backwards It only wastes time.

Photo of Jim Shaw as a Spaceman by Cary Loren, used for DAM graphics, 1975

Photo of (from left to right) John Reed, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975

Fake Rock: Mike Kelley’s Music Joseph

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I’m sick of the trees And all the clean air I want my body full of drugs And I want to sit and stare.

By the summer of 1970, even Sinclair had pronounced the 60s’ short-lived utopian moment over. “These PIGS!” he complained. “They’ve made our music and our celebrations into cheap consumer products, they’ve destroyed the use-value of our culture and converted it all into dollars and cents, antifeeling and antisense, all in the name of profit and greed.”11 Even the drugs were bad: “Full of speed and death, sending people off into nightmares of paranoia.”12 With little possibility of reclaiming “that very happy time,” DAM adopted an allegorical outlook, wherein, to quote Walter Benjamin, “Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.”13

“The allegorical mind,” explained Benjamin Buchloh, “sides with the [appropriated cultural] object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluing it for the second time in allegorical practice…. It is this repetition of the original act of depletion and the new attri- bution of meaning that redeems the object.”14 DAM took as its “object” the dregs left over after the countercultural rock and roll Sinclair so lauded had been degraded by the 1970s record industry to a mere commodity. “[B]y the time you got these records,” groused Kelley, “the ‘stars’ who made them were already in decline: dead, drugged out, or producing corporate rock.”15 Left with only devalued remainders of 1960s musical culture, DAM appropriated them, not to return them to life but none- theless to reanimate them, albeit in a vampiric or zombielike condition. Although Niagara sings of its impossibility, to “kill kill”—to devalue the cultural devaluation of the 1960s and thereby redeem it—was precisely DAM’s goal.

2. “Live 1975” (1975), released on Destroy All Monsters, Grow Live Monsters, cassette

A sludgy instrumental jam recorded in sterling bootleg quality in Kelley’s basement bedroom, “Live 1975” reveals DAM’s oft-cited relation to Detroit’s music scene. “We wanted to sound heavy like a metal band,” recalled Kelley. “A certain kind of ugliness is a common aspect of the Detroit rock sound—like the Stooges, for example.”16 The Stooges, fronted by Iggy Pop, have long been under- stood as the quintessential antihippie band. “The abject began looming in rock when the insurrectionary energy of the late 60s started to flag, and rock turned heavy,” write Simon Reynolds and Joy Press: “After the high, the comedown. On the first side of The Stooges (1969), the incendi- ary teen revolt of ‘1969’ and the lust-for-abasement of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ dwindle into the lapidary lassitude of ‘We Will Fall’…. ‘We Will Fall’ is terminal, the triumph of death drive over eros, a return to the womb-tomb.”17 As a committed avant-garde noise band, DAM generally proved closer to the Stooges’ original incarnation, the Psychedelic Stooges, which combined Harry Partch with rock and roll and deployed metal drums, Theremins, vacuum cleaners, and amplified blenders as instruments.18 In “Live 1975,” however, DAM worked its way into a vintage Stooge-like amalgam of numbing, overdriven, repetitive force.

The Stooges’ sound was central to the discourse of early “punk,” formulated in the pages of Detroit’s Creem magazine by Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs. Rebelling against the inflated rhetoric and musi- cal proficiency of industry-sponsored behemoths like the band Chicago, Marsh and Bangs lauded

“assaultiveness, minimalism, [and] rank amateurishness” as the three primary components of punk rock.19 This not only valorized an anticorporate aesthetic approachable by those with only rudi- mentary means and skills (“I left the drumheads behind,” noted Kelley, “beating on metal with pipes. Volume and noise level were the important things, not finesse”20), it also entailed a dialectic between pop music and the more experimental wing of the artistic avant-garde. “Bangs’s key aes- thetic notions—assault, minimalism, and amateurish nonvirtuosity,” explained musicologist Bernard Gendron,

DAM flyer, ca. 1975 (bottom, left to right) Jim Shaw, Ron Asheton, and Mike Kelley

Photo of God’s Oasis from the Ann Arbor News, Wednesday, June 23, 1976 Marju Nemvaltz, Rick Greenvald, and Jim Shaw on porch; David Owen and Mike Kelley on lawn

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had already been variously adumbrated in avant-garde movements of the art world. The use of assault and shock, of course, are well-known trademarks of twentieth-century avant-gardes of all stripes, particularly Dadaists and Surrealists. And, of course, many avant-gardists, mostly in the Dada tradi- tion—but here John Cage’s aleatory experiments are also noteworthy—made it a point to undermine the cult of virtuosity and professionalism in the arts….

Thus, the punk aesthetic of Bangs and his early allies was at the same time a pop and avant-garde aesthetic, which combined the perceived ethos of male teen culture with art world concepts.21

More than the thuggish sound of early punk (which, with exceptions like “Live 1975,” is relatively rare in DAM’s recorded output), it is this dialectic of art and music, avant-garde and pop, that con- stitutes the group’s most profound affinity with punk rock.

It is therefore not surprising that DAM arose out of the guerilla performances Kelley and Shaw staged at the University of Michigan that investigated various historical avant-garde strategies as filtered through Cage’s chance experiments, William S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique, and the already wan- ing legacy of psychedelic freak-outs. While the Futurist Ballet (1973), the sole example captured on video, gestures toward Futurism more than Dada, the assaultiveness and eschewal of conventional skill have the same effect. “The background,” proclaims Kelley at the “ballet’s” opening, “is Futurist music, continuous noise, like a hot rod. A hot rod,” he explains in terms calculated to appeal to his Michigan audience, “is a Futurist ideal.” Investigating the avant-garde within a Michigan context, DAM similarly aimed to desublimate the legacy of Luigi Russolo from within that of Iggy Pop.

3. “Double Sextet” (1975), released on Destroy All Monsters, Double Sextet, LP

In the mid-1970s, the most avant-garde wing of what could be called popular music was found in jazz. Kelley has consistently cited the importance, for both his music and his visual art, of cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra, specifically noting the latter’s tendency towards abrupt contrasts between radically discontinuous styles: “At one point, you might be swept up bodily, only to be dropped on your ass by twenty minutes of harsh electronic white noise.”22 Kelley and fellow bandmates were also drawn to free jazz recordings by Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. DAM’s half-hour-long “Double Sextet” (1975)—played by Kelley, Loren, and Shaw, along with housemates Jeff Fields (conga drum), Kalle Nemvalts (trumpet), and John Reed (guitar and bass)—frequently reaches toward free jazz’s screeching intensity.

As much as it reveals DAM’s debt to jazz, “Double Sextet” also illustrates their assimilation of German “Krautrock” bands like Can, Tangerine Dream, and, especially in this case, Faust. (You can practically sing the nonsensical lyrics “Chet-vah Buddha, Cherra-loopiz” from The Faust Tapes to the segment of “Double Sextet” released as “Bounce.”23) Relating to “[t]he Western Music scene” as though it “was a mythical and ancient currency to be plundered,” Faust proffered a postmodern musical pastiche (a trait that aligned them with Sun Ra) where high modernist experimentalism alternated with takes on popular genres from rock to cabaret, an eclecticism for which they have been called “a ‘faux-rock’ group.”24 This dimension of Krautrock sprang from the West Germans’ dual assimilation of Karlheinz Stockhausen and American rock and roll, along with a good dose of Frank Zappa and, perhaps, a particularly ardent reception of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the 1967 album by British art designers Nigel Weymouth and Michael English that fostered the genre of communal freak-out LPs.25 Whatever the reasons, Faust’s interests—which “owe as much to John Cage’s theories of chance operations, or the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as they do to rock, or ‘fusion’”—parallel Kelley’s.26 “It wasn’t until I heard psychedelic stuff that I really liked rock,” says Kelley. “So my interest in rock wasn’t really like an interest in pop culture, I was interested in the mix and match aesthetic of psychedelia, its ‘postmodern’ quality.”27

Still from The Futurist Ballet, 1973 (featuring Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw)

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Kelley frequently cited Smith’s importance, and Kelley’s predilection for the most theatrical and “inauthentic” rock acts (the Stooges, Alice Cooper, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown) bears an affinity with that side of Smith’s aesthetic that relates allegory to camp. Smith’s “embrace of phoni- ness,” noted Kelley, “is the essence, and politic, of the Camp aesthetic.”32 Camp views the world as a construction, a feature that aligns Smith with Kelley’s understanding of the work of Öyvind Fahlström (and Sun Ra), which “reveals that [seemingly natural] tropes are manufactured, often arbitrarily coded, and thus ‘unnatural.’ As manmade images, they are politicized.”33 “I was much more attracted to the camp aesthetic than the hippie essentialist one,” maintained Kelley. “In Jack Smith’s work, I know he doesn’t expect me to believe he uses degraded exotica as a sign of true cultural otherness. It is symbolic of cultural otherness within our own culture, of his own position as a cultural other: a freak.”34 By associating Smith’s queer subject position with psychedelic freak culture, Kelley relates him to his own understanding of subcultural production, wherein artworks that operate within the realm of “popular” culture (music, movies, comics) are suffused by alterna- tive, culturally “deviant” libidinal investments and thereby appeal to only a small segment of the public, one that “recognizes something within them at odds with dominant notions of spectatorship and audience.”35 Packaged within the most normalizing cultural forms, such works nonetheless stand outside of them while also eschewing the trappings of avant-garde distanciation.

Although “Evil Works” aligns closely with Kelley’s aesthetic outlook, he does not appear on it. In 1976, Kelley and Shaw moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). On this recording, Loren and Niagara are joined by Roger Miller (drums) and Larry Miller (guitar). After the departure of Roger Miller (who also attended CalArts in 1976 before founding the band Mission of Burma in 1979), the group would add Ben Miller (saxophone), Rob King (drums), Michael Davis (bass), and the original Stooges guitarist, Ron Asheton, to form a more rock-oriented version of DAM quickly and colloquially known, on account of volume, as “Destroy All Monitors.”36

5. “Alan Vega Says: ‘No Heroes, Man’” (ca. 1978), released on The Poetics, Remixes of Recordings 1977–83, 3-CD set

Like DAM, The Poetics—which Kelley formed in 1977 with Tony Oursler and other CalArts stu- dents—drew upon a wide array of musical sources that were combined, fractured, and undermined to varying degrees. Kelley and Oursler separate The Poetics’ evolution into two parts, one domi- nated by the organ, the other by guitar. The chronologically earlier “organ-period” sound can be related to the soulless electronic pop of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, facets of Silver Apples (also a DAM touchstone), and even Los Angeles’s searing “synthpunk” band the Screamers, of whom Kelley was particularly fond. The Poetics’ primary rock inspiration, however, was Suicide, the drum-machine-and-synthesizer duo of Alan Vega and Martin Rev. On “No Heroes” (ca. 1978), over Kelley’s muddied mechanical beat and echoey electronic drone, Oursler channels Vega’s snidely slurring, spook-house vocals, as immortalized on “Frankie Teardrop” (1977) from Suicide’s debut album.

Suicide’s powerful sonic minimalism and infamously confrontational performances (which inspired a riot in Brussels in 1978) convey nihilistic aggression. Yet at the same time, their unconventional instrumentation dethrones the primary signifier of rock’s phallic power, the guitar.37 Like Suicide and other organ-dominated punk and new wave groups, The Poetics sought to undermine the essen- tialized, masculinist ethos that underlay what Ted Nugent termed “hard-dick” rock and roll. Their investigation of the gender-bending of 1960s psychedelia and 70s glam rock paralleled Kelley’s engagements with crafts like crochet as the “failed” and feminized other to modernist high art.38

4. “Evil Works” (1976), released on Destroy All Monsters, Crying in Bed, CD

To a simple chorus, “evil works,” Loren and Niagara trade verses:

The devil’s gonna win ’Cause he’s on the right side His evil’s gonna work So it’s no use to hide.

The song is less an homage to Satan, however, than to Loren’s true master: New York artist and filmmaker Jack Smith. Smith’s own “Evil Works,” sung to the tune of an early-1930s German tango, appeared in Ken Jacobs’s film Blonde Cobra (1963). “God is famous!” Smith hollers, but “evil is practical”: “Evil really works, yes, evil works and not against itself, against you!... If money is the root of all evil, give me the whole tree!”28 Smith’s work had been a presence in Ann Arbor since 1967, when police seized a print of Flaming Creatures (1963) at a university screening. (The same detec- tive would shut down an MC5 gig the next year.29) Immediately prior to DAM’s formation, Loren had returned from New York, where he had worked with and even screened films with Smith. Back in Michigan, he continued to shoot movies featuring Smith’s capitalist nemesis, the Lobster, and photographed Niagara in scenes reminiscent of Smith’s Beautiful Book (1962).

The manner in which DAM’s invocations of evil, death, vampirism, and apocalyptic disaster are evidently distanced—by ridiculous lyrics, low-grade recording quality, and the affectless singing of Niagara and Kelley—echoes Smith’s aesthetic, in which death functions as an allegory of life under police and capitalism. Hence, one of Smith’s favorite phrases, attributed to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (and also voiced on the soundtrack to Blonde Cobra): “To be dead, to be truly dead, is a wonderful blessing, oh Renfield my friend.”30 As we have seen, DAM related to the nihilism of their historical position in a similarly allegorical manner, regarding their own condition as one of living deadness.

“Why do you think your songs are so death-oriented?” Kelley asked Loren. “Because nothing’s alive. Living’s the same as dying.”31

left to right Photo of The Devil and Niagara, Ann Arbor, by Cary Loren, 1974

Kelley’s flyer for a dance event at the University of Michigan, 1975

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6. “The Loner” (1980), released on The Poetics, Remixes of Recordings 1977–83, 3-CD set

Rock was not The Poetics’ sole or even primary musical touchstone. Their sound drew equally upon various types of program music: soundtracks by Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota and those of countless horror movies; the stomach-churning kitsch of soap opera music; the “song-poem” (they covered the MSR singers’ “The Beat of the Traps”); Catholic Mass; and a good dose of demented children’s music à la Bruce Haack. The Poetics started when Kelley, already playing in the deranged polka band Polka Dot and the Spots, heard Oursler’s distinctive early video voiceovers and invited him to be lead singer. Tony Conrad has speculated that Oursler’s video soundtracks “served largely to condition the viewer’s emotional ambiance toward a receptivity to the messages of his voices.”39 Such is certainly the case with “The Loner,” a gloomy paean to loserdom that Oursler croons like Frank Sinatra on downers: “The loner … is sooo … alooone.” Kelley’s echoey atmospheric sounds reflect the mock-maudlin worldview of Oursler’s video The Loner (1980), in which the song plays (sped up) on an ersatz television after the main character has been stood up in a bar.

Much organ-period Poetics’ music has a similar program quality that, like soundtrack music, pro- vokes wider imaginative correlations. In this, Poetics’ recordings may be likened to Jack Goldstein’s contemporary records of sound effects, such as Two Wrestling Cats (1976), and the dreamy, syn- thetic instrumentals of his ten-inch record series The Planets (1985). The spectral qualities Douglas Crimp attributed to Goldstein’s “pictures” (“simultaneously present and remote”) equally characterize his records.40 “The record when played exists in time,” noted Goldstein, “but the alluded-to picture exists as an image that is divorced from real time and space because of its nature to exist only as a picture.”41 Evoking such liminally audiovisual connotations, The Poetics exemplify an analogously conceptual approach to sound.

7. “Searing Gum” (ca. 1978) released on The Poetics, Remixes of Recordings 1977–83, 3-CD set

“Searing Gum” convenes one of The Poetics’ larger ensembles, with Kelley and Oursler joined by John Arnheim, John Miller, and “Simon” (whose precise identity is beyond recollection).42 With bleating organ, pounding drum, and Oursler grunting out his lines like a caveman, the tune comes on like primitive circus music. The lyrics derive from a text by Conceptual artist David Askevold, a visiting professor at CalArts, which boasted a significant Conceptualist faculty including Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari, Michael Asher, and (another visitor) Laurie Anderson. Askevold, whom Kelley regarded as more open to genre-mixing than most of his teachers, made appealing, narrativ- izing, and even faux-mystical pieces whose “message,” according to Kelley, “was ‘surrender to spectacle need not be mindless.’”43 Kelley collaborated with Askevold on The Poltergeist (1979), which featured evidently doctored photographs of Kelley streaming ectoplasm from facial orifices. The implicit juxtaposition of obviously faked spiritualist photography with the deadpan photo- graphic documents of mainstream Conceptual art was pointed, for Kelley regarded Conceptualism as only one position within a larger cultural matrix that also encompassed the counterculture.

“[I]n the late 1960s,” averred Kelley, “Conceptual artworks were in a milieu where they coexisted with psychedelic, counterculture graphics. Psychedelic graphics offered a mode of oppositional visual address quite distinct from dominant cultural modes, whereas Conceptual art was a pathetic version of them.”44

The Poetics practiced a similar logic of virtually juxtaposing different performance formats (while also often offering “pathetic versions”). In addition to the rock band, they adopted the genres of standup comedy, dance, radio drama, performance art, and art installation; they even tried for cable TV. By contrasting formats, The Poetics sought to shift viewers’ attention from the musical and"/"or thematic contents to the spectatorial conventions and institutional structures by which they were framed. Such was, for Kelley, also the underlying Conceptual premise of “art bands,” groups like the Static, Talking Heads, Devo, and even the Ramones, who self-consciously played with rock-and-roll tropes. “The idea behind the art-band movement,” he explained in terms applicable to The Poetics,

“was a kind of critical removal where the stance of the band was more important than the music. The look of popular culture was being examined, not necessarily accepted.”45

Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, poster for Dance By Artists, ca. 1976

Outtake from Kelley’s Ectoplasm photo series 1979

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8. “I See Your Hiney” (1978), The Poetics, unreleased rehearsal tape

By 1978, The Poetics had entered their “guitar” period, sporting a more conventional lineup of vocals (Oursler), guitar (Miller), bass, drums (Kelley), and an organ sound that careened between that of Question Mark and the Mysterians and a carnival hurdy-gurdy. Although motivated by the explo- sion of L.A. punk, the guitar-period Poetics were never a straightforward exponent of the genre. While the conga-punk hybrid “I See Your Hiney” can get rollicking, Oursler’s willfully infantile lyr- ics (adapted from a children’s rhyme), nonsensical taunts, guttural vocalizations, birdlike whistles, and rooster crows undermine any unproblematic reception. Oursler takes moronic vocal delivery to the level of a pose, and other songs’ lyrics—about polka-dot hallucinations (“I See Spots” [ca. 1977–78], a holdover from Kelley’s earlier polka group) or nonsensical directions (“Open the Pie” [1978])—were equally too far off-the-wall for contemporary audiences.

The Poetics played out infrequently, most notably at a Long Beach space run by the Suburban Lawns, a new-wave band of CalArts alums that released the single “Gidget Goes to Hell” in 1979. Following

“roots-punk” outfit Rhino 39 and Mexican-American punks the Plugz, The Poetics’ public debut proved, in Miller’s recollection, “unsuccessful”: “The Plugz really had the audience revved up and really going, and then we went on. I think about five minutes into our set, there was just a guy beating a tambourine in the audience, and everyone else had squeezed into this small room in the other part of the house.”46 Their stage antics didn’t help. “The leather-clad youngsters were not appreciative of Oursler’s stage dress,” explained Kelley, “a Spock-like stretch pants outfit which he stripped off to reveal a pair of shabby underpants—yellow in front, brown in back. This show pretty much signaled the end of our rock band days.”47 According to Oursler, only the Suburban Lawns’ Vex Billingsgate (aka William Ranson) professed any understanding of their pose as “a fake rock band.”48

Kelley’s contention that a punk band could be a legitimate forum for artistic production would have been reinforced by Dan Graham’s “Punk as Propaganda,” published in 1979, which discussed Devo’s engagement with strategies drawn from Pop art and the Ramones’ alternation between a “popular or vernacular reading” and a “second ironic interpretation that puts the initial reading in perspec- tive, or in quotes,”49 an analysis that resonates with Kelley’s thinking about the manner in which an art band’s performance can be both “alive” and “dead.” Equally relevant, although much lesser- known, is the essay “Annihilating Reality” by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of British performance art group COUM Transmissions. Kelley encountered the article, originally published in 1976, in AA Bronson and Peggy Gale’s 1979 anthology Performance by Artists.50 It was laid out as four vertical columns. Two columns of captioned photographs (that on the far left depicting per- formance artists, that on the far right serial killers, sexual fetishists, subcultural body manipulators, and rock stars) flanked two columns of text, which juxtaposed quotations from artists and non- artists with comments by the authors, labeled alternately “hearsay” and “heresy.”

Originally, “Annihilating Reality” implied a symmetrical division of art and nonart akin to Robert Smithson’s dialectic of “site” and “nonsite.” Although for COUM the “site” no longer signified the quarries and postindustrial landscapes Smithson favored but subcultural sexual practices and criminal acts, the “nonsite” remained the same: the legitimated institutional realm of art gallery and museum, even for transgressive artists such as Hermann Nitsch, Gina Pane, and Chris Burden (who famously walked out on COUM’s L.A. performance). By 1979, however, COUM had trans- formed into the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, and their introduction to the reprint emphasizes their move outside recognized art institutions:

We found the artworld on every level less satisfying than real life. For every interesting performance artist there was a psychopath, fetishist, or intense street individual who created more powerful and socially direct imagery. We also were unhappy about art being separated from popular culture and the mass media!….!Now we much more rarely make actions in Art spaces!….!We have moved into the public arena and are using popular cultural archetypes.51

COUM’s model was infiltration: inhabiting existing cultural forms—from rock bands and strip shows to the evening news—and “détourning” them from conventional usage, but in such a man- ner that they are not fully displaced from popular culture into the conventional artistic realm. With the exception of “Son of Sam,” a creepy, childlike paean to serial killer David Berkowitz, The Poetics steered clear of the unfettered “subconscious” drives toward sexual deviancy, criminality, and murder explored by COUM and Throbbing Gristle (a particular variant of the subcultural appeal to alternative libidinal investment).52 Nevertheless, The Poetics’ attempt to perform in music venues implied a version of COUM’s program: appropriating a pop culture archetype and introduc- ing artistic strategies “to see if it stays art, mutates, or just what the implications of elite versus popular are.”53 For Kelley, Throbbing Gristle was an “art band,” “making a kind of fake-rock music where the focus was more on what the construction of a band was!….!a kind of artistic analysis of the pop band.”54

9. “I’m Alright Again” (1985), Idiot Bliss, unreleased live tape, The Anti Club, Los Angeles, July 25, 1986

Idiot Bliss was a short-lived project fronted by writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan (infa- mously pictured inside the cover Kelley designed for Sonic Youth’s 1992 CD Dirty) and featuring, in addition to Kelley on drums, poet Jack Shelly and others associated with the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. According to Kelley, the group, which he described as

“a fake Punk band,” formulated all their songs on the spot, attempting to pass off musical improvisa- tion and spontaneous punk prosody as a rehearsed hardcore set: “[W]e would play at these clubs and pretend we had all these short, fast songs and we just made them up and nobody could tell.”55

A recording of the group’s appearance at the Anti-Club on July 25, 1985, does not fully bear out Kelley’s description. Clearly, the set is improvised, with Flanagan providing fake intros (“This is a song we wrote when we were in Oregon about a year ago”; “This is a song we always do live. You probably know it”), but the group only occasionally veers into identifiable hardcore parodies, as in a thirty-second string of expletives Flanagan shouts as the band thrashes wildly. Aside from such

The cover of The Poetics’ 1997 two-volume CD (Tony Oursler pictured)

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relatively rare moments, the band hews toward more expansive improvisations, sometimes approach- ing a territory similar to that of L.A.’s the Dream Syndicate (featuring Kelley’s Los Angeles Free Music Society [LAFMS] associate Dennis Duck on drums). Although avowedly tongue-in-cheek, Idiot Bliss bears comparison with Southern California punk band Saccharine Trust’s Worldbroken LP, released that same year, which was recorded in a single improvised session and featured music more meandering and lyrics more spaced out (in both the physical and metaphysical senses of the term) than most contemporary hardcore.

Betraying its generation, Idiot Bliss frequently proffered a sound more rooted in the 1960s and 70s than members likely intended. The languid, bluesy “I’m Alright Again,” which opened the show, reveled in a vibe distinctly reminiscent of the Doors. (Referencing the Doors was not entirely coun- ter to L.A. punk. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek was a continuous presence, from his aborted collaboration with Iggy Pop to his production of the L.A. punk band X’s first two albums. Yet, when X covered the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen,” it was precisely the laid-back 60s vibe that they eliminated.) Kelley expressed admiration for Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison’s ability to draw, in his stage per- sona, from sources as diverse as Symbolist poetry and the Living Theater.56 For the Raymond Pettibon and Super Session album Torches and Standards (1990), Kelley parodically emulated Morrison on “The Stoners of Venice,” a stream-of-consciousness monologue over improvised psy- chedelic music that meanders through various sexual boasts until proclaiming, “Acid isn’t half the buzz being Jim Morrison is!”57 Morrison is also a central character in Graham’s video Rock My Religion (1982–84), where he is cast as the male antihero (to the heroine, Patti Smith), whose inde- cent exposure at a Florida concert undermined the rock star’s imaginary phallic authority:

“Through his own emasculation, Morrison expressed his desire to see rock bring about the destruc- tion of the Oedipal order. And, in fact, when his penis was revealed to his public, Jim’s potency as a rock figure was immediately destroyed. His gesture of showing ‘it’ destroyed his former aura of phallic mystery; the phallus had become—Morrison had become—pathetically physical.”58

Neither Flanagan nor Kelley were strangers to either the physical or the pathetic, and Idiot Bliss manifested a good deal of the latter. Flanagan spontaneously bemoaned “I got no reason to live,” abjectly expressed regret for inadvertently killing a friend’s dog (in a mock-desperate rant resem- bling Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” [1983]), and launched into a five-minute-plus musical apology: “I’m sorry"…"for beatin’ my head"…"against the wall"…” In such moments, Idiot Bliss tapped into the same lineage of poésie maudite that Morrison had imported into rock, while evinc- ing just as much distance from Morrison’s moment as had DAM. In “The Recitation Song,” another somewhat Doorsy number that closed the 1985 concert, Flanagan entreated the crowd, “I want you to know something. Just because we’re poets doesn’t make us bad people.”

10. “I Don’t Make No Difference” (1986), Idiot Bliss, unreleased live tape, The Anti Club, Los Angeles, March 6, 1986

Another set at the Anti-Club, this one dating to March 6, 1986. After a couple of slurred and indeci- pherable phrases, Flanagan came up with the lines:

I don’t make no difference (x2) I’m not standin’ here I’m not going there I don’t make no fuckin’ difference!

Then, in partial reference to the group’s modus operandi:

You know I stood you up You know I put you down You know I made it up for you and then you turn around.

Not the most inspired lyrics, surely, but one of the group’s more plausible hardcore imitations.

More noteworthy is the song’s introduction, where Kelley absurdly berated the crowd:

I’m not wastin’ my time playing this fuck beat for nothin’. I know you think I sit around and waste my time all night to do nothin’. Well, that’s not true. I’m gonna push all these seats out of the way, and I’m gonna make a big space. You know, so, if you want, you can take your pants off, and lay in this spot, and get your rocks off! I don’t wanna waste my time playing this fuck beat all night! Unless you’re fucking!

Kelley’s absurdly Rabelaisian transformation of the mosh pit into an orgy humorously desubli- mated rock’s own desublimating impulses: “Rock turned the values of traditional American religion on their head. To rock ’n’ roll meant to have sex"…"NOW.”59

Kelley’s impromptu harangue was partly adapted from the performance My Space (1979), where he similarly cleared out rows of seating to form an arena (in which he interacted psychically with a plant). It was only one of several occasions where Kelley slipped into performance-art mode. In “The Recitation Song,” Kelley had intoned, “Turn the rock over, and the whitest thing comes out,” prefiguring lines from his later work, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1986).60 To open the 1986 concert, Kelley screeched out more lines from Plato’s Cave in the same tone with which he would deliver them in the performance at Artists Space in New York that December: “The sounds of air flow and water drip replace the brazen and loud hilarity of unreflexive mirth. Let the color and silence sink in. Show respect!”61 Although not of the same degree of complexity and prep- aration as his performances, such moments can be understood (like the guitar-period Poetics) as following COUM’s proposal to “use existing situations"…"to subliminally infiltrate popular culture.”62

Kelley’s smuggling of passages from Plato’s Cave into the Anti-Club (however offhandedly) may be viewed as a telling complement to his appropriation of Sonic Youth in the performance of Plato’s Cave. Expecting the audience to consist predominantly of rock fans (Sonic Youth released its

“breakout” album, Bad Moon Rising, in 1985 and EVOL, named after an Oursler video, in 1986), Kelley deployed the band far from straightforwardly. Obscuring them for long periods behind a curtain,

Idiot Bliss performing at Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA, ca. 1985

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he interrupted them frequently to quell audience engagement, self-reflexively commented on the identificatory stature of the “star” (including the rock star), and juxtaposed rock with other musical genres, including didgeridoo playing, classical repertoire, and disco groove. At one point, he induced Sonic Youth to play against type by performing “Train Kept a Rollin’” (1951), a song made famous by the Yardbirds in 1965 (with added cultural resonances from their performing it in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, 1966); “That,” Kelley commented, “was very unnatural for them.”63 Kelley’s intentions followed what he had accomplished with The Poetics: shifting attention from the appro- priated content (rock music) to the institutional and spectatorial frameworks of presentation. Plato’s Cave, explained Kelley, “was my attempt to fuck with rock theatrics. I wanted to do something that used rock staging, but it wasn’t rock at all…. It was very much about playing with rock staging clichés and bouncing them off more theatrical ones.”64

In 1982, Buchloh contended that what separated the appropriation artists of the late 1970s and 80s from their Conceptual forebears was an engagement with popular culture. Faced with “the preci- sion with which the Conceptual generation of the 1960s and early 70s had analyzed the place and function of aesthetic practice within the discourses and institutions of modernism,” he argued,

“the new generation would now reorient its attention and address the ideological discourses outside of the modernist framework, focusing on those mass-cultural discourses that condition and control the experience of everyday life.”65 As theorized by Buchloh, artists like Dara Birnbaum alle- gorically engage with popular domains like advertising and television in an external, analytic manner in line with Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957). Kelley regarded this model—of what he calls the “‘adult’ critic—one who refuses to be absorbed”—and its perpetuation of the modernist cordon between high and low as no longer applicable to his generation.66 “[L]aughter at or hatred of kitsch presupposes a feeling of superiority,” Kelley noted. “I get the sense that most artists now do not think this way. They know all too well that the lowest and most despicable cultural products can control you, despite what you think of them.”67

According to Kelley, popular music is perhaps the exemplary case of such control. “Music affects one physically in a way that can become addictive,” he explained, elsewhere likening popular music’s effects to “brainwashing.” “Art needs to be read, whereas music seems as if it directly affects you.”68 For Kelley, music or anything “live” in the sense of temporal in nature—including theater, dance, and film—operates via regressive libidinal identification in which the individual loses him- or herself.69 Unlike a purely analytic appropriation, however, which maintains an apotropaic distance from the pop culture under examination, Kelley’s performances and “art-band” projects engaged closely enough with pop’s normalizing tropes to initiate their regressive, controlling inter- pellation, while working simultaneously to distance listeners from their effects: “If you can bring these ‘guilty pleasures’ into the zone of critique where you can experience spurts of pleasure and then pull back to examine them in relation to broader issues,” he explained, “I think that has the potential to be ten times more successful than something that is only heady and intellectual, or only nihilistic and denies any meaning.”70

Kelley’s work has long been regarded as exemplary of an art historical move, understood to have coalesced in the 1990s, from an estranged, Brechtian, analytical distance, achieved via allegorical appropriation, to a situation of immersion, dedifferentiation, and even overwhelming subjective obliteration under the aegis of formlessness or abjection. Yet, despite the perspicacity and value of such readings, the most significant trope with regard to Kelley’s engagement with popular culture is likely the uncanny. At both Artists Space and the Anti-Club, albeit to different degrees, Kelley juxtaposed tropes from rock music and performance art to forge a dialectic between interpellation and estrangement, pop and art, “life” and “death,” which goes back to that elaborated by DAM. Engaging popular culture on more than an analytic register, Kelley’s art music served not solely to demystify the operations of consumer culture but to mobilize diverse, even competing libidinal investments (normative and subcultural) so as to reorder the type of gratifications deployed by cul- ture industries toward conditioning and control.71 Recovered by Kelley along with the legacy of the historical avant-garde, then, is an aspiration that once accompanied it, as voiced by Walter Benjamin, a writer who preferred the ambivalent investments of childhood to the distance of the

“‘adult’ critic”: “an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure—pleasure in seeing and experiencing— with an attitude of expert appraisal.”72

Left to right My Space, 1979 Performance at Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, 1979

Cover of the cassette tape featuring extracts from Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile and The Peristaltic Airwaves (with Sonic Youth), from Tellus: The Audio Cassette Magazine, No. 18, 1988

Mike Kelley and Cary Loren at the exhibition Destroy All Monsters: Postmodern Multimedia and Musical Mutations (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Cary Loren), Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, Washington, 2000

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1 The original title of this essay, completed in early 2011, was Live/ Dead, appropriated from the 1969 Grateful Dead album Live!/!Dead. There is little doubt that Kelley understood the reference. He prob- ably did not care much for the Grateful Dead, and he would have been articulate about his reasons: what the group stood for culturally, what generation they spoke to, why other bands were better or worse. Kelley read and commented on this essay in October 2011, stressing his interest in Alice Coltrane and Giorgio Moroder and fretting that I had potentially made his “bands” sound too much like bands. I reas- sured him that, with other catalogue essays concentrating on his artwork, the relations between art and music would resonate in the manner that (as least I hoped) they would. He made no mention of the allegorical discussion of death, doubtlessly realizing how much my invocation of the relations between “live” per- formance and “dead” cultural remains drew upon his career-long contemplation of the uncanny. Despite the unfortunate added resonances these terms have after Mike’s own passing, I’ve chosen not to revise this essay beyond making the corrections he asked and insert- ing his comments into notes where warranted.

2 Mike Kelley and Diedrich Diederichsen, “Prog"/"Prole,” lecture at Documenta 10, Kassel, Germany, September 1, 1997.

3 Branden W. Joseph, “Son of the Creature: An Interview with Cary Loren,” liner notes to Destroy All Monsters, Grow Live Monsters DVD, DR-4568 (Oaks, PA: MVDvisual DVD, 2007), n.p.

4 Kelley recalled, “This last line [‘To tie us all in knots’] is an altera- tion by me—probably in reference to R. D. Laing’s book Knots. I believe the original line was ‘To try and fall in love,’ which I thought was too mushy. Loren did not like such messing with his lyrics—he wanted them sung exactly as written.” (Mike Kelley, email to author, October 10, 2011.)

5 Kelley, “To the Throne of Chaos Where the Thin Flutes Pipe Mindlessly (Destroy All Monsters: 1974"/"77)” (1993), available on the artist’s website, accessed April 1, 2012, at http://www.mikekelley. com/DAMthrone.html.

6 Kelley, in Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw, “Destroy All Monsters Interviews Itself ” (1976), in liner notes to “Crying in Bed,” disk two of 3-CD set, Destroy All Monsters 1974–1976, Father Yod"/"Ecstatic Peace! E47, 1994, n.p.

7 John Sinclair, Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with MC5 and The White Panther Party (Los Angeles: Process Media, 2007), pp. 139–40. First published in 1972 as Guitar Army: Street Writings!/!Prison Writings (New York: Douglas Book Corporation). Kelley owned the first edition.

8 Sinclair, Guitar Army, p. 207. Sinclair’s discussion of “blues peo- ple” is indebted to Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963).

9 Sinclair, “Motor City Music,” in Sinclair and Robert Levin, Music and Politics (New York: World Publishing, 1971), pp. 18–19.

10 Cary Loren, “A Manifesto of Ignorance: Destroy All Monsters, 1974–1976,” in Destroy All Monsters, Geisha This (Oak Park, MI: Book Beat Gallery, 1995), n.p. (Note: this is from the first edition. The text was changed in the third edition.)

11 Sinclair, Guitar Army, p. 210.

12 Ibid., p. 208.

13 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 166. Kelley com- mented, “Perhaps it should be mentioned in the note that at this time one of my primary modes of visual output was a series of sten- ciled paintings of the skull-and- crossbones motif. Though I did intend these painting to be silly— adolescent versions of Warhol.” (Kelley, email to author, October 10, 2011.)

14 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art” (1982), in Art after Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 29.

15 Kelley, “To the Throne of Chaos.”

16 Carly Berwick, “Mike Kelley: An Interview,” Art in America 97, no. 10 (November 2009): pp. 173–74.

17 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 87.

18 On early Stooges, see Iggy Pop and Anne Wehrer, I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories (New York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1982), pp. 17–26; Paul Trynka, Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), pp. 62–69; Robert Matheu, The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story (New York: Abrams, 2009), p. 23; and Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 177–98.

19 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 236.

20 Kelley and John Miller, “Too Young to Be a Hippy, Too Old to Be a Punk,” Be Magazine 1, no. 1 (1994): p. 120.

21 Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, pp. 237–38.

22 Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 42.

23 I’ve rendered the lyrics here as transcribed by Julian Cope—and as they actually sound! The true lyrics are in French, “J’ai mal aux dents; j’ai mal aux pieds aussi.” See Cope, Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik—1968 Onwards (London: Head Heritage, 1995), p. 117.

24 Cope, ibid., 24; and Stephen Thrower, “On Faust,” in Nikolaos Kotsopoulos, ed., Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy (London: Black Dog, 2009), 89. On Sun Ra’s relation to postmodernism, see John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon, 1997), p. 234.

25 Cope, Krautrocksampler, passim (on Hapshash, p. 32). On Faust and Zappa, see Andy Wilson, Faust: Stretch Out Time, 1970–1975 (London: Faust Pages, 2006), espe- cially pp. 171–81.

26 Thrower, “On Faust,” p. 88.

27 Ashley Crawford, “Monster Men,” World Art 19 (1998): p. 29.

28 Jack Smith, “Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra,” in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), p. 160.

29 Sinclair, Guitar Army, p. 69.

30 Smith, “Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra,” p. 157.

31 Kelley et al., “Destroy All Monsters Interviews Itself,” n.p.

32 Kelley, “Cross Gender"/"Cross Genre,” in Mike Kelley!/!Peter Fischli, David Weiss, ed. Rainald Schumacher (Munich: Sammlung Goetz, 2000), p. 39.

33 Kelley, Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 164.

34 Mark Breitenberg, “Freak Culture: An Interview,” Artext 68 (February–April 2000): p. 61.

35 Kelley, Foul Perfection, p. 49 n. 7.

36 Ivan Suvanjief, in Matheu, The Stooges, p. 79. By 1978, Loren, too, was no longer with the band.

37 See Kelley and Diederichsen, “Prog"/"Prole.”

38 See Kelley and Julie Sylvester, “Talking Failure,” Parkett, no. 31 (March 1992): pp. 100–101.

39 Tony Conrad, “Who Will Give Answer to the Call of My Voice? Sound in the Work of Tony Oursler,” Grey Room, no. 11 (Spring 2003): p. 46.

40 Douglas Crimp, Pictures: An Exhibition of the Work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Philip Smith (New York: Committee for the Visual Arts, 1977), p. 10.

41 Jack Goldstein, “Notes on the Phonograph Records,” in Dan Lander and Micah Lexier, Sound by Artists (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1990), p. 259.

42 Kelley stated that he could nei- ther pronounce nor remember

“Simon”’s last name in Kelley, “The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings from 1977 to 1983,” in Oursler and Kelley, Poetics Project (Tokyo: On Sundays"/"Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997), n.p. According to John Miller, “Simon” could have been Szymon Choynowski (John Miller, email to author April 16, 2012).

43 Kelley, Foul Perfection, p. 197.

44 Ibid., p. 184.

45 Kelley, Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-chat (1986–2004), ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP Ringier; and Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2005), p. 54.

46 John Miller, comments at sym- posium, “Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1977–1983,” ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, New York, November 4, 2010. “Roots-punk” is Kelley’s characterization; Kelley,

“The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings from 1977 to 1983,” in Oursler and Kelley, Poetics Project (Tokyo: On Sundays"/"Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997), n.p.

47 Kelley, “The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings,” n.p.

48 Tony Oursler, “Poetics Memories,” in Oursler and Kelley, Poetics Project, (Tokyo: On Sundays"/"Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997), n.p.

49 Dan Graham, “Punk as Propaganda,” in Rock!/!Music Writings (New York: Primary Information, 2009), pp. 64–89, quote on 68. Graham’s essay origi- nally appeared as “Punk: Political Pop,” Journal!/!Southern California Art Magazine 22 (March–April 1979).

50 Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson [COUM Transmissions], “Annihilating Reality” (1976), reprinted in Performance by Artists, ed. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979), pp. 65–71.

51 Ibid., p. 65.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Kelley and Oursler, “Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler Discuss The Poetics Project,” unpublished inter- view, Watari-Um, Tokyo, 1997. Kelley further stated, “My primary interest in TG was their success in packaging their talentless noise music as pop music. This is some- thing, though, that never could have happened in America—only in England where punk was a popular teen phenomena and music was dominated by style could a band like TG find popular success by virtue of their stance alone. I found TG’s ‘existential angst’ hard to take seriously. But that is popular with adolescents—they were kind of like Black Sabbath 2—which is quite an achievement really.” (Kelley, email to author, October 10, 2011.)

55 Crawford, “Monster Men,” p. 30.

56 Kelley and Miller, “Too Young to Be a Hippy,” p.123.

57 Kelley had also planned to play Morrison in a Raymond Pettibon video (before the project was dropped upon hearing of Oliver Stone’s intention to address the same topic). Kelley, Minor Histories, pp. 196–97.

58 Graham, “Rock My Religion” (1983), in Rock!/!Music Writings, p. 111.

59 Graham, “Rock My Religion,” p. 99 (ellipses in original). Kelley recalled, “I believe I actually laid a mattress out on the floor.” (Kelley, email to author, October 10, 2011.)

60 In the Plato’s Cave performance, the line reads, “Turn the rock over, and expose the frail thing to the light.” See Kelley, The Peristaltic Airwaves and Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, High Performance Audio, Los Angeles, 1987, audiocassette; mp3s available through UbuWeb, http://ubumexico. centro.org.mx/sound/kelley_mike/ Kelley-Mike_Peristaltic-Airwaves_ 1986.mp3 and http://ubumexico. centro.org.mx/sound/kelley_mike/ Kelley-Mike_Platos-Cave_Rothkos- Chapel_Lincolns-Profile.mp3; and Kelley, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (Venice, CA: New City Editions, 1986), p. 10.

61 The words “air flow” and “water drip” are reversed in Plato’s Cave; see Kelley, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1986), p. 2.

62 P-Orridge and Christopherson, “Annihilating Reality,” p. 70.

63 Kelley, unpublished interview with Markus Müller, October 1997.

64 Kelley, unpublished interview with Müller. See also Alec Foege, Confusion Is Next: The Sonic Youth Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 156.

65 Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures,” pp. 37–38.

66 Kelley, Foul Perfection, p. 52.

67 Ibid., p. 93.

68 Kelley, Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 99; and Berwick,

“Mike Kelley: An Interview,” p. 174.

69 See, for instance, Kelley, Foul Perfection, pp. 50–56.

70 Kelley, Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, p. 110.

71 See John Miller, “The Poet as Janitor,” in Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), pp. 149–59.

72 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 264.

Mike Kelley with Tony Oursler at CalArts, ca. 1977

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MIKE KELLEY

AND THE

JOHN C. WELCHMAN

Comedy and its numberless affiliations, liaisons, and progeny are as important to the work of Mike Kelley as to the practice of any artist in the current generation—or, for that matter, any artist work- ing during the last century. The comedic resources that define and disorder Kelley’s intergeneric projects with corrosively insistent bravado include parody, irony, and caustic satire; black and blue humor; farce; and unstinting wordplay. Some of his earliest works—produced in 1974 using mixed- media on paper and assembled in Missing Time, 1974–1994 (1994)—were already organized around a set of strategies that furnished an ironic bedrock for the artist’s comedic landscape: gen- der equivocations (Hermaphrodite, Sweet Heart, New!, Angel, Cottage Cheese, Fab Aura); anatomical and biomorphic confusions (Hand, Rib Cage); and prurient teen humor (Bed Wetter). The paintings made during the following years (1975–76) add to this ribald lexicon by skewering both self and other identities (Self-Portrait in Suburban Landscape, Portrait of Jim Shaw) and political history (In Anticipation of America’s Bicentennial), as well as proposing new rounds of dissident fracture between form and content (Painting with Hawaiian Mask, Ballerina, and De Stijl Painting; Untitled (Biomorphic); Shrimp, Head, Pot). The almost absurdly variegated and wryly self-conscious space between these allusions acts as a preliminary operating system for Kelley’s signature comic sensibility.

Throughout Kelley’s performance work, beginning around 1976, and later video-based pieces cul- minating in Day Is Done (2005), it is equally clear that the artist’s acid tongue, vented in a legion of voices and surrogates, found its most chiseled groove when planted firmly in the cheek. Kelley invested his pervasive senses of humor in even the most recalcitrant of objects, including perfor- mance props and other found or “assisted” materials. He was part, in fact, of a select band of modern and contemporary artists who have somehow infiltrated sculpture or three-dimensional forms with a mischievous comedic substrate. Kelley laid down his own marker on this satirical trail with a sequence of mischievously absurdist birdhouses, the formal elaborations of which are devi- ously yoked to highfalutin religious principles or the unstable machinations of common wisdom.

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Present as they are, however, throughout his compulsively diverse work in performance, installa- tion, sculpture, painting, photography, and video, Kelley’s comedic commitments were perhaps most immediately apparent in his critical and creative writings, where they surfaced in even the most apparently straightforward disquisitions. Beginning with “Ajax” (1984)—a “playful attempt to engage with issues of readership in relation to my writings for performance, which were purposely ambiguous”1—Kelley’s texts are saturated with humor and irony springing from the gaps and disso- nances he built into his willfully faulty structures. The artist’s image-text combos—such as Booth’s Puddle or Nazi War Cave #1, both made in 1985 in relation to Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–86), for example—deploy a wide array of humorous texts, ranging from sim- ple, captionlike, in-picture titles to facetious commentaries that trawl around the image like a second frame. The texts might mimic the work or operate “as another figure in a visual proposition,” offer- ing new layers of meanings that mediate, often unstably, between “jokes,” “red herrings,” and real

“issues.”2 The compounding of textuality with, or as a supplement to, the visual image is a part of Kelley’s plea for “scrutiny,” the kind of close but “open reading” that punctures the “social veneer” and probes underneath his rearrangements of mass culture.3 We encounter, then, both literal and metaphorical sides to Kelley’s central comedic strategy of playing with “figures of speech.”4 And linguistic humor, somewhat as discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essays on jokes and wit,5 acts as a reservoir for the dispersion of Kelleyan comedy, even in its most corporeal manifestations.

There are, I think, several points of historical origin for Kelley’s abiding preoccupation with humor. One emerged as the artist himself developed during his early days in the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit and then as a student in the art program at the University of Michigan (1972–76).6 He was drawn in these years to a spectrum of performative wit and radical humor, ranging from the politi- cally edged situational parody of Abbie Hoffman7 and the Yippies, to the abstract Surrealist whimsy

Loading Dock Drawing #3, 1984 Acrylic on paper 72!¼× 44 inches (183.52 × 111.76 cm)

Booth’s Puddle, 1985 2 parts: acrylic on paper 22 × 60 inches and 60 × 71 inches; 82 × 71 inches overall (55.88 × 152.4 cm and 152.4 × 180.34 cm; 208.28 × 180.34 cm overall)

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of his U of M professor Gerome Kamrowski8 and the impromptu carnivalesque of the noise band Destroy All Monsters (DAM), with which he performed in the mid-1970s. To these he added bouts of voracious reading in the black humor of William S. Burroughs and the Comte de Lautréamont, the absurdism of Alfred Jarry, and the impish wordplay of Gertrude Stein. These lit- erary sources combined with Hoffman’s streetwise pranksterism; the collisions of image, text, and context in Surrealism; and the unholy improv of DAM to generate a signal technique based on serial juxtaposition and idiosyncratic recurrence. Kelley noted in 1985 that his “work often con- sists of long strings of associational clusters ordered spatially, as visual artworks, in architectural sites, or over time in performance.”9 In Freud’s account of wit and humor, of course, overlay and repetition constitute staple conditions for the comic disposition, especially in the generation of lin- guistic jokes and funny slips.

Kelley’s iconoclastic humor encountered a second impetus, this time in the form of an oddball nega- tive dialectics, when he moved to California in 1976 to study in the graduate program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia at a moment when the studio (or “post-studio”) program was largely preoccupied with Conceptual art. As he makes clear in the interview with Eva Meyer- Hermann in this volume, Kelley was uninterested in what he described elsewhere as the “reductivist sensibility,” visual conservatism, and “bookish” appearance of much of this work. He was drawn instead—both by personal inclination and pedagogic preference—to the more expansive practices of visiting faculty, including “the kind of free-floating play in Laurie Anderson’s and [David] Askevold’s work.”10 At CalArts, the exception that proved the rule is a gag line that was provided by the work and teaching of John Baldessari, whose career-long commitment to droll and offbeat humor was predicated on a disarming and uniquely sustained comedy of paraformal relations. I argue elsewhere that a key figure for these interests can be found in the comedic metaphor of

“deadpan,” more commonly associated with film or theater. It is on the site of this exchange that Baldessari’s organized interruption of code-based practices meets Henri Bergson’s notion of

“mechanical elasticity,” generating a new model for the comedy of deferral.11

It is important to underline that these contexts for Kelley’s signature brand of ribald and jocular irony also produced a kind of negative engram in the sense that much of Kelley’s subsequent work cast his own formation as a series of “abusive” encounters in which he was the apparently servile subject of a whole gamut of institutional and aesthetic constraints. Another “Hofmann” bookends this more restrictive side of Kelley’s formation: for it was the doctrinaire promulgation of composi- tional “push-pull” by Hans Hofmann and his disciples, still dominant in many art schools and academies in the 1970s, that led Kelley to single out this overly influential abstract painter as the archpriest of Kelley’s own educational exploitation, describing him—with zealous overdetermina- tion—as the chief perpetrator of “a form of institutional indoctrination and mental abuse.”12 Kelley’s career-long dispute with the complacent self-affirmation of abstract compositionality gave rise to a series of off-kilter, axiomatic refutations that took on Hofmann’s precepts in order to sup- ply them with ironically loaded referential possibilities—both formal and contextual—that they could never negotiate on their own terms.

Humor in Kelley’s work is also a function of his wider view of art as “a by-product of repression.” “[P]art of the humor in my work,” he noted in an interview, “is about making that obvious.”13 In his writings, one aspect of repressive activity is identified with the histories and reputations of those artists passed over or suppressed by the critical status quo, including those of David Askevold, Paul Thek, and John Miller. Kelley’s revisionism often crackled with irony as he engaged with what he viewed as omissions or misinterpretations in the historical record. But his engagement ventured further than this. Reflecting on Miller’s work as both artist and critic (and indirectly, of course, on his own negotiation between these poles), Kelley suggested that the conventional two-step

Pages 14–17 between them can be likened to a Hollywood comic routine: “The antagonistic relationship between the artist and art critic is such a common cliché that it is the stuff of Hollywood comedies. The crux of the joke is that the artist and critic are dependent on each other but have fundamentally different social positions and worldviews. As the story goes, the artist is uneducated but has a kind of innate gift for visual expression, which the educated and socialized critic must decode for the general population. The pathetic symbiotic relationship of this odd couple is endlessly amusing.”14 By adjudicating the relationship between art and criticism on the basis of a misbegotten codepen- dency, fraught with insidious implications for the naïve, creative personality presumed by a critical ventriloquist, Kelley took screwball into the heart of the traditional aesthetic order and used come- dic analogy to reveal the clichés and cover-ups that mediate art world institutions. The comic, here, is not simply an effect or funny outcome, nor even a stratagem or a ploy; it is, rather, a metacritical ordering, the assumptions of which offer a kind of camouflage for the hierarchical diminishment of artistic intelligence. Humor and irony are necessarily caught up, then, in a related conceptual focus of Kelley’s wider aesthetic—his proposition that art is crucially connected to ritual and that one measure of its power and success is founded on what he termed “a kind of structural analysis of the poetics of ritual.”15

Kelley’s signal accomplishments in reformatting the comedic order of things are often realized by working through the conditions of humor as an operating system or rule-bound ritual device. We can find a point of origin for this paradigm shift in the formats of his early performance objects and a point of convergence for the strategies accumulated thereafter in the synaesthetic ricochet of song and dance, vampire diary and rejuvenated apocrypha, soap opera and mystical monologue that animates the interleaved ironies of Day Is Done. But while Kelley’s work is informed by occa- sional moments of parodic pantomime or satirical slapstick, the predominant register of his comedic endeavors is black. What he argued of Survival Research Laboratory (SRL) in an early essay is applicable, albeit in a very different register, to much of his own work. It was, Kelley suggested, their grasp of comedy as a blend of different, sometimes antithetical, structural coefficients that redeemed the projects of SRL from the “pathos” “represented by tired clichés”—“pathos is denied by the interjection of humor [though] even this is qualified, for the humor is one of cruelty, a black humor.”16

Some of Kelley’s own blackest and most outrageous humor is played out in “Timeless/Authorless: Four Recovered Memories” (first shown in the exhibition Toward a Utopian Arts Complex, at Metro Pictures in New York in 1995), in which four texts were apportioned across a series of fifteen black-and-white photo-text works in the form of newspaper articles. Written from the point of view of putatively fictive victims of probably delusional abuse, the work’s disquieting themes include gang rape, torture, abduction, incarceration, and incest. Depending for their effect on sub- tle moments of believability and clearly drawing on the style of Kelley’s scripts and monologues (though eschewing much of the fragmentation and allusive compounding of the early work), these pieces are among the most fantastic, provocative, and disturbing of all Kelley’s writings. They reveal once more his dependence on the written word for the delivery, sustenance, and plausibility of imaginative extremism. For it would be almost impossible to deploy the contradictory impulses that play through these narratives—which are at once horrific, perverse, and darkly humorous—in any conventional visual media. Of course, all of this is rendered even more shocking—and effec- tive—when one realizes that the four texts here derive from a bout of auto-analysis crossed with the “normative” schema for reports of social dysfunction as Kelley “used self-help books to deter- mine what [his] ‘pathological’ psychology is”: “I just plugged my own life story into the standardized scenarios for believable detail.”17

Another collision between protocol—or ritual—and offbeat humor arrived in Kelley’s illustrated text “Some Aesthetic High Points,” “written,” he noted, “in lieu of a biographical statement” for

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inclusion in a 1991 monograph.18 In addition to its purposeful contamination of a conventional for- mat of self-presentation—the annotated curriculum vitae or personal statement—this offbeat sequence of captioned images conjugates several of Kelley’s wider comedic strategies. First, partly by accident and in some measure by design, the ragtag cluster of unlikely “high points” shuttles back and forth between the factual and the facetious, but does so in large part as a consequence of assumptions projected on it by readers or viewers. As Kelley observed, the piece constituted “prob- ably my most misunderstood text. It has often been cited as a serious commentary on my aesthetic concerns. In fact, it was designed as a humorous jab at the impossibly difficult assignment to write a thumbnail encapsulation of my artistic practice.”19 A significant segment of Kelley’s humor oper- ates in the fitfully faulty space between presentation and expectation, which—as with the “false” personal emotions projected onto his stuffed animal and soft toy pieces—the artist reincorporates in subsequent related work. Secondly, Kelley mobilized here a technique of appropriation using found, mostly black-and-white, photographs sourced from newspapers and magazines from the 1940s through the 90s that became subject to a whole roster of subjective and period projections. The gap exploited by Kelley between the “common,” snapshot, or documentary conditions of these images and the tumultuous forms of projection and situational “reconstruction” he visited on them acts as a capacious reservoir supplied with prodigious amounts of potentially comic or ironic energy.

Fueled by this stock, Kelley’s tireless repurposing of repressed energy is built on his uncanny capacity to elicit a spectrum of humorous effects from almost any object, discourse, or situation, conjuring laughter from a galaxy of sources ranging from architecture and animality to bigotry and the utterly banal. At the same time, his interests embrace more conventional comic vehicles such as caricature, the forms, recent histories, and implications of which are discussed in his essay

“Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature” (1989).20 Kelley made use of several traditional comic vehicles including comic books, humor magazines, and television cartoons, which appear in numerous projects, notably in his fantastic extrapolations of the home city of comics hero Superman: Kandor, capital of Krypton. Kelley’s investigation of Superman’s city began with the video Superman Recites Selections from “The Bell Jar” and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999) and the exhibition Kandor-Con 2000 (1995/2000), and more recently underwent a spectacular development in the exhibitions Kandors at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin (2007–08); Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34, Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35 at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2011); and Exploded Fortress of Solitude, Gagosian Gallery, London (2011). Kelley also explored the role of comic-strip imagery in essays on the work of fellow artists including, Doublas Huebler and Öyvind Fahlström.21

At the other end of the comedic spectrum, Kelley experimented with knockabout, corporeal comedy in his first solo videotape, The Banana Man (1983)—modeled after vaudeville performer A. Robins, who appeared in a yellow costume with seemingly endless pockets on the children’s TV show Captain Kangaroo (which aired from 1955 until 1984), but whom Kelley had never actually seen. He released another bout of unreconstructed adolescent humor in a folding game involving the Indian Maiden on Land O’ Lakes butter packaging discussed in his statement “Land O’ Lakes/Land O’ Snakes” (1996) and alluded to in the formal mutations that underwrite a series of Maiden-based works.22 This effort of ribald origami transformed the knees of the maiden into bare breasts when the label was folded on a certain axis. Fully conscious of the solvent capacity of comic languages to under- mine the earnest convictions of art-world genres, especially those with social commitments, Kelley noted of 100 Reasons—Spank O Rama (1991)—a video made in collaboration with Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose—that “what separates this work from much of the recent spate of S & M performance is its humor, its deadpan truthfulness and its refusal to fall into dim-witted neoprimitive expression- ism.”23 So while Kelley indulged in smutty, sexist, and scatalogical jokes, such as the lewd drawings from the Loading Dock series of 1984, he was also willing to deliver social satire with a political edge—a genre vigorously deployed, for example, in the parodic text for A Stopgap Measure (1999).24

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As we have seen in the autobiographical declensions of his early paintings and in writings such as “Timeless/Authorless: Four Recovered Memories” and “Some Aesthetic High Points,” Kelley might seem to concur with Freud’s equivocal proposition in the theoretical section of his book on jokes that “everything comical fundamentally depends on the degradation to the level of the child” and the similar supposition about the “infantile roots of the comic” ascribed by Freud to Bergson.25 But Kelley also followed Freud by allowing for a crucial latitude in these causal relations: while Freud was uncertain about whether “adult” comedy arises directly from an innate childish substrate or from occasional reversions to childlike behavior, Kelley was more interested in expanding the parameters of childhood itself by attending not just to the conditions of early boy- or girlhood but to the adjacent categories of adolescence and semimaturity. Time and again Kelley founded his comic disturbances not, like Freud, on the actions and utterances of preschoolers at the threshold of language acquisition,26 but on the activities of slightly older children and teenagers. Kelley’s most elaborate disquisition on these questions, however, might be an exception that proves this rule. The copiously ironic humor of We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses (1995) arises not from the linguistic naivety of the kinder- garten students under Kelley’s tutelage while he was an undergraduate art student at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s, but instead from the technical hypertrophy and rhetori- cal overdetermination of simulated analytical texts. The artist’s clinically spurious scripts deliciously ape the language of child psychology purporting to diagnose phobias and psychosocial dysfunctions from the imagery and styles of a selection of class paintings. The humor here doesn’t arise from the childlike splitting or amalgamation of language, but from sundry painted pictures presented as Ektachrome prints (made more than two decades later) to offer a neutral form of material stability; and it doesn’t depend on naïve linguistic compounds or abbreviations so much as on the patent absurdity of purportedly therapeutic professional art analyses run amok.27

Whether subject to crypto-autobiographical refashioning or deeply metaphorical allusion (as in the image of a severed tree trunk in “A Weakness Inside"…” (1983) from The Sublime, which includes the text “A Child Abused”), the childhoods assembled in Kelley’s oeuvre ricochet between torment, delusion, and comedic degradation. Kids are serially lampooned, often lost (Lost, 1984), and unendingly laughed at. But Kelley’s humor was directed not so much at the misadventures of the young per se, but at misbegotten episodes in the social and symbolic production of childhood. Caught with their hands up a donkey’s behind or their fingers in a pie (Caught, 1982–83)—Kelley satirized not just the unsavory childhood events he so brazenly pictured but also the absurdity of

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Sketch for The Banana Man, 1981–82 Acrylic, ink, pencil on paper 11 × 14 inches (27.94 × 35.56 cm)

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their possible mitigation by context (the in-image caption of the two parts of Caught reads: “Excuses, Excuses"…"It’s not my fault it’s my upbringing"…"It’s my environment—Mercy”). One of the studies (1981–82) for The Banana Man delivers a similar sting, as Kelley revealed the deep, gift- giving pockets of the personified fruit as nothing more than dispensaries for “cheap trash” activated by the unstinting “want, want, want” of the kids surrounding him. Mindless, proto-consumerist happy times are skewered here by the tart sarcasm of Kelley’s conclusion: “What a Good Joke!"…" What a Good Man!”

Kelley offered one of the most revealing assessments of his comedic methodology in discussion of a work conceived for the interior of the Chiat/Day advertising agency, a signature building designed by Frank Gehry in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in Venice, California (1985–91). Though the project was eventually cancelled, the artist built a full-scale model of it— Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry—for the exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s in 1992.28 Departing from the premise that “Jokes often hinge on improper usage,” Kelley noted that “the piece I did for Frank Gehry was based on this principle—I used architectural tropes in a manner that was unsuitable for the environment. Some of this was in the service of social commentary—to point out the inequality of ‘choice’ space for workers in the office environ- ment, but mostly my project was designed simply to be funny.”29 Proposal for an Island of Conference Rooms continued the artist’s adaptation of popular, stand-alone image-text jokes, such as “Decided Opinions” (1983) from The Sublime: “I have decided opinions"…"my wife decides them for me.” But it also responded to a situation in which commentary was obliged to retreat once more to the wall while the office politics caught up in corporate culture and advertising copy could only fight back through the posting of bad jokes and “office fax cartoons” convened around what Kelley termed their “supergraphic” insinuation.30 Kelley’s take on impropriety—putting things, ideas, or people where they shouldn’t be and foisting blue-collar toilet humor on an ultra–white-collar environ- ment—braids laughter with a debunking of un-self-reflective intellectual purpose so that comedy and commentary are both spotlighted and mutually insinuated.

Working inside Gehry’s postmodern architecture, Kelley’s intervention would have subverted not just the interior space and the social relations it subtends, but the whole enterprise of “deconstruc- tion”—with which he was, of course, somewhat engaged himself. “It often seems to me,” Kelley suggested, “that ‘deconstruction’ is a joke from which the humor has been drained and a social message attached”:

Like the authorial voice in documentary, the “deconstructionist” voice in art suggests a removed and impartial commentator—which is a fiction. Subjectivity is revealed in every “deconstructionist” act. The tradition of functionalism in architecture strikes me as bound by a somewhat similar pose of fictional objectivity. I would like it if architects would reveal their sub- jectivity in their buildings in much more obvious ways…. People don’t like to be beaten over the head with a message all the time. Deconstructionist practice often comes off as preachy, so humor is a way of handling the message more lightly. But there’s also something annoying about architecture that is goofy or exotic on purpose! Michael Graves’s architecture rubs me the wrong way for this reason.31

It is clear, then, that from the furious Rust Belt rants of Kelley’s early performances to the deli- ciously witty concision of his image-text paintings, from the comedy of debasement, lowness, and popular expenditure that energizes his work with craft objects in the late 1980s and early 90s to the dizzyingly rambunctious musical comedy that structures Day Is Done, Kelley has transformed

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humor into a nondogmatic revelation of the compelling, grotesque, and perversely defining assumptions that make up the American vernacular. In many respects Day Is Done marked the heady climax of Kelley’s prodigious comedic repertoire—as it did for several of the artist’s major issues and interests. Conducted, as its title suggests, under the abiding cover of darkness—real and symbolic—the projective action and myriad protagonists of Day Is Done are the product of noctur- nal emissions and ritualized leisure-time abandon. Kelley has always insisted that the work keeps comedy central—its noirist subplots notwithstanding. “My version of this unremittingly dark vision,” he suggested, “is presented as fun, as a carnivalesque escape from the drab daily grind of normal life.” He even connected its comic ethos to both the “zeitgeist” of the early twenty-first cen- tury and the good-time, theatrical spirit of the city where it was first presented: “We are now in a period in which a lot of fun art is being made. I put this show together with New York in mind. There’s a lot of Broadway in it, and Broadway is quintessentially New York.”32

Kelley’s joke-telling devil functions as both the comedic axis and ironic agent provocateur of Day Is Done. For not only does the raunchy demon underscore what Walter Benjamin suggested was the

“better chance” for “thought” when activated by “laughter,”33 but he incarnates a latter-day variant of the special genre of evil humor that found its fullest articulation in Charles Baudelaire’s essay

“De l’essence du rire” (On the essence of laughter, published in 1855)—which “contains,” Benjamin suggested, “nothing other than the theory of satanic laughter.”34 While Benjamin did not outline the constitution of the demonic form of humor in detail, he made two suggestions relevant to any con- temporary recalibration of this most unremittingly dark of comedic types. He observed, first of all, that in his essay “Baudelaire goes so far as to view even smiling from the standpoint of laughter.” On this account, satanic laughter is characterized by its voracious appetite and, above all, by its propensity to capture or absorb all other forms of humorous expression, right down to the most fleeting, innocuous, and least physiologically committed: the smile itself. Behind that smile of course was what Baudelaire famously described as “the greatest trick the devil ever played”:

“convincing the world that he did not exist.”35

Kelley too was interested in the infectious imperialism of the comic mode, its contaminating ubiq- uity, and the circuits of counterrational syntax that link fist-pumping guffaws with the sly lip slips of some capricious insinuation. The hectic relay of humorous types, a hallmark of Kelley’s work in all of its idioms, is nowhere more apparent than in the astonishing range of sonic genres which ric- ochet between the twenty-five choreographed numbers and thirty-two sculptural viewing stations that make up Day Is Done. Kelley and his collaborator Scott Benzel interspersed “serious” or high- style music—such as the “somber music designed as a foil to a comedic scene between office workers and their vampire boss” in Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) #3,

Production still from Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil’s Door) from Day Is Done, 2004–05

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Co-Workers; the “‘seriously engaged,’ but uplifting, National Public Radio–style music” of Motivational Speech (EAPR #6); the John Carpenter–inspired “‘horror tension’ music” of the Singles’ Intro (EAPR #8); or the “tasteful bourgeois Minimalism inspired by Phil Glass and Steve Reich” from Empty Gym—with a wide palette of humorous sonic types. These include the misbegotten genre of “Broadway light opera of the liturgical variety featuring a background chorus of squealing pigs” for The Moaning Dead (EAPR #18, The Morose Ghoul); “‘comedic’ techno theme music for the sickly vampire character, composed entirely from computer and keyboard sample presets” in Sickly (EAPR #5, Sick Vampire); and the explicitly “‘dorky’ sound clusters” of Nerd Theme (EAPR #8).36

Of course, satanic laughter can also be identified by the roster of nefarious protagonists who give it vent. For Baudelaire this included a vampire “strong as a herd of demons,”37 the ghost who performs its haunting “like angels with wild beast’s eyes,”38 and the “devil” himself who “pulls the strings that move us.”39 These scrupulously malign forces are met by Kelley’s congregation of somewhat lesser evils, made up of the Wandering Ghoul, Druid and Vampire Couple of the Woods Group, the Shy Satanist of EAPR #19, and a clutch of other vampiric types—“sickly,” “lonely,” and “heartthrob”— who bear witness to the immovable persistence and circumstantial diminuendo of diabolical powers in the American vernacular. But satanic laughter has more to it than can be summed up in the dark mannerisms of these ghoulish surrogates. For, as Arthur Symons noted of his powerfully ambigu- ous and destructive relation to women, Baudelaire “is of his own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal laughter.”40 This self-referential vampirism underscores the sec- ond of Benjamin’s brief suggestions about the nature of Baudelaire’s satanic laughter: that

“contemporaries often testified to something frightful in his own manner of laughing.”41 While Kelley didn’t navigate quite so completely—or literally—between an evil menagerie and his identification with it, the projective redistribution of his own persona and the “abusive” accretions of his child- hood and adolescence are woven into the theatrical releases of Day Is Done, as they were in many previous projects. Yet despite using his own voice to perform perhaps the most bathetic soliloquy in the entire piece—that of the Wandering Ghoul—Kelley’s presence among the cast of deviant spooks and hand-me-down, dress-up phantoms is buffered by a tangle of reconstructive variants and never, strictly speaking, “autobiographical.” These include the situational “objectivity” of the originating photographs; the protocols of effective simulation, which follow on from their perfor- mative realization; and some measure of associative congruence governed by the religious or holiday episodes unfolded from them. At the same time, Kelley is certainly the commanding agent who—as Baudelaire put in his “Address to the Reader” in Les Fleurs du mal—“pulls the strings that move” each of the EARPs forward. In this sense he produces the comedic script that animates the joke-telling devil, who in turn provides the pivot for the shifting kaleidoscope of song and dance that turns the carnival wheel of Day Is Done.

Symons’s remark about Baudelaire’s misogyny also points us forward to Kelley’s own complicated address to the gender politics of humor. In one sense, Kelley created a level playing field for the democracy of folly, traversed by young and old, men and women, rich and poor—a motley crew of false saints and fake devils. Characteristically, however, he never shied away from the unending barrage of prejudice, delusion, cross-identification, and lewd and loud-mouthed name-calling staked out with special relish and profane delinquency in the projective scenes of Day Is Done. Using the camouflage of costumes and fake persona, Kelley took us, in fact, deep into the heart of the often absurd and disturbing performance of stereotypical exchange, lingering on the many forms of obdurate rhetorical perversity that take no or little account of the views and circum- stances of those who are its targets or “victims.” Offering no apologies for the risks he courted, Kelley worked on the fault line between something that is excruciating one moment and somehow funny the next, in an arena cordoned off by things he didn’t do: document, simulate, judge. What resulted sometimes takes its place, however, in the historical legacy of comedic gender relations,

as with the devil’s joke itself, which, quite literally yet absurdly, explodes a long-standing tradition dating back to Lysistrata (412 BCE), in which, as one commentator on Aristophanes’s comedy put it, “the integrity of male identity is kept whole” while female identity is “unstable” or fragmented.42

The widest aperture in the relation between Baudelaire and Kelley on the question of humor turns on the prominence they both accorded to the activity of caricature. For Baudelaire the operations of caricature were coupled, irresistibly, to forms of counter-human distortion and exaggeration, the artifice, cunning, and deviance of which were satanic by their very nature: they itemized the

“falling” away from what was God-given43 and were animated by a corollary narcissistic indulgence in the salacious diktats of dark personal vision elevated over both the ideal and the natural.44 Caricature and the grotesque, which Baudelaire described as “the absolute comic,” along with

“ordinary” comedy, which he termed “the significative comic,” are, he argued, predicated on “human pride” and the “expression of an idea of superiority”—the latter of “man over man,” the former, which gives rise to a more “profound, primitive, and axiomatic” laughter, of “man over nature.”45 Kelley’s essay on caricature, “Foul Perfection,” reviews the ideas developed about caricature (though he does not mention Baudelaire) and adds a number of propositions of his own. But Kelley’s discussion also has an important context as a response to what he termed the “new Mannerism” of the late 1980s—which he understood as an amalgam of several issues: the recycling of reductive high modernist tropes in the more attenuated forms of “commodity art” and Neo-Geo, and the implications borne by new styles of art-making that sexualized the modernist imagery of the “natu- ral,” especially biomorphic abstraction. Kelley aimed, then, to offer desublimated readings of the work of some of his contemporaries by probing the assumptions of modernist discourse about the counter-classical themes of the grotesque body, low culture, and irony, and to question modern- ism’s negatively coded assumptions about them.46

Acting for Baudelaire as a kind of poisoned embrace and for Kelley as a salient recoil, the making and reception of caricature is part of the relativistic double bind that defines modern culture. In Baudelaire’s estimation, humor in general and caricature in particular were satanic because they feed on the hubris inherent in the judgments of “superiority” on which they are founded. Baudelairean modernity thus emerged as the negative image of humanistic idealism, the anthropo- centric orientation of which was founded on new structures of order and propriety as “man” became the measure of all things. Caricature was a leading device by which the political and social security of this regimen was undermined by a representational scrutiny that fixed on the flaws and weak- nesses of its subjects, highlighted them on the side of the “fallen,” and set them up for general pillory. Viewers of caricature could thus suspend their rank and circumstances and achieve a momentary superiority to a disadvantaged subject so that status and hierarchy were continuously undermined by distortive artifice and social masquerade. Informed by historians of caricature including Albert Boime, Ernst Gombrich, and Ernst Kris, Kelley came at this dichotomy from the other side by point- ing to the common predicates of both caricature and “classical” representation: the “duality of distortion” that embraces “making things better, on the one hand, and making them worse on the other.”47 Like Baudelaire, Kelley conceived of caricature as a telling symptom of modernity; but, for him, its paradoxical nature was due to its designation as a debased or vulgar format, the basic strate- gies of which—formal distortion and reduction—actually emerged as the signal languages of the modernist aesthetic, which were mustered and returned in various postmodern redactions.

For both Baudelaire and Kelley, caricature was animated by a secret covenant, a hidden touchstone of personal, formal, social, and political reference that wreaked havoc with the diffidence and aloof- ness of the politer confines of the literary and visual art worlds. Kelley extended this critique to the 1980s by pointing to the caricatural orientation of several contemporary artists as they attended to different aspects of distortive or reductive play with the established characteristics of abstract form. In Kelley’s formulation, the geometric or biomorphic formats of both pictorial abstraction

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(as in the paintings of Carroll Dunham, Bill Komoski, and Lari Pittman) and Minimal-type sculp- ture (as in the work of women sculptors such as Debby Davis, Liz Larner, and Aimee Morgana (formerly Rankin), “who all defy the chastity of Minimalism to reinscribe the body,” become the new subjects of caricatural de- and reformation. Charles Ray’s Memory of Sadat (1981), for exam- ple, “a rectangular steel box positioned on the floor from which a human arm and leg extend,” presented “a fouled primal form [that] is a caricature of the very notion of perfection.”48 So if Baudelaire identified his own poetic vocation with the lineaments of satanic laughter, Kelley’s ideas in “Foul Perfection” seem to cross self-reflection with an art world endgame that both updates and corrodes Bergson’s suggestive contention that humor has an intrinsically allegorical relation to art itself: “There is something aesthetic about"…"[laughter], since the comic comes into being just when society and the individual begin to regard themselves as works of art.”49

The sprawling segments of Day Is Done are actually sutured together by its red-caped, demonic compare in a second sense: through the performance of an episodic joke delivered in installments. This hanging riddle acts as a kind of absurdist punctuation between the thirty-two “projective reconstructions” that constitute the piece. But the joke is not only told in parts, it turns on a sexual encounter in which the body of the devil’s wife is dismembered, bit by bit, as its prosthetic members are discarded during the narrator’s absurd rhetorical foreplay. Disquisition on the production and darkly humorous fate of body parts (and “part objects” in general)50 has a long history in Kelley’s career dating back to works such as No Substitutions (1983) and The Good Listener (1983), a trip- tych in which the ear is cast as a migrating appendage doubling as a vagina in the final panel, “Ear Attraction.” Disembodied arms feature in several drawings related to Kappa (1982–83), including Grendel’s Arm (which refers to the limb ripped off by Beowulf in the eponymous Anglo-Saxon epic). By bringing these splits home so abundantly in Day Is Done and arranging them in a choric cycle, Kelley offered a form of ironic negotiation between the competing theories of creative and comedic production favored by Freud, on the one hand, and the Object Relations psychoanalysis associated with Melanie Klein on the other. For while the predominant mode of material and conceptual orga- nization in Day Is Done is dependent on the colossal imaginative constructs of “projective” fantasy—and is thus somewhat aligned with Freud’s understanding of the creative act as an exten- sion of childhood daydreams—Kelley’s self-conscious amalgamation of comedic parts alludes, salaciously no doubt, to the reparative theory of creativity advocated by Klein. In this account, the creative impulse is an extension of childhood efforts to mediate between or repair objects that had been split into aspects of “good” and “bad” during the paranoid phase of early childhood.51

While as ever with Kelley’s work there is nothing systemic (or affirmative) about this polarity (or either side of it), Day Is Done clearly unfolds as a unique alliance between the additive logic of pro- jective association and a subtractive regimen that gives rise to multiple parts and splits. Both aspects are replete with their own comedic potentials, embracing pseudo-carnivalesque excess and conjectural abandon as well as specters of diminishment, bathos, and myriad downward spirals of the low. But they also bookend a gaudy and promiscuous spectrum of circumstantial humor ranging from the parodic sitcom of Singles Mixer (EAPR #8), with its stylistically discontinuous “canned laughter,”52 to sentimental soliloquies and holiday dress-up by the sundry vampires, ghouls, and Satanists from EAPRs #3–7, 17, 20, whom we have already encountered—and from the performa- tive ironies of religious ceremonies (EAPRs #11–13) or ritual mime (EAPRs #2, 16, 30) and choreography (EAPRs #14, 22, 16), to stock-in-trade comedic vehicles such as clowns, Halloween, or pagan spooks (EAPRs #7, 10, 24, 25, 30) and pantomime horses (EAPRs #31, 32). In the end the dizzying pluses and minuses of Day Is Done and all that falls between them summon up as perhaps no contemporary art project has ever done a thrilling twenty-first–century intimation of the synaes- thetic combustion Georges Bataille associated with the energetic excess of the carnival: “dance and poetry, music and the different arts contribute to making the festival the place and time of a spectac- ular letting loose.”53

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1 Mike Kelley, head text for “Ajax” (1984), in Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 2.

2 Kelley, in “Isabelle Graw in Conversation with Mike Kelley,” in Mike Kelley (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 8–9. 3 Ibid., p. 9.

4 Kelley, interview by Robert Sentinery, “Mike Kelley: Form and Dysfunction,” Zone 1, no. 2 (1994): p. 15.

5 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and his brief, lesser-known

“Humor” (1927). The latter is reprinted in John C. Welchman, ed., Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2010).

6 Kelley’s years at the University of Michigan gave rise to several artworks and writings: see, in par- ticular, “Alma Pater (Wolverine Den)” (1991) and “Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered” (1995), in Minor Histories, pp. 32–39 and pp. 60–71, respectively. As with the facetious appearance of the university in the glued felt piece Skinny University of Michigan (1989), Kelley notes specifically of Alma Pater that it

“shouldn’t be taken too seriously.”

7 The editors of the Nation are among several commentators who have suggested that “Abbie Hoffman was one of a kind: an imp, the joker, the Shakespearian fool who sees and suffers, clothing truth with wit” (Nation, June 12, 1989).

8 Kelley discusses Kamrowski (1914–2004) and his schooling in general at the beginning of the interview “My Universal System Is a Dystopian One,” Sin Titulo, no. 5 (1998): pp. 89–165.

9 Kelley, statement on “Monkey Island Part II,” in Richard Kriesche, ed., Artificial Intelligence in the Arts Nr. 1: “Brainwork”, exh. cat. (Graz, Austria: Steirischer Herbst; and Los Angeles: Municipal Art Gallery, 1985).

10 Kelley, “My Universal System Is a Dystopian One.”

11 For a discussion of Baldessari’s humor addressing these and related questions, see John C. Welchman,

“‘Don’t Try for Laughs’: John Baldessari and Conceptual Comedy,” in Black Sphinx.

12 Kelley, transcript of an interview by John C. Welchman, Los Angeles, Fall 2005, np.

13 Kelley, transcript of an interview by Heinz-Norbert Jocks, part 1, p. 1.

14 Kelley, “Artist/Critic?” in Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 220–21.

15 Kelley, interview by Jean- Philippe Antoine, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 73 (Fall 2000): p. 110.

16 Kelley, “Mekanïk Destruktïv Kommandöh: Survival Research Laboratory and Popular Spectacle” (1989), in Foul Perfection, p. 130.

17 Kelley, in “Tony Oursler: An Endless Script,” in Interviews, p. 227.

18 The text appeared in Mike Kelley, ed. William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh (Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press, 1991), pp. 54–59.

19 Kelley, head text for “Some Aesthetic High Points,” in Minor Histories, p. 40.

20 Kelley, “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature,” in Foul Perfection, pp. 20–39.

21 See Kelley, “Shall We Kill Daddy?” [on Douglas Huebler] (1997), in Foul Perfection, pp. 178–94; and “Myth Science” [on Öyvind Fahlström] (1995), in Foul Perfection, pp. 158–77.

22 This statement was written for inclusion in the catalogue for the exhibition Mike Kelley: Land-O- Lakes at Wako Works of Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1996; reprinted in Minor Histories, pp. 82–92. Works in dialogue with the folding game include the mixed-media Slightly Psychedelic Depiction of the Sexualized Land-O-Lakes Girl (High Priestess) (1996) and the sculpture Straight Depiction of the Chaste (Unfolded) Land-O-Lakes Girl (Debuttered) (1996).

23 Kelley, statement on 100 Hundred Reasons (1991), in Minor Histories, p. 204.

24 Kelley’s highly charged “protest poster,” A Stopgap Measure, announced and was shown in the artist’s 1999 exhibition at Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles; reprinted in Minor Histories, pp. 192–95.

25 Sigmund Freud, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916), pp. 370, 361. 26 Freud discussed linguistic slips by three- and four-year-old girls (ibid., pp. 291–92), though a subse- quent analysis example also cites the example of ten- and twelve- year-olds who produce a play for their aunts and uncles (p. 293). While Kelley mostly addressed children over the ages of five or six, the lean-to text from Proposal for an Island of Conference Rooms, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Builder,” features a foul-mouthed four-year old—or, to be precise, an adult adopting his persona.

27 See Kelley, “We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses” (1995), in Minor Histories, pp. 258–73.

28 Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, curated by Paul Schimmel, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992.

29 Kelley, in “Missing Space/Time: A Conversation Between Mike Kelley, Kim Colin, and Mark Skiles,” in Minor Histories, pp. 335–36.

30 Kelley, in Mike Kelley/Thomas Kellein: A Conversation, p. 11.

31 Kelley, in “Missing Space/Time,” p. 336.

32 These are the concluding words of Kelley’s interview with the author, “1000 Words: Mike Kelley,” Artforum, October 2005, p. 235.

33 “There is no better starting point for thought than laughter,” Walter Benjamin wrote. “In particular, thought usually has a better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of the epic theatre is its amount of laugh- ter.” Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” trans. John Heckman, New Left Review, no. 62 (July– August 1970): p. 95. Benjamin’s affirmative view of laughter should be contrasted with the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno. In the intro- duction to his translation of Adorno’s “Chaplin Times Two” (Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 1 [1996]: p. 57), John MacKay notes that: “In his writings on contempo- rary culture, Theodor W. Adorno was inclined to treat laughter with suspicion, in particular the kind of laughter generated by popular film comedies and other products of the

‘culture industry.’ What received its comic comeuppance in such films, he claimed, was anything opposed to or unassimilable by the status quo; such mirth produced a false sense of liberation masking blind conformity to a cruel social order.” See also Shea Coulson, “Funnier Than Unhappiness: Adorno and the Art of Laughter,” in Arendt, Adorno, New York and Los Angeles, a special issue of New German Critique, ed. Dana Villa, no. 100 (2007).

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34 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” (section 32), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938– 1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 182. Baudelaire’s “De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les art plastiques” was first published in Le Portefeuille in July 1855 before taking its place as chapter 6 of vol- ume 2, Curiosités Esthétiques, of the Edition Définitif of Baudelaire’s writings (Paris: Michel Lévy et Frères, 1868–69). The essay is trans- lated in Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955).

35 Baudelaire, section XXIX: “Le Joueur généreux,” in Le spleen de Paris (1862).

36 All quotations are from Kelley, “The Music of Day Is Done,” in Kelley, Day Is Done (New York: Gagosian Gallery; and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 507–18.

37 Baudelaire, “Le Vampire” (The vampire), from Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil, 1857; enlarged in 1861 and 1868); trans. William Aggeler in The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).

38 Baudelaire, “Le Revenant” (The ghost), from Les Fleurs du mal; trans. William Aggeler in ibid. See also Jonathan D. Culler,

“Baudelaire’s Satanic Verses,” Diacritics 28, no. 3 (Fall 1998): pp. 86–100.

39 This is the first line of “Les Litanies de Satan,” in Les Fleurs du mal.

40 Arthur Symons, Charles Baudelaire: A Study (New York: Dutton, 1920), p. 48. Symons writes (pp. 35–36): “It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in Earth, finds a certain Satan in such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essen- tially demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets.”

41 Benjamin, “Central Park,” p. 182.

42 Lauren K. Taaffe, Aristophanes and Women (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 51.

43 In “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), Paul de Man offers a com- mentary on Baudelaire’s notions of irony and their relation to percep- tions of superiority and inferiority:

“The Fall, in the literal as well as the theological sense,” he notes,

“reminds him [‘man’] of the purely instrumental, reified character of his relation to nature.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2nd ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 214. 44 For a dedicated study of Baudelaire’s ideas on caricature and modern comedy, see Michele Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

45 Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in The Mirror of Art, pp. 144–46.

46 This synopsis of “Foul Perfection” is adapted from my head text to the essay’s republica- tion in Foul Perfection, p. 20.

47 Kelley, “Foul Perfection,” p. 22.

48 Ibid., p. 34.

49 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 20.

50 The “part object” is a term used in the psychoanalytic “object rela- tions theory” associated with Ronald Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and others work- ing in Britain from the 1950s through the 70s. See Lavinia Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations Theory (London: Free Association Press, 1997).

51 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), compiled in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 8, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), pp. 1–236, and “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming” (1907–08), com- piled in The Standard Edition, vol. 9, pp. 143–53; and Melanie Klein, “Infantile anxiety situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse,” in The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1975) [first published in International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 10 (1929): pp. 436–43].

52 Kelley, “Scene Notes,” in Kelley, Day Is Done, p. 491.

53 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion [first French ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1973], trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 54. For a longer discussion of the relation between Day Is Done and the thinking of Bataille, see Welchman, “Fête Accompli: Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done,” in Kelley, Day Is Done, pp. 467–85.

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Until they are influenced by their kindergarten, children before the age of five rarely draw animals; then the human figure is simply switched from a vertical to a horizontal position, and extra legs added onto its underside. This occurrence reverses the evolutionary development that initially produced art. Because of the adoption of the erect human gait, there was a crisis of male optical pleasure when the voyeur libido was deprived of the sight of the female genitals from the rear. To make up for this loss, a pan-genital significance was projected onto every object in the external world. At that moment, all forms acquired a sexual significance, and the new aesthetic principle could be likened to a kind of “fig leaf.” All works of art, objects of visual pleasure, are censorial replacements for the sight of the female genitals.

Effigy

We don’t know exactly who is speaking, and the words seem a pack of lies, but such is one origin story for art, according to Mike Kelley.1 At roughly the same moment this statement was drafted, the artist produced a comparable visual lesson in the last painting from his series The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1994). Arriving like an addendum to twelve prior oval canvases— so many twisted, egg-shaped Stations of the Cross—Kelley’s final painting was entitled simply (extravagantly) Art. And it imaged forth a wash of shit-brown paint, vertical and quasi-gestural brushstrokes resolved by a wavering grid into the image of rickety floorboards, or ramshackle pan- eling, a painting of wood grain.

GEORGE BAKER

MIKE KELLEY:

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Fusing this two-sided picture into a single, facing image, Kelley’s Art transformed a structure of doubleness and passage into one of occlusion, the sickly pink rectangle of the Effigy poster covering over the incontinent brown of the oval painting’s wood grain. Pink and brown: pink, the artist has stated, “is the hippie color. It’s fairydust color, gender-bender color, anti-I-beam-sculpture color, the color of the New Man, the hermaphrodite color.”3 It is the color of Pepto-Bismol, the artist has pointed out in other texts, perhaps matching it to the shit brown of Art’s faux-wood expanse, to brown’s excremental connotations, its evocation of the dirt or the ground—the everything color, the color with no purity, the color of the low. Pink is the color of the genitals, Kelley has also insisted, and if the literal hole of Alma Pater has disappeared, Art remains littered with small black holes, like miniature knots in the painted wooden floorboards, or like holes—peepholes, corporeal holes, geni- tal holes—of another sort. It is as if the work directs us not only to look down to a space beneath us, to the ground or to the floor, but to the unknowable space below the painting’s surface, the chilling darkness underneath the painting’s “ground.”

In this, Kelley’s Art becomes something like a model for the artist’s aesthetic—a self-reflexive state- ment, a visual manifesto, perhaps another origin story for art as well. This seems like a modernist move, and modernist memories are mobilized here. But surely, Kelley’s turn to paintings of wood grain has little to do with the surfacing of such techniques in the history of high modernist painting, which happened most notoriously with Picasso and Braque, within the history and development of Cubism. There, the play with represented and mass-produced wood grain accompanied a series of trompe l’oeil devices that set up a kind of dialogue between representation and the real, testing the illusionism of painting in a number of ways, forcing attention to the surface of the painting, the

“truth” of the medium. Nor does Art seem to share the worldview of a postmodern figure much more closely aligned with Kelley’s use of wood grain, sculptor Richard Artschwager. Artschwager’s Formica objects with wood-grain veneers seemed to reverse modernist concerns with truth to material, with the integrity of the surface, embracing the perfection of the faked and the false. And yet this postmodernist assertion seems, with distance, strangely congruous with its modernist opposite in that both aesthetic tactics focused all their attention on the surface, on the assertion that art, in a sense, is all surface, nothing but surface. We could substitute Warhol for Artschwager here as a countertype to Kelley: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”4 The modernist myth of the truth of the picture plane, the postmodern ideology of a world of pure artifice, total surface, depthless image play—Kelley’s Art overturns these paradigms precisely. For Art proclaims an aesthetic not of the surface, but of the depths.

It proclaims an aesthetic of the effigy. As if plumbing the depths of memory, Kelley once elaborated on the Effigy Hanging Contest poster at the center of Art and Alma Pater. The elaborate ritual Kelley weaves around the poster also speaks to the larger operations of his work:

I actually attended the effigy-hanging contest. As a kind of performative intrusion, I made an effigy—a simple dummy composed of old clothes stuffed with newspaper—and took it to the frat house to see what the contest was all about. It turned out to be a booster event for a football game. The frat’s

“sorority sisters” had sewn a cuddly, stuffed figure that represented the animal mascot of the other team and hung it from a tree by a rope. My effigy was the only other one submitted for the contest. I hung it from the tree as well. There followed a series of speeches, presided over by an aging housemother, attack- ing the other team and their coach—I had no idea who they were. But as I had brought an effigy for hanging, I was called on to speak. I was terrified, but

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The image eventually spawned a whole series of Wood Grain Paintings (2003); but the work also provoked a wave of resonance and recollection that points back to the artist’s earliest productions. Already in the “student” works on paper of the mid-1970s that Kelley reclaimed as part of his later project Missing Time, there were multiple examples of wood rubbings or frottage. The artist’s sig- nal early Birdhouses announced a persistent sculptural object cobbled together from the cheapest plywood, carried on in an increasingly raw state in wooden pieces of the early 1990s like Orgone Shed and Colema Bench (1992). Excessive wood-grain effects had surfaced in many of Kelley’s black-and-white paintings of the 1980s, especially in works from the artist’s project The Sublime, such as Infinite Expansion (1983), so many cartoon versions of allover “abstract” painterly sur- faces; or as the all-encompassing background props for staged photographs produced at the end of that decade, such as Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood (1990); or as the “ground” for Kelley’s stuffed animal works of the same period, with fake wood-grain veneers dominating the tops of the folding tables used as supports in the installation Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991). And image and object, painting and sculpture, had come together in works such as Antiqued (Prematurely Aged) (1987), a chest of wooden drawers covered over redundantly in a distinctly pink faux-wood grain, the artist’s labor reduced to “antiquing,” a craft procedure specifically designed to create a counterfeit object, a fake patina that carries with it a false sense of time and a fictional age.

The replication and coloration returned in Kelley’s painting Art, whose fake wood grain was further “decorated,” in the artist’s words, with a “trompe l’oeil rendering of a handbill,” a bright pink broad- side announcing a fraternity competition dubbed an “Effigy Hanging Contest.”2 The artist had been collecting such hand-lettered posters from college campuses for some years, and previously pro- duced a number of large-scale felt banners from other appropriated examples. And this specific poster had already surfaced in a prior Kelley installation titled Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) (1991), one of the artist’s many installed “fantasy spaces”—overt theatrical spaces as opposed to abstract phenomenological spaces (Minimalist spaces), replete with décor and props—its hybrid locker room or school gym joining a roster of other installations that evoked things like military camps, dank basements, office cubicles, hillbilly shanties, or darkened caverns. In the center of Alma Pater, a large freestanding element stood, with the Effigy Hanging Contest poster emblazoned on one side and an allover brown wash of more fake wood grain upon the other, the whole two- sided construct pierced by a large hole, like a fun-fair prop through which to toss objects.

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #13; Art, 1994 Acrylic on wood 62 2 × 40 ½ inches (159 × 102 cm)

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pulled it off by delivering an impassioned rant, using only generalities, about the evils of the other team. I then called for the burning of the effigies. This provoked a shocked silence. It turned out that the sorority sisters were too proud of their handiwork to destroy it, and the housemother informed me that burning things on fraternity property was strictly forbidden. I responded by saying that they obviously did not hate the other team enough, but they weren’t convinced. Because I was the only person submitting an effigy who was not affiliated with the fraternity, I won the contest by default. I asked for my trophy but was told that there wasn’t one.... The next day I went back and demanded my trophy, making it clear that I would keep returning until it was given to me. One of the frats took a track trophy from his shelf and applied a hand- made sticker over its inscription announcing that it was now the trophy for the effigy-hanging contest.5

Like a precursor to the recent film scenarios in the artist’s series Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, the “screen memories” accumulated in Kelley’s monumental 2005 project Day Is Done, this memory mirrors precisely the actions of the painting Art, as Kelley lays down the trompe l’oeil pink Effigy poster over the wood-grain false surface of his own painting like the frat boy renaming a trophy, producing an effigy for an effigy.

Layers upon layers, effigy behind effigy, one stand-in covering up another—Kelley’s Art proclaims art to be an experience of replacement, of the substitute. As a corollary to this, Art asserts that art should privilege the downward glance, the gaze at the floorboards and perhaps beyond, to the dark chasm that yawns beneath. Art wants art to figure forth the unknowable zone behind the substitute, the deep void behind the ersatz, the underground beneath the effigy. All images are effigies, the painting asserts. Nothing is itself. If modernism had once fantasized that it could be about the thing or the medium “in itself,” that it could focus truth in the physical reality of the surface, Art makes self-reflexivity move in a different direction. For here is a surface that is about, not itself, but some- thing else: a surface about that which is beyond the surface, a surface pointing us down to the depths, a surface pointing us below and to the low, a surface pointing to a beyond. It is the surface as effigy, a “ground” not transcended but made literally groundless.

Or perhaps, for Kelley, the lesson to be learned is that there is no surface; in art, as in Art, there are only layers, displacements, substitutions—transformations, in other words, endless and excessive. The effigy, then, is what art is, at base; in this, it arrives as a companion to (and perhaps parody of ) the postmodern idea of art as a “surrogate,” an aesthetic stand-in for social relations and desires closely associated with Allan McCollum’s well-known series of Plaster Surrogates or Surrogate Paintings.6 A surrogate, however, is usually something we consider a replacement for our affections: surrogate mother, sexual surrogate.7 An effigy represents something more violent. An effigy is not just a stand-in, a replacement, a displacement. It is something we ridicule, an idealized figure brought down low. An effigy implies exaggeration; it involves caricature, a revolt against a figure of power or the law. An effigy, like art, is something we hang. An effigy is something we burn.

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Sublevel

At the end of the 1980s, Kelley produced a series of abstract felt pieces in the form of mattress cov- ers. With titles like Stained Glass Mattress or Orphic Mattress (both 1989), here again was the image as a cover for something beneath it, and Kelley’s crash-pad abstractions were positioned on mattresses placed directly on the floor. The painting Art elaborated horizontality and layering into an image; works like the mattress covers made such operations literal. In this, they joined more well-known works by Kelley, such as a series of paintings done on carpeting, like the deliquescent Rorschach image of A Hippie’s Bedroom (1985) or other allover, “abstract” untitled works on car- pet from 1986. And by the end of the 1980s these led to the Arena and Dialogue series, in which the artist unleashed an army of afghans and baby blankets across the floors of galleries and museum spaces, often using his readymade domestic abstractions to cover over other, hidden objects buried beneath them.

In 1995, Kelley placed a mattress on the floor underneath his mock-monumental tabletop sculpture Educational Complex, an accumulation of miniature architectural models of all the institutions (including his childhood home) where Kelley in his youth had been schooled—with any parts he could not remember “left blank.” Educational Complex spread wide, a horizontal expanse in gleam- ing white, like a collection of so many architectural ghosts, or, as Kelley put it, like some kind of modernist community college, a Bauhaus of the backwaters.8 Lifted up on naked wooden saw- horses, however, the planar surface of the Complex created a dark space beneath it where, hidden in the shadows, Kelley’s plain white mattress burrowed. Hardly noticed by critics—I myself have no memory of having seen it when Educational Complex was first shown in New York—the mat- tress allowed visitors to lie beneath Kelley’s sculpture.

And there, positioned like a leech sucking on the underbelly of the complex, a final architectural structure was revealed. Screwed onto the underside of the Complex was a model of the basement, the sublevel, of Kelley’s art school, the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). While almost no one mentioned it, Kelley did write about it: “In Educational Complex!…!the sublevel is the point fur- thest underground. To get to it one must crawl under a table. There, one can lie on a mattress, stare up through an invisible floor, as if up a skirt, and study the structure of that architecture. Parts are missing.”9 Blocks of thick negative space pierced by diagrammatic holes reversed the structure of the architectural models up on the sculpture’s surface, positivities often opened by cut-aways

View of the CalArts Sublevel model located on the underside of the base supporting Educational Complex, 1995

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to reveal remembered rooms and corridors within. And like a true negative-to-positive reversal, Kelley thus imagined at least two visual experiences that the Educational Complex would support: a birds-eye view from above, the fantasy of an all-seeing and masterful vision (despite disruptive

“blanks” or obdurate blocks of congealed architectural space); and a furtive view from below, the child’s view, or perhaps better, the pervert’s view, like looking “up a skirt”—evoking so many memo- ries of Vito Acconci and his notorious installation Seedbed (1972), where the artist secreted himself to proclamate and masturbate beneath a fake gallery floor.10 In fact, the child and the pervert’s per- spectives come together here, as if Kelley were reimagining Sigmund Freud’s origin story of the emergence of fetishism—of perversion itself: the tiny child staring up at the female genitals from below, looking up at the traumatic fact of sexual difference and castration “from the ground.”11

The sublevel transforms Educational Complex into another two-sided structure, and it gives the surface of the work an underground, a subterranean space that while perhaps parasitical to the entire construction also seems to determine it—the hidden base of the entire (psychic?) “complex.”12 Its negative form constituting a collection of blanks, absences, or holes more than anything else, the sublevel proliferates in what Kelley imagined as the “repressed” architectural spaces above, the forgotten details of his retrospective collection of buildings, with these blanks linking the surface of the Complex quite literally to the underground voids below. Such underground spaces, whether caverns, tunnels, or basements, had long been the sites to which Kelley directed all his aesthetic imagination. “Let’s go down into the chapel of my basement—the shadowed domain of the tinkering genius,” Kelley proclaimed at the conclusion of his very first published essay, “Urban Gothic,” which ends: “[T]hat which lies on the surface is often not of the same material as that which lies below it.”13

Slithering out from its underground location, Kelley’s model of the CalArts sublevel would come to find itself enlarged, reconstructed in new materials and in an altered form a few years later as the work Sublevel (1998). Now itself raised up from the floor on straining car jacks, the diagram- matic model of the CalArts basement was rendered as an open lattice in raw blonde plywood, producing a large format but seemingly random grid of squares and rectangles, open passageways and tiny cubicles. “I have made it my project to reconstruct my missing memories of this site,” Kelley proclaimed. But “this is a daunting task.”14 Unable to recall most of the rooms of the sublevel, Kelley lined the forgotten spaces in monochromatic pink crystal—like uncracked geodes, the artist explained (“IT’S ALL PINK INSIDE”), or like more explicitly erotic, corporeal zones. Sublevel emerged as yet another pink and quasi-brown artwork, the vastly transformed progeny of the effigies buried in Kelley’s prior painting Art.

As such, the diagrammatic grid and the nubbed monochromes of Sublevel now became associated with amnesia and repression both: “The sublevel must have been an incredibly torturous arena to engender such a wide blanket of forgetfulness.” Playing with and parodying the cultural obsession with “repressed memory syndrome,” Kelley amplified these associations upon noticing a seemingly

“inaccessible” space on the floor plan of the CalArts’ basement. “[O]ne spot seems especially ominous,” the artist gasped, “more terrible than the rest: the ultimate zone of unspeakable horror.” This room, Kelley imagined, perhaps has “no access to it at all. Like a time capsule, it might simply be a buried chamber. For the sake of simplicity, in my dimly recollected Sublevel, I have provided a tunnel that grants access to this void.” An actual tunnel in the blonde plywood snaked its way along the floor from the diagrammatic lattice of Sublevel to an otherwise sealed steel cube. Visitors were invited to crawl within its utter darkness. Adding excess to excess, the Sublevel thus found itself with a beneath, a structure even lower than itself, a void below its void: “The tunnel is sub-sublevel,” Kelley concluded, “it exists on a plane even lower than the sublevel itself. It exists in the plane of nonexistence, of provisionally reconstructed memory.”15

Layers were added to this excavation, allegorical layers. Using text and image supplements Kelley attached his sublevel model and his tunnel to things like the fictive tunnels rumored to exist beneath the McMartin Preschool, a notorious site of alleged mass child abuse; or a pornographic image of a woman’s pussy illuminated by pink spotlights—of course—from behind (The Pink Crystal Speaks, 1998); or alien abductions inasmuch as the “inaccessible” space at the end of the pitch black plywood tunnel was equipped with an examination table and a series of phallic devices that could be seen as “probes.”16 An auxiliary plywood structure titled The Keep (1998), installed with Sublevel at its first showing, evoked a rural outhouse; hick outsiders from the underclass complimented the aura of alien intervention from above that Kelley wove around the structures. He labeled other collage supplements with phrases like “pathways to secrets,” and an Ed Ruscha– inspired, semi-Pop, semi-abstract painting included “Pathways to Unexplored Worlds” (The Sun Collapses, Taking With It The Grid of the Ordered Universe, 1998).

But in a primary sense, alongside these allegorical resonances, Kelley’s Sublevel attached its present form to some of the most consistent tactics of the artist’s larger body of work. The open lattice embodied by the diagrammatic floor plan of Sublevel produced a sculpture that one could see through, a device for looking, for producing new perspectives. This had been one of the primary modalities of Kelley’s early objects from sculptures like Perspectaphone (1977–78) to the early birdhouse structures that similarly evoked looking though peepholes and through telescope or camera devices (Birdhouse for a Bird That is Near and a Bird That is Far, 1978). Similarly, the tunnel of Sublevel joined a roster of Kelley sculptures that one could move through, a sculpture of passage in the most literal sense of the term. Many of Kelley’s earlier works had simply embodied passageways, like the corridor formats of The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave (1985), or Pay for Your Pleasure (1988)—less phenomenological spaces though then lowly “hallway[s],” a minor or “lesser space,” as the artist once described this, “that one passes through on the way to a real destination.”17

Both The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave and Pay for Your Pleasure involved sculptural spaces constructed in part or whole from paintings; in the former, viewers had to enter the dark cavern- like hall by literally getting down on their hands and knees and crawling under the painting Exploring (1985), positioned like a dominatrix or a barrier across the entry to the space. “When spelunking sometimes you have to stoop,” the painting’s inscription bellowed, “sometimes you have to go on all fours, sometimes even crawl"…"CRAWL WORM!!” Devices for seeing and devices for moving, sculptures of visual and spatial transformation found themselves fused in a low or desublimated mode.

And yet these forms and formats were effigies, the work’s resonance through Kelley’s prior tactics part of a consistent assault. Sublevel’s rural companion, The Keep, was rendered locked and inac- cessible, but it was pierced by two peepholes and covered by bright rectangles of primary colored paint—red, white, blue—as if fusing, incomprehensibly, key modernist structures such as Marcel Duchamp’s peephole-riven door in Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage!…!(Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas!…!) (1946–66) with the reductivist geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian, and all of this with a country shithouse. Sublevel itself embodied a diagram as much as a grid, Dada and Conceptualist formats mixed incongruously with hegemonic, abstract painterly ones from the history of modernism. The work’s tunnel could not help but call up Minimalist pas- sageways, phenomenological structures, just as the pink crystal lining the forgotten spaces of the CalArts basement brought the history of the modernist monochrome into the mix. The grid and the monochrome, the passageway and the diagram, modernism and Minimalism, abstraction and Pop: Associated with the Sublevel—with an allegorical space calling up all that is subterranean and low, pointing to the underground and the beneath, imagining an inaccessible, dark space—Kelley was

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pushing modernist forms, hegemonic high art forms, in a different direction. For it was the (implic- itly modernist) blanks within the work that were now fused with the imagined tale of the forgotten spaces of the Sublevel, the modernist-inspired negativity or absence present in the work that pro- voked a (paranoiac?) vision of secrets, enigmas, missing zones, and inaccessible chambers. “Bring out the Gimp!” the chorus of modernist and avant-garde forms seemed to intone. Modernism in the basement: high art forms were being made to deviate. The sublevel, for Kelley, had become what we might begin to call the principle of deviation.

Repression

Educational Complex was not the first time Kelley evoked the basement of CalArts. It had been a crucial component of the installation From My Institution to Yours (1987), where the artist appropriated xeroxed drawings and cartoons posted by workers in the art school’s janitorial offices. All representing personified animals, the janitorial jokes and cartoons were blown up to mural scale and assimilated to a mostly red space that the artist described as a kind of Soviet-inspired agitprop workers’ shrine, replete with both bourgeois or hieratic-religious inscriptions and a black revolutionary worker’s fist. The confusion of historical and class-based signifiers only mounted upon reading the cartoons’ captions—“WORK,” “WANNA FOOL AROUND,” “I WUV YOU”—and the shrine’s inscriptions, a typical Kelley-brand litany of sadomasochistic degradation: “ALL YOU OUTSIDE THE BOUNDARIES OF THIS COMPOUND OF INNOCENT ANIMAL PURITY"…""KISS UP TO THE PIG. CUDDLE THE SKUNK. TONGUE THE VULTURE. GROOM THE LION. SERVICE THE MOUSE. BOW TO THE CHIPMUNK. YOU WHO ARE THE RAT…POOR TIRED RAT"…"POOR POOR TIRED RAT!”18

And this confusion mounted again upon confronting the relationship of Kelley’s workers’ shrine to the surrounding museum space, especially in its first installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mysteriously, a red ribbon dangled a carrot before the open red-carpeted space, as if taunting the visitor to enter it. As Kelley explained:

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I wanted to run a ribbon through the museum, through a door that was for employees only, down to the worker’s area in the museum so that people who saw the shrine would follow the ribbon and realize they couldn’t get through the door, and there would be a big sign there and a battering ram. And the sign would say something like “The Museum is preventing you from joining with the other workers. There is real worker’s art down in the bowels of the museum, so take this battering ram and knock the door down to go see it.”19

This fusion of exhibition space and basement space, of museum visitors and the workers of the institution, was not to be. Upon having his proposal rejected, Kelley instead set up “an open conflict between the museum-goers and the workers.”20 The shrine’s last inscriptions echoed the dangling carrot’s challenge: “FROM MY INSTITUTION TO YOURS—LOVE I AM IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE WORKERS. CLIMB OVER THE RAMPART—BATTER DOWN THE DOOR—STEP ACROSS THE LINE—THAT SEPARATES BROTHER & SISTER FROM BROTHER & SISTER. THIS IS THE SIMPLE SHRINE OF TRUTH IN THE TEMPLE OF LIES.” But the artist had instructed the surrounding security guards to enact to the letter of the law their normal role as guardians of the art objects on display, immediately evicting any visitors who attempted to follow the ribbon into the space of the blushing shrine.

If From My Institution to Yours presaged Kelley’s stuffed animal sculptures, it emerged directly from his 1980s series of black and white paintings, the installation’s borrowed images being the progeny of a series of drawings based on cartoons found in work spaces like janitorial offices and car garages that the artist had appropriated and titled Loading Dock Drawings (1984).21 And if this origin supports a reading of Kelley’s early production in line with a revision of what might be called

“working-class aesthetics,” it also places the worker images within the larger disruptive iconogra- phy of his early work, with its range of not just borrowed mass-cultural or popular images and styles, but explicitly repressed pictorial or material productions—an attentiveness, as one critic has put this, “to the most rudimentary, if not trashiest forms of graphic design"…"high school newspa- pers, Sex to Sexty joke books, [seemingly fascist] Gothic typography, Xerox-machine cartoons and gags"…"[and] absurd reconfigurations of ‘feminine’ fabrics and ‘masculine’ carpentry.”22 Indeed, Kelley always invoked repression as the key to that which set off his image and material borrowings from most other Pop or appropriation art: “I have a problem with the terms ‘high’ and ‘low,’” Kelley stated. “I prefer ‘allowable’ and ‘repressed,’ as they refer to usage, whether or not a power structure allows discussion—rather than to absolutes.”23

What has not been noticed, however, is the signal manner in which From My Institution to Yours not only continues Kelley’s investigation of an iconography of the repressed, but now develops an explicit model of repression itself, a spatial as well as conceptual model as the central engine of the artist’s project. The work represents a turning point. With its enactment of a structure of barriers and taboo, of restriction and interdiction, From My Institution to Yours elaborates a kind of thresh- old model and imagines another underground, inaccessible space, in line with some of Sigmund Freud’s favorite metaphors for his notion of psychic repression. “The crudest idea of these systems is the most convenient for us—a spatial one,” Freud wrote in his chapter on repression in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. “Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second, narrower room—a kind of drawing room—in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him.”24 Kelley’s installation precisely replicates this scenario.

Loading Dock Drawing #1, 1984 Acrylic on paper 72!¼ × 44 inches (183.52 × 111.76 cm)

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Shortly after From My Institution to Yours, Kelley appropriated another type of everyday artistic production for his artist book Reconstructed History (1989): the drawings of grade school students or adolescents. Mimicking the look of the high school yearbooks that would become so significant to Kelley’s later work, Reconstructed History was, however, elaborately faked, with most of the “draw- ings” completed by Kelley himself. Over the images of presidents, government buildings, monuments, or historical scenes, a series of mostly scatological graffiti erupts: Getting the Charles Manson treat- ment, Abraham Lincoln appears with a swastika tattoo, zits, and snaggleteeth; Daniel Webster with a pig’s snout or John Calhoun with Frankenstein scars; George Washington with added breasts, a vagina, flipped bob, and rosy cheeks; the Statue of Liberty with a stinking armpit and hairy pussy; eighteenth-century dancers with massive cum-spraying erections; the Capitol Building’s cupola transformed into a pair of giant breasts; the Lincoln Memorial’s “throne” turned into a toilet upon which the president takes a crap. These “additions” to historical images seemed to position the drawing- as-graffito as a kind of eruption of desublimated or instinctual violence, defacements revealing the sexual, infantile, or demonic aspects of power that are normally repressed. And thus from Kelley’s early paintings in marginal or subcultural styles like underground comic books, to a later exhibition project like The Uncanny (1993), the artist’s interest would seem to have been in the “return of the repressed,” the desublimatory release of excluded, “low” materials.

And yet when Kelley produced Reconstructed History, his writings explored an analysis of repres- sion that moved along entirely other lines. “We might ask,” Kelley wondered, “why these pictures provoke addition. What has been subtracted from them?” Subtraction, not addition, became the artist’s primary concern: “Heroic images thrive on subtraction. Idealization occurs as things move away from the physical concerns of mankind. Only then, after the body and desire are no longer in proximity to them are things worthy of adoration.” In an interview with John Miller, Kelley clari- fied his theory of repression: “Repression is built into classical objects—something’s missing and that’s their power.” The “effect is produced through removal.”25 And so, as the stuffed animal sculp- tures emerged at the end of the 1980s, Kelley focused his attention on the operation of repression not as an iconography of the forbidden, nor merely as a devalued system of production (craft); the attention of the artist would increasingly shift to a thinking of excision, subtraction, and burial themselves as the operations of the repressive mechanism.

We thus sense that in the wake of From My Institution to Yours, Kelley became interested in mim- ing the work of repression itself—excision, burial, exclusion, effacement. As opposed to an ethos of radical desublimation, and in opposition to the wild release of the repressed—one common under- standing of Kelley’s project—the artist could be seen, suddenly, as working with or inhabiting repression’s “logic.” The “missing” blocks of congealed or forgotten space in the later Educational Complex would be one of the primary products of this sudden turn. The hidden or buried site of Sublevel would be another. As with the security guards instructed in From My Institution to Yours to evict all visitors who attempted to enter the work’s space, Kelley was not so much undoing as he was producing repression, perhaps in something like a sadomasochistic mode. To create further repression, to enact—to the letter or to excess—the structures of power and of the law, might be to allow power to produce in a deviant way, to allow it to misfire. Repression would now literally create the sublevel, the underside or underground, the missing and the forgotten, as if the sublevel could only arise through a dynamic of dominance and of masochism, the sublevel as truly “sub”— below, but also subjected, subservient, submissive, potentially subversive. Like a riposte to Michel Foucault’s contemporaneous diatribe against the “repressive hypothesis,” the philosopher’s con- tention that power should be considered not as repressive but as productive, Kelley claims a similar dynamic for repression itself.26 Repression censors but it also produces; it “withdraws” or “subtracts,” but in so doing it causes proliferation, a seething exaggeration of images and forms, a sudden modality of form’s excess.

Blank

In 1989, the same year as the false grade school drawings of Reconstructed History, Kelley returned to the scene of the classroom in a video he produced with Erika Beckman titled Blind Country. Now however Kelley evoked the ur-site of modernist pedagogy, the utopian formal explorations of the Bauhaus. Pointing to Wassily Kandinsky’s notorious Bauhaus questionnaire in which the painter attempted through a statistical survey of his students to assign one primary color to each of the basic geometric shapes—arriving at a yellow triangle, a red square, and a blue circle—Kelley inserted his viewers into a classroom where a priggish teacher confronted an audience of orally fixated, candy-licking students with similar “primal configurations.” Each colored shape was able to be removed from a background of the same primary color—revealing a black void beneath it— and then replaced, in a repeated action that could only evoke Freud’s “fort-da” game, associating abstract form not with logic and transcendence, but with absence, trauma, and loss. “HERE,” the teacher called out, demonstrating the resplendent fullness of his three primal shapes. “GONE,” he lamented, uprooting the geometric form from its ground, revealing the dark chasm hiding beneath.

In a subsequent scene, Kelley suddenly emerged in the role of the “teacher,” ranting and raving while displaying his primal configurations in a classroom now gone dark and smoke-filled like a stinking nightclub, with the infantile students devolved one step further into pig-faced, snorting animals.

“What [do] they remind you of ?” the teacher raged, while facing the shapes drawn upon a blackboard, bending over and presenting his backside to the students. A blue square suddenly emerged, super- imposed over Kelley’s anus. “OK,” he fumed, “well, what do you see?” A red circle appeared, to punctuate Kelley’s crotch as he turned back around. This was followed by a yellow triangle, floating over the artist’s armpit as he raised his arms. Here were the aesthetic “fig leaves” soon to be announced by Kelley as one of the origin points of art, modernist forms not just attached to the lowly genitals or to the body, but configured as direct displacements from them: abstract form as an effigy or a covering, laid over a gaping void, or on top of base, instinctual desires.27

In retrospect, it becomes clear that an assault on abstraction was central to Kelley’s practice from its start. In the early work, reductivism was countered by excess; Minimalist purity was recast, lit- erally, in minor, miniature forms (the shrinking and expanding forms of the Birdhouse sculptures); purity met its opposite in strategies of exaggeration and disguise, what Kelley called in his great essay on caricature and Neo-Geo, “fouled perfection.”28 Abstraction and representation would mis- cegenate, endlessly becoming impure, but also “complex” in Kelley’s precise understanding of this

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Still from Blind Country, 1989 (with Ericka Beckman) Video, color/sound; 19:57 min.

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key term (the parody of autonomy in paintings from Monkey Island like Two Islands Merge to Form a Boat [1982–83] or the skin- or body-fluid-colored monochromes of The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave [1985]).

But by the end of the 1980s, a limit was reached. Kelley’s rethinking of repression heralded a transi- tion in the project, a shift, we might say, in the very nature of the artist’s deployment of modernist form, abstraction, or the “blank” itself. Miscegenation, hybridity, impurity—fouled perfection— would no longer be enough. In 1987, roughly contemporary with From My Institution to Yours, the artist initiated another project called Half a Man, where his first felt banners and stuffed animal sculptures were born. Blankness and reduction were at the genesis of the latter works, but now in the guise of removal or deletion, effigies of the body or of figuration placed literally under erasure. Accumulating a mass of similarly colored stuffed animals together, Kelley could turn bodily effigies into formless lumps, tactile color fields, furry monochromes (Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites [1991]). But this move was just an amplification of Kelley’s initial attraction to using these objects, which stemmed from their redirection of the issue of reduction central to his practice from its beginning. “Purity through reduction always fails,” Kelley has the stuffed bunny rabbit say to the teddy bear in the soundtrack to his work Dialogue #1 (Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ) (1991). “A sad example of this is the child’s stuffed animal,” the other stuffed animal pathetically responds. “It is a model of innocence,” comes the reply. “The major ‘reduction’ in this model is the genitals!…!they have been removed,” the doll self-reflexively relates. “Subtracted,” comes the response,

“The animal has been spayed, neutered; it grows fat and plush.”29

In Half a Man, the first stuffed animal sculptures accompanied two series of paintings and draw- ings, both structured around the blank as removal or deletion. In the paintings series Incorrect Sexual Models (1987), a collection of rearranged images of the body’s innards and viscera, Kelley blanked out the center of one painting titled Mommy’s Penis, evoking fetishism or perversion once more, equating reduction-as-blankness with the psychoanalytic notion of castration, as in the stuffed animal works. The blank now removes the pictorial, and abstraction withdraws figuration, like the fantasy of a penis severed from the body, transforming abstraction into an image of mutila- tion and loss. (In another canvas from the series, one entire half of the larger two-panel painting appears blank, a dichotomous scenario Kelley in pop Freudian–speak then titled Envy.) In the series Seventy-Four Garbage Drawings and One Bush (1988), Kelley performs—once again, to the let- ter of the law—a proper modernist reduction on appropriated examples of an old army comic strip called Sad Sack, deleting all narrative, characters, bodies, and words, until the only thing left are the roiling piles of garbage that formed the background of most of the comic strip’s original scenes.30 A mass cultural source image produces seemingly modernist, biomorphic forms, quasi abstractions that emerge through a process of literal erasure, formal deletion: abstraction as lack, as the production not of transcendent wholeness or fullness, but of absence. In this mode, abstract form emerges as something like the revenge of the background, the surging forth of the beneath or the behind as much as the low.

The next step would be to privilege the beneath literally, operationally, as a new formal tactic within the work. The beneath, the background, the behind, and the below—all of these would come to determine the scene of representation for Kelley, like underdogs rising up against their masters, the revenge of the minor and the weak, the formal equivalent to his earlier thematic exploration of previously unrepresentable or repressed aesthetics of the working class. The surface would soon be undermined by the sublevel, as the artist’s tactics of subtraction and deletion found themselves accompanied by a linked series of devices of addition and layering, devices that made the under- ground literal by reconfiguring the blank now as a kind of additive obliteration, a form of burial. As opposed to the stuffed animal works, the glued-felt banners would be one site of this development, as in Kelley’s crucial Untitled (Pasolini) (1990), one of the banners based on the artist’s collected

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college leaflets. Featuring an improbable call for an actor who could play the martyred poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the banner squared off against the real through a series of added black squares and rectangles, deleting the photograph of Pasolini and much of the communicative information the original appropriated poster contained. It was as if Malevich’s notorious Black Square (1915) had been turned into a form of deletion and concealment. It was as if the extreme limit of modernist reduction had suddenly become instead an addition, an excrescence, a supple- ment, a layer added onto a surface not to produce the self-reflexivity or the transparency of modernism, but the secretive and the hidden, the lost and the forgotten. Reductivism, here, had again been turned into excess, but in a new and literal way. It would no longer speak only of itself, but also of the hidden underground beneath; no longer singular, but more-than-one, the blank had become a form always itself and something else at the very same time, like a pathological symptom or an image in a memory or a dream. In Kelley’s version of abstraction, excess and addition would now be made over into form, a true “reductivism in reverse.”31

The monochromes kept coming. The blanks proliferated, their new aesthetic principle profligate as opposed to rarified.32 The blanks could be materialized, objectified—made real as opposed to ideal—as Kelley immediately explored in the many stuffed animal works that deployed the blank as blankets, objects for covering and wrapping other things, in works like Arena #4 (Zen Garden) (1990), Riddle of the Sphinx (1991–92), or Lumpenprole (1991).33 Mass cultural image sources could be either buried or excised, as in the lost appropriations covered by abstract, gestural zones of paint in The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) or removed from wall-hung posters to floor-bound abstract effigies in the Surrogate series of 1998–99. Dolls could be encased in black monochromes like coffins, hidden from view, as in the Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology series (1990); or, as in the work Center and Peripheries (1990), figurative images might be organized around a central blank, a white monochrome figuring an “organizing principle” that is “paranoiac,” control- ling but “invisible,” a “power base” that is simply “missing.”34 As with the blanket works, Kelley could configure the act of abstraction, the logic of the blank as an endless pile-up—one thing on top of another and then another—a principle that rules over the censor bars, the abstract monochrome rect- angles, that Kelley would actually screw to the surface of his otherwise figurative Timeless Paintings (1995). Abstraction no longer would be permitted to conceive itself as an art of pure surface, but as the effigy covering over another image, an immense lack, a gaping void, perhaps propelling this move of the picture plane out into real space. As opposed to a utopian tabula rasa, the blank would literalize amnesia, enact forgetting, but in so doing transform the logic of abstraction into a true art of memory— which is always in some deep way about the irretrievable, about that which cannot be remembered.

The blank would give voice to an experience of loss, and of the missing. With Kelley’s Missing Time Color Exercises (1998), the monochromes marched out of the studio in endless succession. Filling in grids displaying the covers of an incomplete collection of a raunchy men’s humor maga- zine titled Sex to Sexty, Kelley’s monochromes amounted not to sui generis absolutes but to dependent reconstitutions, launched from a “formal analysis of the color relationships of the extant maga- zines.”35 Like holes in the larger collection of objects, the monochromes here took the place of “the missing issues” of the magazine that Kelley did not possess. They did this in a literal way: they “filled in the blanks” with colors “related directly to what was present,” copied or leeched from the chro- matic choices of the nearest magazines. But—like the work of repression intensified, amplified, the law followed to the letter and to excess—these were blanks filled in with more blanks, holes calling out for further holes, monochromes “designed to point toward that which was missing.”36 Burying, concealing, covering, layering, the blank would call out to be filled, as if we were witness to an occu- pation of modernist form. But the blank in Kelley’s hands also became a form of occupation, an infiltration that worked by giving form an underground, a sublevel, a dimension going beyond— transgressing—that which is given to be seen.

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Parasite

In 1991, Kelley buried a series of floor-bound stuffed animals beneath the largest afghan or blanket he would ever use. A “giant” painting of a sort, Lumpenprole also recalled a communal shroud, allowing funereal or deathly connotations to emerge as the stuffed animal series began to close. The work’s title pointed to both the social underclass and the qualities of a kind of shapeless form— a new iteration of abstraction. Kelley’s various “lump” pieces—stuffed animal accumulations like Brown Star (1991), paintings of trash bags in the Sack Drawings (1988), blanket works covering other objects in the manner of Lumpenprole—have been understood as assaults on visual modernism, their respective evocations of excrement, garbage, and the underclass giving vent to explorations not of the laws of form but of the “formless.”37 And yet their logic may explore the laws of a form we have not yet recognized, a relationship to modernism we have not yet plumbed. Their associations run in other directions than the formless.

The subterranean protrusions in Lumpenprole or Riddle of the Sphinx, for example, called up a series of sexual eruptions breaking through the placid abstract surface of Kelley’s blankets, spelled out in earlier paintings like Shock (1982–83), with its panel depicting a man frightened by his own throb- bing penis rising up from under the covers, a nighttime erection pushing up a bedsheet pierced by two holes so that it evokes as well a comical ghost, a nighttime haunter, an undead woodie. Seeing such a specific evocation in the later, “abstract” lump pieces functions not to anchor a reading of the works or pin down their resonance. Rather, it opens a reading of Kelley’s art to what the artist described as a quest for a kind of “frenzy of meaning,” the condition of the “more-than-one,” the double or multiple image that in fact is the very stake of the misrecognition at the heart of this panel from Shock, itself stemming from the larger exploration of multiplicity and categorical contagion at the heart of Kelley’s project Monkey Island.38

And radical desublimation—the artwork’s (abstraction’s) implied, throbbing tumescence—hardly ends the spiral of associations the lumps throw out. Evoking a pictorial surface riddled with “can- cer or tumors,” in the words of one critic, the lumps in a work like Lumpenprole have a “pathological look.”39 Like pimples, the lumps seem to want to signal contagion or infection, a kind of swelling of form like a sickly body, a protrusion inhabiting form from within, erupting from below. When the lump first appeared in Kelley’s art, this was in fact its original guise: not the formless, but the para- site, the infection, the alien or foreign body, one form inside of another, corrupting it from within.

In a figurative drawing of 1978 titled A Traveling Lump, a red inflammation takes over a body both high and low, “from tongue to foot,” displacing the head and a lower extremity with a blood-red, swollen pustule, like the body caricatured and enlarged, clown-footed, blob-headed. “The corrupt body is attacked by antibodies,” the drawing’s caption explains. “Swelling is the accumulation of these agents. An army encamped around a foe.”

Such are the origins of Kelley’s relationship to abstraction and his “undoing” of figuration or repre- sentation—as well as his caricature of Minimalist and Conceptualist forms of reductivism. It is an origin that makes it impossible to regard Kelley’s endless attention to modernism as anything like a kind of “archaeology” of its forms and possibilities, a mourning in the wake of its conclusion. Rather, to narrativize Kelley’s seemingly obsessive relation to modernism would be to imagine it given over to the parasite, to envision it infected or occupied from within. In addition to drawings like A Traveling Lump or parodic projects like The Poltergeist (1979), the parasite would be one of the most frequent leitmotifs of Kelley’s formative works. It was the focus of a signal early perfor- mance, The Parasite Lilly from 1980. It was key to the historical readings that Kelley attributed to his favorite artists such as Paul Thek, whose work Kelley once described as “parasitic” to the

“hard-edge aesthetic prevalent at the time,” evidently a model for Kelley’s own later projects.40 The parasite was the poetic focus of many early writings, as attractive to Kelley as the subterranean metaphors of the cave or the basement, and often twinned with them. As Kelley wrote in “Urban Gothic,” “There’s a conspiracy afoot—a Yellow Peril—a many headed, slant-eyed, buck-toothed, dog- eating hydra that’s worming its way through the sewers of the city.” The “horrible parasite,” he went on, “once removed and viewed through the window of the microscope, becomes ‘pretty’. This is the decadent beauty of strangeness.”41 And the parasite was central to Kelley’s key notion of the “minor” and to what art historian Branden W. Joseph has called its “opposition to existent historical forms.” Minor histories “are ones that have yet found no need to be written,” Kelley explained. “[T]hey must find their way into history via forms that already exist, forms that are considered worthy of consid- eration. Thus minor histories are at first construed to be parasitic.”42

Like a series of monochromes multiplying wildly and beyond control, Kelley’s operation on modern- ism was intensive, we might say; both processual and productive, it creates difference—what I have also here called deviation—from within the very structures of its host, perhaps from within a struc- ture of domination or restriction itself. Rather than canceling modernism or simply negating it— as much postmodernism was thought to do—casting modernist forms in a minor or parasitical mode lives off their remnants, ambivalently opening them up. The parasite entails not an archaeology of modernism, but a digging down in another sense: going beneath the surface of modernism to produce neither typology nor catalogue, but an infection of modernist form, which would also be a perversion of it, leeching its power, transforming such forms into something else. Kelley’s art does not mourn for modernism’s loss, but furthers this loss—working through loss into excess, into something like a modernist “pathology”—toward, as the artist would have it, a “Utopian Arts Complex.”43

Given the parasitical structure of the work, it might make sense to speak of much of Kelley’s larger project not in terms of postmodernism, but as what could be called paramodernism. Instead of sheer negation, aftermath, or reversal, the paramodern wants to go “beyond” the modern. The paramodern creates from within the modern another space, another site, a literal para-site, an excessive division and multiplication from within. It is precisely this space of otherness in Kelley’s work that I have been calling here the sublevel. For the sublevel is a para-site, we might say, a beneath or a beyond of form. And yet it carries along with it a formal logic, surely (parasitically). Emerging not only against modernism but also from it, the sublevel brings modernist form to an entirely other space.

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Installation view of Lumpenprole, 1991 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1994

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Subdividing form, burrowing beneath the visual, opening up the object given to be seen, the sub- level emerges—almost utopian in its way—as an engine of transformation, of form as transformation. In this, the sublevel hardly remains a mere metaphor, a kind of fantasy, operative allegorically in only certain of Kelley’s key installations like Educational Complex and Sublevel itself. In Kelley’s hands, the sublevel amounts as well to an operation; we could call it a modality of creation, an unsung means for the production of form. For form to have a sublevel—like Lumpenprole, throwing up lumps, pimples, eruptions from below—means that such form cannot be conceived any longer as merely formal. It becomes instead an unimaginable engine, as modernism had once wanted to be, of form’s transformation, but also its deformation, deviation. It cannot be conceived as singular in any sense, immediately becoming double, multivalent in both meaning and direction (a parasite is always at least two things). The sublevel emerges in the parasitical inhabitation of other forms, older forms, modernist forms. But it does not remain where it began. The sublevel involutes mod- ernism’s priorities, making reduction over into excess, like cells dividing wildly, with modernism’s singularity going double, its monomaniacal qualities going multiple, rhizomatic, attaching them to all that can be imagined to burgeon forth from underneath. Sheer doubleness, excess, differentia- tion from within, the sublevel operates parasitically by giving form another side, giving form an underside. Kelley’s sublevel gives birth to a vast underground.

Underground

In 1994, Kelley dug out a series of works on paper he had completed some twenty years before, stu- dent works, exhibiting them collectively under the new title Missing Time. Referring to a “blank” time, to memory loss, the Missing Time drawings thus raised the issue of abstraction yet again, but also indicated a time and a past that had been repressed, obliterated, producing abstraction from the process of repression itself. This, for Kelley, was the logic of “missing time.”

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Inconsistently, incoherently, the artist reworked some of the older paintings. Sometimes adding formless pink blobs or biomorphic growths, he most often inundated his images with large swaths of dark brown paint, with gestural marks and loose, abstract fields. These incontinent rectangular blocks of paint might seem to follow and outline a representational form in the earlier work, as in Ka-Rumba (1975/94); they could overtake the entire center of an image, occupying it, pushing all figurative detail to the margins, as in Teen Angel (1975/94); for the most part, however, Kelley’s abstract gestures reiterated the borders of these excessively framed and sometimes literally shaped works on paper, echoing and rebounding from the forms already present.44 Amplifying, we might say, their existent forms, Kelley’s supplemental abstract zones might refocus attention on a detail, reframing a prior image by exaggerating the frame, as in Fab Aura (1974/94). They could also con- nect disparate, seemingly unrelated figurative or collagelike integers, suturing the incommensurable impossibly together, as in Untitled (Woman and Legs) (1974/94). But in refocusing they could also obliterate the image, as occurred with the now absent landscape in Self-Portrait in Suburban Landscape (1975/93), with at least two-thirds of the former image gone missing beneath a lake of loosely-brushed, nail-polish-red paint.

Two operations, then, characterize Kelley’s work in the Missing Time paintings. First, Kelley inhab- ited the paintings’ existent logic, reworking their forms as if from within. The incongruity between figuration and abstraction already characterized Kelley’s student work, dominated by a collage aesthetic of disparate image fragments held together by Abstract Expressionist stains and splotches, by garish color fields and gestural abstract zones. This condition of hybridity gets named in the spe- cific thematics of the drawings themselves, themes that Kelley would never abandon, such as Hermaphrodite (1974). And it is underlined in an aesthetic that leans heavily upon those modern- ist painters who never resolved the dialectic of figuration and abstraction in their own work, with images evoking so many shades of Francis Bacon, or Willem de Kooning, or even Richard Hamilton. Robert Rauschenberg’s dialectic of image and gesture ghosts the entire project, a dynamic intensified by the manner of Kelley’s drawing within the images, recalling the rubbed quality of Rauschenberg’s lighter-fluid transfer drawings descending upon the images as an added layer from above or the tracing of a form pulled up through the surface of the sheet from below.45 Kelley’s reworking of the paintings enters into such dynamics again, from within. The work involves inhabiting a prior form, working immanently through its logic, like following a rule—in this case Kelley’s student training— to the letter of the law. And the result is intensity, works that are “stronger in their own terms,”46 as the artist put it, intensified from within.

This inhabitation involves a second operation, however, an intensification that is also a form of burial, deletion, blocking and blacking out many of the original forms. Steeped in a modernist ethos deeply indebted to the formalist teachings of Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, Kelley’s student works corralled their figurative and abstract incongruity into a typical Hofmann- esque “push-pull” or relational compositional mode. Kelley refused “to give up the gesture,” as he later explained. “I like the goopy, slightly disgusting surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, and I thought such surfaces could be used to great advantage in combination with various kinds of more loaded images.”47 Twenty years later, Kelley recoded this push-pull balancing act as another sado- masochistic dynamic, further obliterating and inundating with new abstract blanks the images he had himself once created, self-destruction renamed, as the artist put it, “an exercise in self-dis- covery.”48 What might have connoted stubborn and Oedipal late modern recalcitrance in the 1970s, however, now signified in an utterly different way. For it had been the image—mediated figuration, appropriated representation—that had triumphed in postmodernism, overtaking abstraction, dis- persing modernism, literally displacing it from the scene. Played out in reverse, Kelley’s deletions unleashed the gestural mark upon the image, a vision of a reborn abstraction now drowning out the image and the past.

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Nowhere within the series does this dynamic become more reflexive than in the image Night Cry (1975/93), an early reworking within the series, perhaps one that indeed suggested the logic of the larger project. Here we witness a noir scene of a cartoon body, a cadaver depicted as wrapped and bound, literally occluded from view, but also sinking into the depths, weighted down to plummet into the watery chasm that the icy blue paint represents. However, the image also sinks into the excessive layers of gestural abstraction that Kelley has now piled upon his earlier scene, burying this body a second time, intensifying and reframing its unimaginable submersion. We face an image that both represents and embodies the burial of the image, an experience of beneathness in both thematic and formal terms—in both figurative and abstract modes—a figuring of the operation of the underground.

The sublevel thrives here—it is visible, palpable, seething—and abstraction creates it, through an operation everywhere throwing up further incongruity, more difference, intensification in something like its pure form. At the very initiation of Kelley’s work, the enemy is shown not just to have been modernist reductivism, but what the artist retrospectively named “abstract equivalency,” his early paintings’ reaction against the aesthetic of someone like Rauschenberg, who Kelley saw as equating formalist devices and figurative ones, abstract gestures and pop images, using them as if they were all the “same” thing, equivalent materials. But in this war on equivalency, a deep paradox emerges. In the battle against the minimalist, the reductivist, or the pure, Kelley’s first move was to turn to a kind of maximalism or excess, to what he called “loaded images,” to “images that couldn’t be reduced so easily to a kind of abstract equivalency.”49 These images are of a particular kind. The sublevel that emerges in the Missing Time works comes into being only on top of the burial— or, perhaps more aptly, the embalming—of a vast, incongruous iconography emerging directly from what we might call a “subcultural” space, from the social formation of the underground. As opposed to the deep formal notion of the same I have been exploring here, Kelley’s work begins in this incon- gruous meeting of the social underground, of the subcultural or the countercultural, with the remnants of modernist form. “Like Jim Nutt,” Kelley explained, “I began to use low imagery from bottom-end advertising, drawing on my own knowledge of fringe popular culture: weird second-rate comic books, erotica, Santo the Mexican masked wrestler, and drawings by adolescents. I also drew upon imagery associated with the art world and underground culture: Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, William Burroughs, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Igor Stravinsky, Sun Ra.”50 Colors and patterns could also evoke the underground, the counterculture, as in the many paintings that seemed to deploy tie-dye effects, hippie-clad, or pressed close to the feminist craft movement emerging at the time, gender-bending. And alongside writers and musicians like Burroughs or Sun Ra, Kelley would embed in the Missing Time works a series of portraits of his close friends, figures like Niagara, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw, who came to make up the noise band Destroy All Monsters with Kelley during these crucial early years.51

What must be narrated is the trajectory of this dalliance with the underground in Kelley’s art, the move from modernist-inspired painting tactics to a rock band, from noise music to placing the underground back into the museum and gallery world, but now in “appropriated” or citational ways at the moment of the rise of postmodernism. Thus we can understand the vast panoply of graphic tactics in Kelley’s now-canonical paintings from the 1980s. “I was familiar with that really low stuff,” Kelley once averred to John Miller, “and with the traditional tactics of the counterculture: to use the worst and trashiest stuff that the main culture abhors.”52 Confusing to most early commentators on Kelley’s art, however, was the way in which such images were being offered in an “ironic,” or appropriated mode, not in a sincere one; by the 1980s, the underground sources of Kelley’s aesthetic were already at one remove. “To adopt an invisible style was part of the

Page 360 [postmodern] strategy, and to constantly shift personas. Unlike a lot of the ‘pictures’ generation, who adopted media personas,” Kelley explained, referring to both his early performances and his images, “I tended to adopt different subcultural personas.”53 But this shape-shifting, like the Owl of Minerva, perhaps only flies at dusk, and ever present within Kelley’s importation of the under- ground into art production would be something missing from most understandings of the high art and mass culture dialectic: an appreciation of the decimation of underground culture itself.54 By the 1980s, the social and cultural tactics of the underground—with its aesthetics of the ridicu- lous, of libidinal excess and radical desublimation, of wildness, exaggeration, and extremity—were largely spent. It was Kelley’s cognizance of this that seemingly drove his still misunderstood recoding of underground radicalism into a radicality of another sort, into a formal, perhaps allegorical project.

For by the moment of Missing Time, it would be the underground and its many signifiers that would come to be buried in Kelley’s art—lost, blanked out, literally covered over, but also thus reconfig- ured. The underground would find itself submerged by its enemy, by the traces and remnants of modernism or the dominant culture, in a manner however that magnified difference and excess, incongruity and intensity, against all odds. The tactics of abstraction and repression, of abstraction as repression, that Kelley came to develop in the second half of his career can only be understood in this deep entwinement with the rapid destruction of underground or subcultural space and prac- tice. The lesson of the work thus seems to be that sometimes repression is a means of keeping something alive; it would seem that the impulses of the underground can only thrive repressed, beneath the surface, driven down into a space of invisibility and utter obscurity. A tactic of salvage and survival, then, repression in this understanding would also provide a way to understand modernism in turn as more than just a “restrictive” structure. Through its capacity for preserva- tion and proliferation, repression might just continue modernism in its way, keeping it alive but in a new form, making its restrictions productive, using its structure parasitically in excess of itself.55 The underground would be buried, only to infect its gravedigger from within, converting an entire language and history of forms.

It is this process of transformation that we sense in the echoes and reboundings that Kelley’s abstract blanks in Missing Time also create, bouncing modernist forms off of prior subcultural ones, inten- sifying and refocusing underground images as much as burying them, carrying the energies of one into the other. The sublevel, we might insist, comes to be born of this rebounding. It is itself an echo, a reiteration, doubleness and excess made over into form. For ultimately, the sublevel casts mod- ernism as an effigy. And this is so, for simultaneously, the sublevel presents the underground in effigy. “That’s a dead culture,” Kelley once deadpanned, “so it can be art. Dead things are art, basi- cally.”56 But the ghouls, zombies, and vampires that overran the artist’s late works suggest a slightly different conclusion. We are witness to an art thriving off an underground cancelled but also pre- served, withdrawn into the darkness, perhaps proliferating there, a subcultural space figured ambivalently as undead, in other words. Modernism too, in Kelley’s hands, might best be described as undead, buried alive, perhaps, or a corpse made to walk the earth once more, seeking vengeance, out for blood. Day Is Done is this work’s motto. It is the sublevel’s litany. Night cries.

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24 Freud, “Resistance and Repression,” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17) [Part III: General Theory of the Neuroses], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVI, p. 295. See also “Repression (1915),” The Standard Edition, vol. XIV, especially p. 153.

25 John Miller, “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller in Los Angeles on March 21, 1991,” Mike Kelley, ed. William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh (New York: Art Resources Transfer, 1992), p. 30.

26 See Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1980) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1990).

27 Throughout these scenes in Blind Country, Kelley’s “primal configurations” deviated slightly from Kandinsky’s conclusions, altering the Bauhaus yellow trian- gle, red square, and blue circle into a yellow triangle, red circle, and blue square. This deviation called up another, more recent deployment and alteration of the Bauhaus ques- tionnaire’s forms, the early logo devised for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, spelling out the abbreviation MOCA with a blue square, green circle, and red triangle.

28 Kelley, “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature (1989),” Foul Perfection, pp. 20–38.

29 Kelley, Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ, cited in Timothy Martin, “Janitor in a Drum: Excerpts from a Performance History,” Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, p. 86.

30 The series title Seventy-Four Garbage Drawings and One Bush seems inescapably a parody of the Conceptualist"/"Pop books of Ed Ruscha, specifically Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). The manifesto of Kelley’s submis- sion to procedures of what I am continually referring to here as “the law” would be his text “Goin’ Home, Goin’ Home (1995),” reprinted in Minor Histories, pp. 74–79, and written originally to accompany the first exhibition of the paintings The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) (1994). “The law is the law,” Kelley states in this text. “It is bur- ied in you. You operate perfectly well under its domination. […] Your memory loss is successful, planned erasure. You are now living, breath- ing indoctrination.” Seeming to

1 Mike Kelley, “We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses [1995],” Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 263. Attached to the retrospection of Kelley’s Educational Complex project, the artist here drafted state- ments describing in the voice of a pseudo-analyst a series of photo- graphs of children’s artworks he had saved from an early experience as an assistant art teacher in the Ann Arbor public schools.

2 Kelley, “Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet,” in Mike Kelley: Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet (Milan: Galleria Emi Fontana, 2004), n.p.

3 Kelley, “Death and Transfiguration: A Letter from America,” Paul Thek (Turin: Castello di Rivara, 1992), reprinted in Kelley, Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John Welchman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 146.

4 Gretchen Berg, “Andy: My True Story,” Los Angeles Free Press, March 17, 1963, p. 3, cited in Hal Foster, “Death in America,” Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 71.

5 Kelley, “Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) (1991),” in Minor Histories, pp. 35–36.

6 For a reading of McCollum’s notion of the surrogate, see my essay “Fraser’s Form,” Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003 (Cologne: DuMont Verlag, 2003).

7 Kelley confronted the notion of the surrogate directly in his Surrogate series of 1998–99; on which, see Mike Kelley and John Miller: Consolation Prize (Vancouver: Belkin Art Gallery, 2000). On the effigy as opposed to the surrogate, one should contem- plate the video effigies of artist Tony Oursler, one of Kelley’s closest interlocutors.

8 Kelley, “Trauma Club: Dennis Cooper Talks with Mike Kelley,” Artforum, October 2000, p. 125.

9 Mike Kelley, “Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas,” Mike Kelley: Two Projects (Braunschweig: Kunstverein Braunschweig and Cologne: Walther König, 1999), reprinted in Minor Histories, p. 104.

describe Kelley’s failure to revolt completely against his modernist art training and background, the text also describes allegorically the artist’s formal procedures, as I am detailing them here, of erasure and burial themselves, the work of the sublevel. “Inversion and perversion serve only to reinscribe the law they seek to undermine. Surface mean- ing is of no consequence. The underlying rule never falters.”

31 I refer to the title of Alex Alberro’s essay on the early work of Dan Graham, “Reductivism in Reverse,” Tracing Cultures: Art History, Criticism, Critical Fictions (New York: Whitney Museum, 1994), pp. 7–28.

32 These terms, the monochrome and the blank, are not equivalent of course, but their interchange has a history. Andy Warhol notoriously referred to the monochrome panels he sometimes attached to his celeb- rity portraits—to make them larger, and thus “more expensive”— as “blanks”; see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One Dimensionsal Art: 1956–1966,” Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), reprinted in Michelson, ed., Andy Warhol, pp. 15–19.

33 Kelley lashed out at critics who described the Arena and Dialogue series as utilizing rugs: “But they don’t look like rugs, the materials don’t have anything to do with rugs. They’re blankets with totally other kinds of associations. I have done some things with rugs … but they had a different kind of association.” Miller, “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller,” p. 44.

34 Miller, “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller,” p. 51.

35 Kelley, “Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas (1998),” Minor Histories, p. 107.

36 Daniel Kothenschulte, “Black Nostalgia: An Interview with Mike Kelley,” Mike Kelley: Two Projects, p. 52.

37 Rosalind Krauss, “The Destiny of the Informe,” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 247–52. My essay’s notion of difference and intensity is actually very close to the manner in which Krauss reads the lumps in Lumpenprole and Riddle of the Sphinx.

10 Kelley produced a collaborative piece with Paul McCarthy based on Vito Acconci’s early performance pieces (Fresh Acconci, 1995) and he referenced Seedbed in his various writings, calling it an “evocation of architectural libido.” See Kelley, “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature,” Artforum, January 1989, reprinted in Foul Perfection, p. 28.

11 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism [1927],” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1951–73), vol. XXI. For Jacques Derrida’s gloss on the spatial valence of Freud’s narrative, see my chapter “Long Live Daddy,” The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 361–62.

12 Howard Singerman has pointed to the multiple valences of Kelley’s title, referring to a “complex” not just as a group of buildings but also in the psychoanalytical and mili- tary-industrial senses. See Singerman, “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies,” October 126 (Fall 2008), pp. 44–68. More recently, John Kelsey has adopted the term “complex” to describe the sculptural work of artist Rachel Harrison; while con- ceived to displace Rauschenberg’s term “combine,” Kelsey’s word choice points to the profound influ- ence of Kelley’s example specifically on contemporary forms of sculp- ture. See Kelsey, “Sculpture in an Abandoned Field,” Rachel Harrison: If I Did It (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007), pp. 120–125. One formal question to be considered regarding Educational Complex would be where the tabletop format of the sculpture emerges and how this dual-sided sculptural support then functions for Kelley in the work. One could look back to the use of folding tables within the stuffed animal sculptures, especially by Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991); one sees tabletop sculpture emerging directly in this installa- tion’s wake, such as the work Gussied Up (1992). One wants to point to such dual-sided precedents as Paul Thek’s Dwarf Parade Table (1969). (Incidentally, 1992 is the same year Kelley published an essay on Thek). Paul McCarthy also uti- lized table formats in ways important to Kelley. Surely the issue of the tabletop sculpture had emerged before within modernism, notoriously with the work of Anthony Caro.

38 Kelley describes his aesthetic as courting a “frenzy of meaning” in Rob Storr, “An Interview with Mike Kelley,” p. 93.

39 Elizabeth Sussman, “Introduction,” Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, p. 32.

40 Kelley, “Death and Transfiguration [on Paul Thek] (1992),” Foul Perfection, p. 142. I have developed Kelley’s insight in “Paul Thek: Notes from the Underground,” in Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky, Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of Art; and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 190–203.

41 Kelley, “Urban Gothic (1985),” Foul Perfection, pp. 3–4.

42 Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A “Minor” History) (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 48, and Kelley, “Introduction to an Essay Which Is in the Form of Liner Notes,” reprinted in Documenta X Short Guide, pp. 114–15, cited in Joseph, p. 48.

43 “Toward a Utopian Arts Complex” was the title Kelley gave to the exhibition in which he first showed Educational Complex (Metro Pictures, 1995).

44 In addition to other more evi- dent references that Kelley has noted in his writings, the shaped works on paper seem a response to the rise of the shaped canvas within Minimalism and Color Field paint- ing during the 1960s (especially the work of Frank Stella); the frequent use of decorative swatches and what appears to be wallpaper in these works also points to the use of such materials from Rauschenberg’s Combines to the rise of the Pattern and Decoration movement by the early 1970s, to which Kelley’s entire lifelong interest in “craft” should be compared.

45 Kelley points directly to Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings in his essay on the project: “Once, I was given an assignment in a drawing class literally to mimic Rauschenberg’s lighter-fluid trans- fer drawings.” Mike Kelley, “Missing Time: Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered (1995),” in Minor Histories, p. 64.

46 Ibid., p. 62.

13 Mike Kelley, “Urban Gothic,” Spectacle 3 (1985), reprinted in Foul Perfection, p. 9.

14 Kelley, “Sublevel,” p. 104.

15 All quotes in this paragraph Kelley, “Sublevel,” p. 104. Kelley has explained his motivations in the two parts of Sublevel as an attempt to figure different kinds of “depth”: “I wanted to get across a subterra- nean feel of two kinds of depth, something akin to the relationship between the subconscious and the unconscious: a below-meaning and an even further, inaccessible zone. Smallness, closeness, and darkness in architecture always evoke this kind of psychological effect. That’s what I was working with.” Isabelle Graw, “Isabelle Graw in Conversation with Mike Kelley,” Mike Kelley (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 21.

16 The title of the essay Kelley wrote to accompany his structure— “Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas”—intensifies the alle- gorical relationship of the sculpture to aliens, referring as it does to a notorious case of UFO sightings called the “Michigan Swamp Gas Case” from 1966, linked to the period of Kelley’s youth and the area near where he was raised. More recently, Kelley’s band Destroy All Monsters released a recording with the title Swamp Gas in 2002.

17 Kelley, “An Architecture Composed of the Paintings of Richard Powers and Francis Picabia (1997) (with Paul McCarthy),” in Minor Histories, p. 343.

18 Rethinking relations between artist and artwork, and between artwork and viewer, in sadomasoch- istic terms (as opposed to merely aesthetic forms of pleasure and delectation) was one of Kelley’s most important strategies. This could structure a rereading of the entire body of work and its larger reflection on forms of power, domi- nation, and deviation. It is also central to the notion of the “sub- level” that I am developing, an explicit thinking of form in terms of dominance and submission. One of the few moments in which Kelley commented directly on S&M and his work comes in his interview with Rob Storr, “An Interview with Mike Kelley,” Art in America, June 1994, p. 91. I explore a masochistic model of the work of art in Dada in my “Long Live Daddy,” in The Artwork Caught by the Tail.

47 Ibid., p. 65

48 Ibid., p. 62.

50 Ibid., 65. Kelley extended this critique to most forms of Pop art, linking it to his far-reaching protest against the surface appearance of forms, in favor of an art in “secret” or in “disguise”: “Pop art, as far as I can see, was pretty formal. It was like Hard Edge painting in disguise. There’s nothing in Pop art that really addresses the material it pictured, with perhaps the excep- tion of Warhol.” Mike Kelley, “Toying with Second-Hand Souvenirs: Interview with Paul Taylor,” Mike Kelley (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1992), p. 60. (First published in Flash Art, October 1990.)

51 Kelley, “Missing Time,” p. 65.

52 Burroughs recurs several times in the series, but never as reflexively as in the painting William Burroughs Quote (1974), which seems to want to represent the image ground giving way to a gap- ing, bleeding wound, a festering hole, the underground in multiple forms. Kelley was giving vision to a specific passage from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (itself a quotation in the text, presented there as exagger- ation and cliché), which he scrawled onto the bottom of the image: “She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hun- ger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of the ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on s—,” the citation of a citation trails off.

53 Miller, “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller,” p. 9.

54 Kellein, Mike Kelley and Thomas Kellein: A Conversation, p. 15.

55 On this history and shift, a key reference point for Kelley himself would be the monumental text written by the artist’s friend John Miller, “Burying the Underground [English manuscript],” published in German as “Den Untergrund begra- ben [1995],” When Down is Up: Ausgewählte Schriften 1987–1999 (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2001), pp. 159–186. Miller traced the decima- tion of the underground and its more recent resurgence only in right-wing and reactionary forms in “Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day! New Politics of Hate in the U.S.A.

19 Thomas Kellein, Mike Kelley and Thomas Kellein: A Conversation (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1994), p. 39.

20 Kellein, p. 39. See also Kelley’s essay “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure,” (1988), pp. 12–20.

21 From My Institution to Yours of course presaged Kelley’s Educational Complex as well. Given the possessives in Kelley’s title, From My Institution to Yours per- forms this in a manner very similar to Marcel Duchamp’s equally auto- retrospective painting Tu m’ (1918), which paradoxically announced many of the dynamics of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Educational Complex works within Kelley’s larger project in a manner analogous to Duchamp’s Large Glass.

22 Rob Storr, “What’s Not to Like?” Artforum, October 2004, p. 306. One of the best essays ever written on Kelley’s work and the one essay to take most seriously the artist’s working-class origins and his chal- lenge to notions of a class-based aesthetic is John Miller, “The Poet as Janitor,” Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), pp. 149–59. As the installation From My Institution to Yours confronted the critical legacies of agitprop and the revolutionary avant-garde, later uses of the same “worker drawings” by Kelley would target the bureau- cratic nature of the “aesthetic of administration” associated by a critic like Benjamin Buchloh with postwar neo-avant-gardes like Conceptual art (such as in Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry, 1991). On these linked projects, see Paul Schimmel, “A Full-Scale Model for a Dysfunctional Institutional Hierarchy,” Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, pp. 211–19.

23 Kelley, “Talking Failure: Mike Kelley and Julie Sylvester,” Parkett no. 31 (1992), cited in John C. Welchman, “The Mike Kelleys,” Mike Kelley (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 60. I am indebted here to Welchman’s discussion in this essay of what he calls Kelley’s “repression- production.”

[English manuscript],” published in German as “Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day! Die neue Politik des Hasses in den U.S.A.,” Marius Babias and Achim Könneke, eds., Die Kunst des Öffentlichen (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1998), pp. 186–229. See, also, Paul Mann, “Stupid Undergrounds,” Postmodern Culture, no. 3 (May 1995). The classic attempt to theo- rize subculture or the underground remains Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979). I wish to thank John Miller for making the full English manuscripts of his essays available to me.

56 In his essay on Educational Complex, Anthony Vidler stresses the blocked or blank space in Kelley’s models as a mode of “pres- ervation.” See Vidler, “Deep Space/ Repressed Memory: Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex,” Mike Kelley, ed. José Lebrero Stals (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1997), pp. 125–27.

57 Miller, “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller,” p. 18.

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Eva Meyer-Hermann conducted this interview with Mike Kelley on November 7, 2011, at his studio in Los Angeles. The artist had revised some two-thirds of the transcript before his untimely death at the end of January 2012. What follows are portions of the revised interview, with minor changes for style and consistency, along with material from sections not reviewed by the artist, which I have edited to the best of my ability so that they accord with both Mike’s detailed scrutiny of the text and my experience of working with him on writings and interviews of different kinds over the past couple of decades. Some of the more provisional sections of the unedited conversation have been omitted; I have indicated the addition of passages that are of interest, but which needed fairly extensive revision, by posting double asterisks before and after the sections in question. A single asterisk indicates material that has been moved but not changed (beyond normal copy edits). I have added a few endnotes to clarify references about which information might not be widely available, and supplied dates for artworks by Mike and others.

Mike was not in good shape when the interview took place, nor for the most part when he reviewed it. It’s a testimony to his professionalism and courage that the draft he left behind was so lucid, honest, and engaging.

—John C. Welchman

top to bottom Personality Crisis (Untitled #1), Personality Crisis (Untitled #2), and Personality Crisis (Death Trail of a Flea), 1982 3 parts: acrylic on graph paper 22.5 × 28.5 inches (57.22 × 48.26 cm) each

368 369

Eva Meyer-Hermann One of the reasons I wanted to interview you was to talk about feminism in relation to your work. I would like to know more about the cultural climate at the California Institute of the Arts [CalArts] when you were there, between 1976 and 1978—right after the period in which Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro set up the Feminist Art Program [1972–74]. Did that affect your decision to attend CalArts or interest you, specifically?

Mike Kelley By the time I entered CalArts the women’s program was gone. I didn’t know about it so it did not affect my decision to attend the school. I chose the school because of the large number of faculty members that interested me. The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles was very much a separatist organization, so I was not person- ally familiar with what was going on there. These women artists wanted to work in what they felt was a safe envi- ronment, free from male influence. So I really did not become very aware of their work until I graduated from CalArts in 1978 and got involved with the alternative space LACE [Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions], where some of the artists associated with the Woman’s Building and other feminist groups presented work or were on the committees. High Performance magazine, which was in the same building as LACE, focused a lot on feminist art- ists as well. It was largely a reader-contributed magazine, so the content was quite eclectic, though feminist dis- course was very much in the air. But, as far as feminism being a big focus in my education at CalArts, no.

I was already attracted to feminist discourse by the time I was in high school, simply because of the increasing vis- ibility of the women’s movement and because of personal experiences. As the late-60s, antiwar, leftist movement fell apart it fractured into various identity-oriented move- ments, and you started to have divisions within the political left. In high school I was part of a small group of leftist students and, of course, the women’s movement was a topic of discussion. A very close friend of mine came out as a lesbian after we both moved to Ann Arbor, and she disappeared into the lesbian separatist world. I ran into her on the street and her friends would not allow her to speak to me. It was hard, as a male, to support some feminist activities because of this separatist attitude. I studied art at the University of Michigan [U of M] in Ann Arbor where there were very few art-related organiza- tions. There was a lesbian-run gallery and I tried to support it as much as I could, just to be helpful. I had experience cleaning and buffing floors and did that for them for free—but they were very distrustful of me. The work shown at the gallery was primarily crafts-oriented and, in that sense, adopted a kind of “essentialist” posi- tion. Most of the women artists I knew were opposed to that position. They did not want to work with traditional

“women’s materials” like fabric or ceramics because they thought that to do so simply reinforced female stereotypes.

How was the performance received?

People just thought it was shit and, in a sense, it was.

You invited the audience with false advertising?

Yes, we posted posters for fake lectures to get our audi- ence, but when people showed up they were presented instead with a kind of anti-Happening. It was a prank.

But they stayed through it?

No, they all left.

But you continued to perform?

Yes. We continued until we tired of it, or until whatever class that was actually scheduled to use the space showed up. It was a guerilla performance. We did not have permis- sion to use the space; we simply found out when the space was empty and used it. The performance was a provoca- tion. But, in a sense, our whole lifestyle was a provocation. The way we looked, our art, everything we did was meant to be abnormal.

I read that when you were a kid you refused to play sports, but instead wanted to sew.

That’s not quite true. There is a photo of me, when I was around fifteen or sixteen, holding a crude doll that I sewed. But I had no desire to learn to sew; I only sewed the doll in order to anger my father. He kept trying to force me to do these masculine activities that didn’t inter- est me—like working on cars or playing baseball. I didn’t want to do that; I just wanted to hang around with my hippie stoner friends and listen to records and goof off. He treated me like a sissy, so I became a sissy to get revenge. I sewed this figure and decorated my bedroom with frilly little girls’ dolls—but mixed them up with anarchist and psychedelic posters. My father and I constantly fought about the length of my hair. He could not accept long hair as being masculine when it was, simply, male teen style of the period. This kind of reaction radicalized me and made me aware of how strict gender identifications were. If he would have just left me alone I probably would not have become the kind of ultraradical he so feared and hated. And it wasn’t just him. In gym class, for example, because I had long hair, the teacher forced me to wear a flowery woman’s rubber swimming cap and called me “lady.” Guys I knew were getting beaten up just because they had long hair when they were just rocker dudes. It soon became the norm for guys to have long hair, but these experiences left an imprint on me. They pushed me further out. By the time I left home to go to college it would not be uncommon for me to be dressed in my custodial uniform and work boots, but with a 50s girl’s sweater and nail pol- ish. It didn’t make any sense—it wasn’t normal

“cross-dressing.”

When I moved to Los Angeles I saw that many women art- ists still embraced this essentialist position. Pattern and Decoration painting is an example; this was a movement that grew out of the desire of many women painters to find an essentially female approach to painting (though male artists were part of the movement as well). Artists associated with the Woman’s Building were struggling with this issue. I think many of the works produced in that context were by-products of consciousness-raising discus- sions related to prescribed material usage in traditional women’s art forms: specifically, crafts like quilt-making, decorating, etc. Some of my works of this period are very related to this mindset—the Birdhouse sculptures, for example. These works were made specifically to comment on my class status and on clichés of maleness. Building a birdhouse would be a typical masculine pastime in the suburb in which I grew up, but was hardly the norm at CalArts. But these works were not made as comments on feminist practice. They developed naturally out of my own experience and the elitist frame of graduate art school. They were, though, highly ironic. I was not attempting to position traditional birdhouses in the canon of fine art.

In the work of some of my female contemporaries (not at CalArts, but of my generation, like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, or Sherrie Levine) there was a refusal to produce works that read as specifically feminine, even if they addressed feminist issues. These artists were criticized by some first-wave feminist artists and critics for adopt- ing “male” styles in order to attain success in a male- dominated art world. Similarly, I have been attacked for

“co-opting” women’s practices in certain of my works and not giving credit to feminist artists. I believe, in both instances, these attacks are misguided. The point was to reveal gender as a construct, not to reinforce traditional gender roles.

I recall seeing an image from the performance Futurist Ballet in 1973 in which you are wearing a little girl’s First Communion dress. Was this gender-bending some kind of political statement?

Yes, but I would hardly call it feminist. That performance was a response to my readings on Dada performance, but its “look” comes directly out of the camp trash aesthetic, especially the performances of the Cockettes or the films of Jack Smith or John Waters. I was very interested at that moment in their “queer” aesthetics, where gender is confused and perversion is championed. The Futurist Ballet was, actually, a response to a course on Dada taught by Diane Kirkpatrick, who had written a monograph on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi.1 Kirkpatrick was the only art historian I can remember who taught courses on mod- ern art at U of M.

When I saw documentation of the performances of the Cockettes and John Waters’s films I was immediately impressed by them—there were no fixed gender roles. They were not straight, they were not gay—they were pure confusion. I saw these films in Ann Arbor while I was attending art school, but they were not shown in the art context. The Futurist Ballet is a reflection of where I was at that time. But that performance was not presented within the art school either. As I said, it was a guerilla performance presented in a university lecture hall, and the audience was tricked into attending it by fake flyers for nonexistent lectures on a number of subjects. There was no place for this kind of activity in the art program.

So you were not commenting explicitly on feminist art tropes until the later 1980s, when you began the Half a Man series?

As I’ve stated before, my initial rationale for working with sewn objects was not about addressing issues of gender, it was about the commodity discourse that was dominating the art world in the 80s. I chose to use those objects because my assumption was that they were gifts. Because they were handmade and not commercially produced, I felt I could safely assume they had been given away rather than sold. I was trying to expand the discourse on commodification in the art world. If it was wrong that artworks be sold, did that mean that objects that were given away were free of the effects of capitalism? I knew this was not the case, and I was sick of only hearing art- works discussed in terms of the market while ignoring all of their specific qualities. Basically, one could not make an artwork anymore; one could only make a product. That seemed to be the limit of the discourse at that time.

The first two works I made using sewn items were More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) and Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set (1987). More Love Hours was made from found, handmade items like afghans, dolls, pot holders, etc. It was composed in an allover, noncomposi- tional manner. Plush Kundalini was composed of commercially manufactured stuffed toys in a vertical ori- entation that related specifically to Tantric belief systems. I chose this contrast to point out the obvious difference between handmade and commercially made objects. The compositional differences were jokes on gender identifi- cation: the vertical, “phallic,” and commercial Tantric sculpture would obviously be gendered male; and the expansive, acompositional, handmade “field” would be gendered female. So gender was a consideration in the works, but they were not specifically made to comment on “women’s” art.

I was naïve to believe that the general art viewer could get past the fact that the bulk of the materials used in the construction of More Love Hours were, more than likely, made by women. But to limit the focus to that fact is to limit the links I make between gift-giving and labor, worth, guilt, and payback solely to gift-giving by women. That is,

1 See Diane Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Paolozzi (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969).

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your performances—and people don’t know much about them, visually at least—when they see these photographs they say, “Oh, this was a performance by Mike Kelley.”

This is another example of how viewers project upon me, the artist, the belief systems they think are being repre- sented in my artworks. The idea that artworks could simply be constructs is somehow impossible for them to accept. People just assume that the male performer in those photographs is me, when it is not. And then they assume that my earlier live performances were like that— something kin to Viennese Actionist performance—when they had absolutely nothing to do with that aesthetic.

Exactly.

Those photos were jokes on pornography and played on people’s fear of the dirty stuffed animal. I invented a genre of scatological stuffed animal porn that did not, in fact, exist. The double titling of the works should make it completely clear that the photos were thoroughly ironic and not pornographic at all. The two photos were slight variations of each other; the black-and-white photo was supposed to be the “documentary” version, focusing on commodity discourse, and the sepia photo was supposed to be about getting back to some natural pre-adult state. They are ridiculous. In one way, I was just playing with certain conventions of coloration in photography.

My performance work was quite formal and language- oriented and had much more to do with, say, structuralist theater than Actionism. Also, my aesthetic is often con- fused with Paul McCarthy’s, since we have collaborated on a number of projects. But our approaches are quite different. My performance work grew out of sculpture; I “demonstrated” objects that I made. Then, I became interested in the fact that the manner in which I spoke about the objects changed their meaning. This led to lon- ger performances in which it was no longer possible for the viewer to recall the development of ideas, so they were forced to be in a constant present. Whatever the logic was at that moment was where they were, because the flow of the logic was too complicated or ambiguous to follow. If there were meaning inversions, they were not recognizable. That’s why I did not allow my performances to be documented—so nobody could go back and make

“sense” or “non-sense” out of them.

I was also tired of working in band formats. I enjoyed the collaborative aspect of working with other artists, but the band format became a limitation—it was too tied to music, especially rock music. I thought of the performances as a kind of sculptural combination of language and music. The manipulation of objects and the flow of speech were temporal and rhythmic and, in that sense, were musical. But they were not tied, in an overt way, to musical genres.

obviously, not true. I suppose, to clarify my point, I should have made another work composed of crafts that one would assume were produced by men: hand-carved wooden items, for example. But that seemed redundant to me at the time.

The general reading, especially amongst some first-wave feminists, was that I was co-opting the work of women artists. I was shocked by this response. It seemed clear to me that what I was doing had little to do with first-wave feminist work, except in the choice of materials. I under- stand why women artists of that generation would be upset that my works would find favor when theirs were barely mentioned in art history. I don’t blame them for being angry. But it was not my fault that there was such a disproportionate ratio of men to women in the gallery scene at that time. Somebody even coined a term, “The Mike Kelley Problem,” to describe this situation.2 I felt like my work was being purposely misrepresented and I was being used as a pawn, a negative example, to con- demn a situation that I, myself, also thought was unfair. I have always been very open about my influences. I think that is the duty of artists to credit those who influence them. But I will not make up influences to serve a cause.

Such gender-specific readings seemed so tangential that I did not even address them in my second series of fabric works. The responses I received to the first works revealed the incredible amount of sympathy viewers had for stuffed figures. Many people told me they felt sorry for the dolls in these works—which seemed to be trapped in the positions they were organized in. The Arena series resulted from this response. I decided to work with the figures in a more singular manner. Plush figures were positioned on blankets laid on the floor. These objects were arranged very simply, generally in quite obvious formal relationships. But despite the formality of the arrangements, viewers tended to read them narratively; they tended to see the objects interacting with each other in the manner of a drama. So, I followed the Arena series with the Dialogue series, for which I wrote texts, which played back on boom boxes, to push this narrative reading. At the same time, I attempted to problematize empa- thetic affect through the kinds of texts I produced.

It wasn’t until I really understood how caught up viewers were with gender readings relative to these works— because they were sewn—that I decided to address this issue more directly by using materials that would be gendered male. This resulted in a group of sculptures made out of wood.

The works presented at Documenta IX in 1992?

Yes, I decided to work with materials that were gender appropriate for me. I felt that I could no longer use cloth objects (especially figurative ones) because, no matter how I used them, the viewer could not get past empathetic connection or issues of the feminine. Each of the wooden

sculptures presented at Documenta IX was a kind of “por- trait” of a different male psyche—they were “characters,” in a sense. I wondered if the viewer could get past the fact that all of the works referred to vernacular woodworking, to the specific connotations of how I was using the mate- rial: what kind of “male mind” “produced” each piece#...

...#Thinking that they must have one message? Do they allow for a more poetic reading, a more ambiguous reading, perhaps?

Well, one would think so, especially in the world of art criticism. Some readers did get what I was trying to do, but it was too complicated or ambiguous for the general viewing public. For example, when my retrospective exhi- bition came to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994 there was a comment book for visitors. The works that got the most response were, of course, the works made using craft items—especially figurative objects like dolls or stuffed animals. The two dominant responses were either:

A) “These are so cute. I could do this with my kid’s old toys,”

or

B) “What kind of pervert are you? Why are you using these things like this? What’s wrong with you?”

Which returns us to the abuse debate. I recently saw a discussion on German television between various art historians and museum directors. They were laughing as they attributed “all these animals!...!used, worn-out animals” to some sort of abuse. They couldn’t get beyond this.

That’s the kind of thing that made me realize how much the theory of Repressed Memory Syndrome [RMS] perme- ated the culture. The presentation of an old, dirty stuffed animal immediately evoked the issue of child abuse to many viewers. I was very surprised by this response and researched RMS. I hadn’t realized what a dominant belief system it was. We were living in the midst of an epidemic of fear regarding the abuse of children. This discovery led to an entirely new body of work. I realized that these fears were projected upon me, the artist, and one interpreta- tion was that perhaps I had been abused myself as a child. I decided to capitalize on that notion—not so much of sex- ual abuse, but institutional abuse: suggesting that my art education itself had been a form of mental abuse.

The issues of misuse and misreading converge in the two photographs you made in 1990, Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood and Manipulating Mass Produced Idealized Objects, one black and white, the other with a brownish tint. Of course, it is well known that there is a lack of video documentation of

Going back to the “scatological” photos, I believe the rea- son people focus so much on this work is to keep me typecast as a “bad boy.” I don’t quite know how this asso- ciation came about, but I cannot seem to escape it. A few pieces chosen from my entire body of work were taken out of context and used to push this reading. Many of these works were made specifically to represent aesthetic positions or political ideologies that are not my own. Again, people confuse ideas that I reference in my work with my personal opinions.

Perhaps because they can’t deal with this “meta”-level of art—that the scatological photos are faux documentary?

Yes, faux documentary. But most art viewers want art to be about “personal expression.”

Maybe many viewers have never taken onboard the indirection of a “postmodern” position, which does not depart from some unmediated encounter with the work but deals with conven- tions or playful allusions#...#and generates its own pleasures?

I’d say my work is primarily about playing with conven- tions. Many of the subjects and materials I work with have little to do with my personal tastes. Especially in my early career, in fact, I was very much against having my work seen through autobiography—though I have eased up on that stance in recent years. Of course, it’s impossible to escape autobiography in one’s work. For example, class issues were present in my work from the start. The very idea of presenting a birdhouse in the art context is proof of this fact. The use of craft materials was not typical in the art world when I was a student. There are a few artists I can think of who worked in this way, but not many— Lucas Samaras, Ree Morton—it wasn’t common practice. Of course, what I was doing had little to do with the prac- tices of either of those artists.

I want to return to what it was like at CalArts when you were there, when it was dominated by Conceptual art practice. The Birdhouses, as I understand it, were seen as jokes on Minimalist art. But then, you began to ascribe symbolic or allegorical meanings to them, which was a no-no in Conceptual art.

Yes. I had a very hard time in the beginning at CalArts, particularly with Michael Asher, because he was so staunchly opposed to making reference to mass or popu- lar culture in any way, because his belief was that to do so simply reiterated it. But that’s not the way I felt. I knew that wasn’t the case.

My entrance into the art world was through the counter- culture, where it was common practice to lift material from mass culture and “pervert” it to reverse or alter its

2 See Terry R. Myers, “The Mike Kelley Problem,” New Art Examiner, Summer 1994: pp. 24–29.

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meaning. That approach is the essence of camp. Mass cul- ture is scrutinized to discover what is hidden, repressed, within it. I thought that Michael’s position was completely escapist. Luckily, there were other artists teaching at CalArts when I was there who did not share this prejudice.

Why did you choose CalArts, then?

There were many people on the faculty for whom I had great respect: Pat O’Neill in the film department, John Van Hamersveld in graphic design, Buell Niedlinger and Morton Subotnik in the music department. I wasn’t so familiar with the people in the art department. Allan Kaprow was listed in the catalogue as being on the art faculty and that was a big draw, but he had left by the time I got there. The only artist I was familiar with in the art department was John Baldessari. But the real reason I went to CalArts was that I wanted to work with Subotnik in the music program. CalArts very much advertised it- self as a cross-genre school where one could work in various departments, but it turned out that was much harder than they made it seem.

Why?

The programs were actually quite divided. Because I’d never had any classical musical training I wasn’t allowed to take music courses.

You never had any musical training as a child?

No, I came out of rock music. I listened to psychedelic rock when I was a teen and that led me to avant-garde, elec- tronic, and improvisational music. I had been making tape music on my own for a number of years before I arrived at CalArts, and I was familiar with nontraditional music approaches like those of John Cage and Fluxus, so I didn’t think the fact that I had no musical training would make a difference—but it did. I was never able to work with Subotnik. All of my musical experiments were done out- side of the academic classes, in collaboration with other students. Of course, this was not the kind of serious work I wanted to do at CalArts, but at least it was a way to play with sound.

Didn’t you study with Laurie Anderson?

Yes, Laurie Anderson taught at CalArts for a short time, as a visiting artist, and I took her class.

But you were more interested in Subotnik?

Well, I couldn’t study with Subotnik. Just before she embarked on her pop music career—and was still primarily working in the art world—Anderson taught a sound class in the art school. I was excited that, finally, there was a course on this subject. She wasn’t much of a teacher. She would just ask the students to bring in sound-related works they liked and we would talk about them, and then the students

allowed to play in a bar or a club. They’d throw us out in two seconds. Only people on the fringes of the music or art world were interested in what we were doing: the most extreme free jazz and improv musicians, and avant- garde composers who were coming out of John Cage and Dada#...#and the few people who were specifically inter- ested in noise music, which was about five people in the city! I myself didn’t really think of what we did as music; we were making art. I always thought the band was more like a posture than it was music. It was a concept band.

It was a kind of cultural convention that you played with?

Exactly. And we had no unified style; we drew from psy- chedelia, drone music, depressing folk music, electronic music, etc. We were all over the place stylistically. It was somewhat related, in this regard, to the paintings I was making at the time. I was mixing different styles together in what would now be called a “postmodern” manner. That was very unusual at the time. Painting at U of M was dominated by formalist concerns.

How did you get into that?

It was just a natural reaction to formalist painting dis- courses falling apart. I was interested in multimedia. When I went to the art school at U of M one was forced to pick a genre to study. There was no multimedia program, so I chose painting. That program was completely dominated by the discourses of the New York School of painting, and a number of the teachers had studied under Hans Hoffman. The art school at U of M was quite backward. I mean, compositional notions of paintings were already dead, by and large, and had been replaced by the acompo- sitional approaches of monochrome or field painting, and the seriality of Warhol or Minimalism. So my works were purposely retrograde and perverse. They looked sort of like Sigmar Polke at his crudest but, of course, nobody had ever heard of Polke in America at that time.

I thought rock music was retrograde, too, so DAM was a similarly perverse reaction to that.

Because the art school was so unsophisticated, I took as many classes in other programs as I could: art history (though there were almost no contemporary or modern art history courses), psychology, and sociology. But it was an undergraduate school, so I didn’t have a lot of freedom about what I could do. Most of my time was taken up with the technical courses that were required in the art program. But I was primarily interested in multimedia, especially performance and installation. Since there were no courses on this subject I arranged to do an indepen- dent study on the history of live art with Jacquelyn Rice, the ceramics teacher.5 That’s the only way I could study the subject and get credit for it. I had to have the approval of a faculty member.

would produce something themselves. It was very open. Besides some avant-garde music recordings, I believe I brought in some early recordings by Captain Beefheart— the more poetic, language-oriented tracks—and something by the Firesign Theater.3 I was surprised that she was unfa- miliar with both, but she responded to them. I liked her personally and, later, she lived close to where I lived in Hollywood so I would see her once in a while.

But I was interested in her work, which I knew somewhat through recordings and the art press and liked. We shared an interest in spoken language in a sculptural context. I made some sound-producing sculptures at CalArts, as well as simple sculptures with which I either interacted physically or spoke about. Those are probably what I presented in her class. I also presented them in evening shows in one of the theaters; I would perform a series of short demonstrations of these objects.

David Askevold was the other artist on the faculty who was interested in performance, installation, language, and music. We became very close. I had a band at CalArts called The Poetics, and we used David’s writings as lyrics for our song “Searing Gum.”

You had already been in two bands, correct?

Yes, Destroy All Monsters [DAM] in Ann Arbor, and then The Poetics, which was formed at CalArts. The Poetics included Tony Oursler, John Miller, and a floating group of other members. I had been working with sound since 1973.

And the school would not accept this as musical training?

No, because I was untrained. The bands I was involved with, at the University of Michigan and at CalArts, functioned outside of the school context. We performed for our own pleasure and what we did was not considered art. Though, The Poetics did perform publicly, once, at CalArts, but in an event done in collaboration with students from the dance program.

As I understand it, when you were in Detroit, music was extremely important for you. You said once that an artist has no social value in America#...#“I came from a milieu where artists were despised, whereas rock musicians and drug dealers were, you know, hipster culture heroes.”4

That’s right.

So, you wanted to be more like them? That’s why you became engaged in music in Detroit?

No, I was against the idea of rock stardom. I chose to become an artist because it was socially unacceptable. The band I was in, Destroy All Monsters, wasn’t accepted by the rock music audience. We would never have been

What’s an independent study?

It’s when a teacher agrees to work with you, indepen- dently, on a particular project or subject. The only faculty member I could find willing to do this was Jacquie Rice. She wasn’t particularly interested in performance, she was a ceramic sculptor, but she was supportive of my work and agreed to work with me. Students had to take a certain number of classes in each genre, if I remember correctly, so working with Jacquie allowed me to forego my obligation to take a course in the sculpture depart- ment, which was dominated by people making welded steel sculpture in the manner of Anthony Caro. I had no interest in that. I had already taken ceramics courses, which functioned as sculpture credits, but I did not wish to continue working with ceramics. Though I did produce a number of ceramic sculptures. Most of the students made functional ceramics.

In my independent study with Jacquie I read all the extant literature on the history of live art. I read on Dada and Futurist performance, Happenings and multimedia art, Bauhaus theater, avant-garde theater, Actionism, Body art, Conceptual art, etc. Later, when RoseLee Goldberg’s book on the history of Performance art came out, I recognized most of her sources.6

And then you gave a presentation on what you had studied?

Not a public one. I simply met with her, showed her what I was reading, and talked about it. I also made some instal- lation works that included my body and were heavily influenced by the work of Joseph Beuys and, to a lesser extant, Rudolf Schwarzkogler. I wasn’t interested in the medical or masochistic overtones in Schwarzkogler’s work but, as in the work of Beuys, I was interested in the ritual- istic displays of objects and materials and my interaction with them. The only solo performance I can remember from this period consisted of me lying on the floor, under a circular sheet of plastic, lightly blowing a whistle that was amplified in the room. I wore a rubber mask I had made by casting the head of a large carp, though the viewer could not see this. I considered the work a poetic tableau. Besides Beuys and Schwarzkogler, I was very interested in the work of Paul Thek, Tetsumi Kudo, and Öyvind Fahlström. I even arranged to bring Fahlström to the school to talk about his work. It was difficult to find much information on the work of these artists as they were not discussed in school. I discovered their work on my own through my reading in this independent study.

So this practice of research begins very early— you approach your projects with extensive study and preparation and are very skilled at this, and this approach continues to the present day. Going back to your experiences in Detroit, you

3 Formed in the mid-1960s, the Firesign Theater comedy troupe (Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor) released a series of smart, zany albums beginning with Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (Columbia CS-9518, January 1968). See Vwadek P. Marciniak, Politics, Humor and the Counterculture: Laughter in the Age of Decay (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

4 Mike Kelley, “Interview: Mike Kelley, Language and Psychology,” interview with Art21 published September 23, 2005, available at http://www.art21.org/texts/mike- kelley/interview-mike-kelley- language-and-psychology.

5 Jacquelyn Rice received a BFA in ceramics from the University of Washington in 1968 and an MFA in 1970. She left the University of Michigan in the early 1980s to run the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was dean of fine arts from 1989 to 1996.

6 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Abrams, 1979).

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once said that visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts [DIA] was an important early experience for you. So you went there as a child; did your parents take you?

I don’t remember. It’s not the kind of thing they would do. They were not interested in art, and my parents didn’t like to go downtown; they thought it was dangerous. But I got there somehow or other when I was quite young. I was fixated with John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark.

How far did you live from downtown?

Very close, a half-hour drive or so. My parents had lived downtown, I believe, when they were younger. But with the increasing racial tension—resulting in the race riots of 19677—they moved to the suburbs, like many other working-class white people. Later, when I was a teenager, I would sometimes go to the DIA with my buddies to smoke pot and hang out, just like you’d go to the mall.

You can smoke pot in a museum?

Of course not, you’d smoke it outside. At that age I recall especially liking the collection of Pop art, and of course the Surrealist works and the Diego Rivera murals. I spe- cifically remember seeing shows by Robert Morris and Mark di Suvero that particularly impressed me.

So it wasn’t only the nineteenth-century paintings that appealed to you, contemporary works interested you as well.

Yes. The DIA had a quite good contemporary collection. Samuel Wagstaff had been the curator, so they had a very good collection of Pop art and Minimalism. And that looked fresh to me when I was a teenager. I was already interested in art and spent a lot of time at the library look- ing at art books. When I was in high school, I was part of a small group of liberal students which formed a recycling center. There was no organized recycling at this time, but we were allowed to use an abandoned house owned by the local newspaper.

So really, you were recycling materials?

Yes. Glass, paper, metal#...#people would drop it there and we would separate it and put the materials in large metal containers that various companies would pick up. I par- ticularly liked working in the glass container. I wore a protective suit and goggles and smashed up the glass with a sledgehammer—it was a lot of fun. Another pleasure was going through all of the magazines that came in. I ripped out all of the articles about art. I learned a lot about contemporary art by doing this, and when I went to college I was far more educated about it than most of the other students. So when I went to the museum, I knew who Warhol was, I knew who Oldenburg was, etc.

But there is a link between the sublime landscape and rustic humor because rustics are the people who inhabit the natural landscape. That’s an amusing dichotomy; on the one hand there is landscape rendered transcendental, and then there are the uneducated people who actually live there. I like hillbilly comedy because it is antitran- scendental and desublimates the Romantic sublime. The same dichotomy helps me to appreciate the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He is an aesthete, and his writing style is overly wordy and flamboyant. He has an intense hatred for rustic country types, and yet these idiots are conduits for metaphysical forces—of course, evil, pagan metaphys- ical forces. [Laughter.]

If you go too over the top with sublimity, it crashes. Then it becomes comedy. I want to ask you about your most recent show, in London at Gagosian Gallery. You included a video from the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) series based on a critical analysis of the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.9

But my take on that text was really comedic. I used sec- tions of Rossetti’s writings cited in a critical study and the more flowery verbiage of the analytic sections to con- struct a script that was Sadean—a joke on the term “the English vice,” which is S&M. The look of the video was patterned after B-horror films made by the Hammer Film Studios in Britain. These are, often, period films featuring copious amounts of blood, seminudity, and torture. But my primary interest in Rossetti has to do with the famous story of him digging up a book of unpublished poems that he buried in his wife’s grave. This is a very morbid meta- phor for writer’s block. I thought of the story when I began work on the Timeless Paintings series (1995), which related to my work referring to Repressed Memory Syndrome. The Timeless Paintings are patterned after student works from my undergraduate years, and I see them as “dead” in a sense. They supposedly represent my inability to move forward in my work, which is the result of my “abuse” by formalist painting teachers. I see these paintings as horrible acts of excavation.

I was thinking about Rossetti as an example of a poet/painter—since I also see you as a poet/ painter.

That’s true. I’m a poet/painter.

The other day you put it so nicely, “Going forward is also going back.” You purposely return to previous works, but this is a form of progress. I don’t see this return as being negative, like having writer’s block.

**As a youngster I was very involved with the subculture and had peripheral connections to the White Panther Party and anarchism. When I was sixteen or so, I really thought I was going to be some kind of “guerilla.” At that time the Yippies were very similar in certain ways to Kaprow—the frame was different, of course, but the idea of doing these gamelike street performances had replaced art in a sense.

My parents didn’t like art. They were just against every- thing I did, as a matter of course. No matter what, everything I did was wrong and seemed to rub them the wrong way. So I had to find the place where what I did was right—which was only in the counterculture. Later, by looking at the kinds of histories of what was behind the counterculture, I realized that the aesthetics of the coun- terculture came directly out of the historical avant-garde, particularly Dada and Surrealism. So, when I was quite young, in high school, I read a lot about Dada and Surrealism.**

Going back to your experiences at the DIA, you refer to Watson and the Shark much later, in Profondeurs Vertes, the project you presented at the Louvre in 2006. You also make reference to Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The Recitation (1891), as well as other nineteenth-century American paintings.

Yes, that’s another painting I recall intensely liking when I was a child. All of the paintings referenced in that instal- lation are nineteenth-century paintings from the collection of the DIA. I’ve always had a soft spot for nine- teenth-century American painting, especially landscape painting. When I was working on The Sublime project [1981–84] I did a lot of research on nineteenth-century American landscape painting.

Why do you think you have a soft spot for that?

Well, I suppose I just responded to the dreaminess of landscape painting of that era, the ethereal, soft-focus mystery worlds they depict—the exoticism of it. I like the tropical paintings of Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade very much: they strike me as very poetic, an American version of Romanticism.

In several pieces, like Meditation on a Can of Vernors [1981], you discussed these effects as

“sublime.” The Fresno episode from Day is Done also plays with landscape.

I’d say it’s more about notions of the rustic than about landscape. The Fresno episode is very comedic and refers to the kind of country humor I would associate with television comedy shows such as Hee Haw—low, hillbilly humor.8 Rather than Romantic landscape painting, that work would seem to me to be akin to the tradition of rustic painting, especially the genre in which country peasants are ridiculed.

But you have to realize that, at my age, there’s a tendency whenever I evoke some earlier period of my work for view- ers to assume that I’m simply attempting to go back and capitalize on my “greatest hits”—that it’s a market strategy.

Who says this?

The art press. In the collaborative installation I did with Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, for example, I used stuffed animals. The installation contains video shot at the Burning Man festival, and the reason I chose to include stuffed animals in this work is because they are such a common element in the visual aesthetics of rave culture. Their use reveals the infantilism at the core of this particular culture. Their presence in A Voyage of Growth and Discovery has nothing to do with the works I made in the 1980s that utilized stuffed toys. I was criti- cized for using stuffed animals because those 80s works are so widely known—in fact many younger artists are only familiar with those pieces, so to them it seems like my work is a one-liner. But, for me, it’s a challenge to use materials I am overly associated with, to see if I can work with them in different ways and get something else out of them.

I’ve already been told that I should not make any more Kandor sculptures, that I have produced too many of them and they are now redundant. But I’m a very pro- grammatic person and I will not stop making them until I have finished the system I set up for myself. There are twenty bottle and city variants that I chose to work with, and I’m going to continue with this project until I have accomplished this goal. That’s the challenge I gave myself, and it’s an interesting and difficult process to continue to make them and to keep finding something new.

I think that the London show was quite different from the Berlin show. The works changed a lot.

I thought so. The Berlin show was built very much on a kind of geometric, modern, almost Bauhausian approach. While, in the London exhibition, I worked with organic forms. Formally the works were very different, in my opin- ion. It was such a simple, and obvious, inversion that I thought art viewers would catch it right away. But, then, for some reason critics rarely talk about formal concerns in my work. With the Kandor series, people can’t seem to get past the Superman reference. Apart from a few meta- phors that interest me, I’m not particularly interested in Superman comic books: the fact that Superman is an alienated being saddled with the responsibility of caretak- ing his traumatic past—represented by the city of his birth stored in a bottle—is somewhat like my own Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school I have ever attended reconfigured into a single über-school. But that’s only one aspect of the project. My primary interest was that each rendition of Kandor was completely different, and that allowed me to produce twenty quite different,

7 The reference here is to the Detroit—or “12th Street”— Riot of 1967.

8 The TV variety show Hee Haw emerged as a rural alternative to the pop entertainment of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In. Beginning in 1969, the show featured cornpone skit comedy interspersed with performances by the biggest stars in country music in a surprisingly long run that lasted until 1991. That final year, Hee Haw was given a facelift, which removed most of the rural sets, replacing them with city streets and a shopping mall. This drastic change led to a quick decline in audience and the ultimate can- cellation of the show.

9 “Exploded Fortress of Solitude” was at the Gagosian Gallery, London, September 8 to October 22, 2011. Made in England, the script for Kelley’s video Vice Anglais (2011), is spoken by voice-over actors and

“performed” by a still-life arrange- ment of characteristic, British decorative objects. Both tapes offer humorous and ironic responses to Robert M. Cooper’s study of the English writer and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lost on Both Sides: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Critic and Poet (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970).

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I wanted to go back to how music shapes your practice and how musical structure functions as a kind of armature for your work. How has this changed or developed since your early days in Detroit? As I never attend performances, such as Tube Music, which addressed sound and music directly!....

**What I did in Destroy All Monsters, or in the art bands, was geared specifically towards the conventions and audi- ences of the time. Destroy All Monsters was deliberately aimed at an audience that we knew would hate it—though not very many people actually saw us. We thrust our- selves upon people. We directly addressed the death of the avant-garde in popular music and its increasing com- modification!...!and stupidity. And, of course, people didn’t like that. You have to realize that this was pre-punk, and there was no system for distribution. With a couple of exceptions, I didn’t even know that other bands in the US—or elsewhere in the world—were doing things like this; DAM was specifically pointed towards Detroit his- tory and a Detroit audience. It was connected with the death of radical popular music in the late 1960s, with the death of left politics in general, and with the huge eco- nomic crash of the 1970s.**

**DAM was a provocation against popular music. You have to realize that it had absolutely nothing to do with any- thing in the music world except maybe the Stooges, but it was far more abstract than the early Stooges. I never saw the Stooges in their first phase when they were beating on metal, oil drums, and stuff like that. I heard about it, but I never saw it. I was familiar with avant-garde music. I would go to the Kitchen in New York and see perfor- mances there. While a lot of avant-garde music came through Ann Arbor, DAM wasn’t geared towards the avant- garde world, but more towards street culture or bar cul- ture. These were our only venues, even if we got thrown out. You could come in, set up, and play for five min- utes!...!and get thrown out. Mostly we played loft parties or house parties and got thrown out of those too. So it was designed to be an unfun band. Music was secondary. We weren’t musicians and didn’t think about what we did really as music—or, if it was, it was at the furthest extreme of what could be considered music in the “pop” sense, maybe Captain Beefheart was the closest thing. This is before there was a punk scene, and way before I knew anything about the No Wave scene in New York.

So punk developed in the US in the second half of the 70s?

I’d say the big year of punk was 1976. But punk struck me as being a kind of throwback music, going back to early rock and roll and reacting against all the excesses of psychedelia. I actually liked the excesses of psychedelia. What I didn’t like about the 70s was the return to roots music, like country rock, folk rock, and then punk rock, which was like going back to simple, stripped-down early rock and roll. I thought it was retrograde.

formal variations of the city—all of which are supposed to be the same city. But, instead it’s more “bad boy” crap.

“Mike Kelley is a nerdish comic book fan.” That’s simply not true, or what that series of works is about.

I suppose people are more familiar with Superman than they are with your work, that’s why they focus on that aspect of it. They just don’t want to make the effort to go any further than that. The Kandor show in London had a much darker feel than the previous show in Beverly Hills. It somehow struck me as site- specific. Was that something you had in mind?

Yes, most definitely. That’s why I related the works to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and shifted the aesthetic to forms evocative of rocks, ruins, or war memorials. I was very much thinking of British sculpture from the Henry Moore generation.

It was so#...#British!

I have always been interested in the drabness of postwar English art. Of course, no one thinks about that much at this point, in a post-YBA England.

In one of your early projects, Australiana [1984], you directly address American attitudes toward England.

Well, in a very comedic way. I did several projects related to travel at that time. In Indianana, for example, I conflated memories of a trip I had taken to rural Utah as an adult with childhood memories of a trip to southern Indiana. While for Three Valleys I visited two randomly chosen areas on the outskirts of Los Angeles, took photos, made notes, and constructed a fantasy relationship between the two places. Around this same time I went to Australia to be in an exhibition; if I remember correctly, this was my first trip outside of America. After the exhibi- tion had opened I traveled around the country a bit. I was interested in the fact that the United States and Australia were both former English colonies. I made an exhibition, titled Australiana, of drawings related to my travel notes. The idea was that the United States and Australia shared this colonial heritage and England, of course, was cast as the villain. It was very lighthearted, with lots of jokes about the American Revolutionary War and the brother- hood between Australia and America. It was all fabrication built on the most clichéd notions of all three countries. It was all done for fun and very nonsensical.

The installation shots show that the exhibition was hung salon style. Was that how you usually hung shows at the time?

Yes.

So, each show was a site-specific installation?

That’s how I thought about it. The hanging of the works always commented specifically on the given architecture. Pieces were hung in a very eccentric manner—in the cor- ner of the room, over doors, et cetera. Because I rarely sold any artworks, I sometimes showed the same bodies of work in different spaces around the country. The Monkey Island group of works, for example, was exhibited a number of times—in fact that was the body of work I presented in Australia at the 1984 Sydney Biennial. Each exhibition was very individual because of my approach to hanging. I was interested in Jonathan Borofsky at this time. He was really good at utilizing the same images over and over, yet each presentation was completely different and formally very interesting and complex. This is what I liked about Paul Thek’s installations as well. They both had a great understanding of space.

My placement of drawings in an architectural space forced the viewer to scan the room to search for thematic con- nections. I saw this as analogous to the placement of language motifs, in time, in my performances. Of course in installations of drawings or objects, these relationships are more recognizable. But still, my exhibitions were visu- ally busy and not so easy to penetrate. They were fairly complex networks of information. When I hung Australiana I actually ran strings from certain drawings to related drawings to prove that I was conscious of the placement of the works in the room. It was like, “If you’re too lazy to search for these relationships, there are strings to point them out to you.”

You do not hold viewers in very high regard.

I’m afraid not. You know as well as I do that most viewers look at art for about two seconds and then they’re out the door. I have always appreciated complexity in artworks; the fact that works are high minded or silly is less impor- tant than their complexity. That is the true content of the work—its structure.

Some of this complexity is lost in a retrospective exhibition because it’s almost impossible to get all of the works from a certain series or exhibi- tion—that may have been sold separately—back together again.

You’re never going to see my shows again as they origi- nally were. Viewers of a survey exhibition have to realize that they’re only seeing a kind of series of fragments of a whole.

But a survey is also an opportunity to bring together disparate works and combine them in new ways.

Well, there’s no other choice than to try and have some fun with it.

And also more commodified?

No, I wouldn’t say that. Even though it was put out by big record companies, they didn’t even sell those records. Unlike England, where punk was extremely popular, it was never really successful in the US. The first two punk compilations in America were the CBGB and Max’s Kansas City compilations. The only bands I recall liking off those compilations were Suicide and Pere Ubu, which you could hardly describe as punk. Other than that, I didn’t know of any other bands in the country doing anything similar to us—except Devo. I’d seen a film by Devo at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and could tell that they were artists. Their first concern wasn’t music, it was this whole media proj- ect. In a sense this wasn’t unheard of, as bands like Funkadelic were already creating their own worlds and finding success doing it. That’s the “advanced” music— though its politics is very complicated. But you have to realize that DAM was never seen in a musical context and never thought of as music by audiences.

I know that sometimes it’s difficult to listen all the way through it.

Of course, now, it sounds like pop music. But it didn’t then!…. But to go back to the politics of the new punk movement, which we saw as retrograde, DAM—like The Poetics later—did a lot of things that were completely antithetical towards this aesthetic. We played these slow, mournful, dreary instrumentals, or made silly, childish noises!...!the punk audience hated us. We had absolutely no place in that scene, which we confronted on purpose. Also, the music was quite experimental. Some of The Poetics’ music was done as background music for Tony Oursler’s videos and specifically designed to play with the conventions of movie music or mood music. And we would always do different kinds of things, different kinds of per- formances, given the opportunity. So when we were once invited to work in a dance context, we did a dance perfor- mance. We also had the opportunity to play in clubs a couple of times, and in public spaces. We wrote sets of more “straight” songs to play with those conventions. So it was very experimental.**

*When I went to CalArts, it was specifically to focus on a broader notion of performativity in music!...!and just to go someplace. I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles. I knew that there were people teaching there whom I greatly respected, and I thought I could learn from them. Oddly enough, I found myself back in a similar position of just playing music on the side, with a group of people I met from different departments.*

** But all this had nothing whatsoever to do with my devel- oping interest in solo performance, which followed on from the installation work and “environments” I was making when I first arrived at CalArts—and with which I wasn’t especially happy. That’s when I started making the Birdhouses. The second one was built specifically out

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of a how-to manual that I had bought at a local swap meet. After doing that I understood the conventions of the materials, what it meant to work in the garage, to build something!...!“let me just limit myself to this kind of spe- cific, class-oriented pastime!...!home carpentry.” But by the time I made the third Birdhouse I was already tired of building “normal” ones, so they became more and more abstract and more and more allegorical or pseudo- allegorical.

I started building other, similar objects—that were spe- cifically meant to be spoken about. I might write two or three lines!...!they did one thing, accompanied by another couple of lines. I call that period of my sculpture “demon- strational sculpture.” The writing then became more and more complex while the objects became less and less com- plex. As it became more about a kind of theater I realized that I had substituted this activity for my interest in music. In fact, all the junk that we collected and played with Destroy All Monsters was “sculptural”—and just as important as the so-called “music.” I thought all that stuff was interesting!...!and some of it was not even played. We’d have a guitar and an amp, but also something found on the street that just looked interesting. That was part of the ensemble.

Of course, I was interested in Fluxus and post-Cageian ideas, people like Alison Knowles, and situations where a group of things can represent a kind of music. In my work, the props became less about this kind of exchange, so that language eventually defined them. But over time the language changed the definition, so temporality became much more important. These early performances were musical in a number of ways: they were durational and had tempo, based on speech and speech patterns. But I felt that the movement of the objects in space was also a kind of music—though a much more abstract and lan- guage-oriented music. In many cases I never felt that the language and its meaning was especially important. It was about the flow of the language, a sense of development and dynamic shifts in rhythm and tempo. I was interested in other artists who were working somewhat in this vein, especially Stuart Sherman, whose work is little known or appreciated, or, to a certain degree, Guy de Cointet.

So this musical approach, as I would call it, used temporality to conquer or capture a space?

It freed me from the band format, and from the populist overtones of the band. And it was only me. I didn’t need all those people. Sometimes I would work with other people, but generally not. While I continued to work with people in band formats, I never showed this work in the art context. It was always done for our own amusement, in the music context. Bob Flanagan and a couple of other poets associ- ated with Beyond Baroque, whom I was friends with, started a band, for example. We were all writers. We never

Yes, there was a drum section, but the music was very rudimentary and performed by nonmusicians. So it had to be very simple. They made one sound—when they did this action, they made that sound. Or, at this moment, there’s ten beats.

So you scripted all this?

Yes. When I did Plato’s Cave, I decided to work with the famous rock band Sonic Youth, because that brings a cer- tain expectation to the audience about what they’re going to see!...!how the band’s going to perform. I particularly wrote it so that they did things that they wouldn’t nor- mally do. And they weren’t the stars. A lot of times, they were behind a curtain or, when they played something, it wasn’t something that they would normally do. So I was trying to play against the theatrics, the conventions of rock theatrics. And the piece really itself had nothing to do about that. That was just a play with structure because nothing, say in the so-called thematics of the piece, had anything to do with rock. Zero. Also, I randomly broke the script up into male and female parts to make it seem like it was drama. But the only drama was because a man and a woman spoke it to each other in a certain kind of tone, which gave it, say, the feeling of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But the words had zero to do with that. It was just another play with the format of presentation.

So did it relate to the content of Plato’s Cave? What would you say Plato’s Cave is about?

About nothing! It’s about a certain set of cave references and other kinds of references related to my research.

You mean the performance?

Yes. But then the staging might not have anything to do with that. There’s no physical connection between the performance and the exhibition, though in the early days there was. My shows consisted of presenting leftover props or demonstrational devices without the explana- tory action. You didn’t know what the things did or how they functioned. That information wasn’t provided. Instead, I became more interested in language, so I decided I had to have two approaches: one for the gallery, where drawings and objects could interrelate as a gestalt, produc- ing a certain kind of effect; and another for performance, which needed a completely different set of operations done specifically for a live audience.

I recall reading somewhere that the music— or sound—helped you to memorize your scripts.

I memorized them by rote repetition, in short bits, and I kept going until I got it all memorized. I didn’t even know what I was saying, because I found that easier than memo- rizing them by content. Some of these works were an hour and a half long, so you can see how, at a certain point, this

rehearsed and would book ourselves into these punk clubs and try to invent the set on the spot and—whether it was good or not—make it seem that it was really a set of preex- isting songs. That was the sole reason to form this band. It was amusing and sometimes fun.

My performances became much more complicated. They almost got to the point of being operatic. And then I couldn’t deal with them any more. They had moved into the world of theater which was too complicated, too dif- ficult to deal with, too technical. So I decided to stop. Also, the performances were always ideational projects. I always thought of them as a development of belief or logical sys- tems. At some point my interest in this also ended. There’s a performance, it brings something to life, and then it’s dead. And I start a new one. The performances were all quite random.

That’s also why you would never restage a performance?

Yes, I’ve never restaged them. A few I’ve traveled, performing them two or three times.

But you wouldn’t, say, do The Sublime again?

I don’t see it; though somebody could restage it in the future, if they so desire. I also never allowed the perfor- mances to be videotaped, because I thought it was against their temporal nature. What I wanted was for somebody to watch them and to feel a logic. If you could go back and watch it on videotape, that logic would be disproven because it made no sense. So I could not allow that. You could read them as “poems,” in which case you don’t expect logic, but, you know, in performativity, people get involved. It’s like listening to a preacher. You get involved live, but if you analyze your experience, you see that the logic doesn’t hold together. It’s not about that. It’s about producing certain mental states in the viewer.

Did they try to interact?

People? No.

Were they really quiet, or did they stand in the corner!...!I remember seeing photos!…

Well, sometimes. I built interaction into them, but gener- ally I think people were so confused they didn’t know how to respond or act.

You learned your performance scripts by heart— even though when one saw them performed, they seemed extemporaneous. How did you incorpo- rate music? In The Sublime, for example, were there drums?

would produce a crisis. It went beyond my capability, because I wasn’t a naturally gifted memorizer anyway. I had to listen on a tape recorder and go over it and over it and over it again until I felt the rhythms; then I could shift them if I felt they needed to be shifted.

For me, this seems to be “musical.” It’s a musical approach to working by rhythms. Maybe what results is a kind of “operatic”—as you put it— recitative, which makes one more narrative line, interspersed with things that repeat or use rhyme or alliteration—the arias, if you like.

Exactly. But after I stopped performing live, I took a hiatus from all this.

So, for example, you let certain “dialogues” run on?

Yes. Then I wrote those, too. They were similar, but much more simple. As they were sculptures, they had to be short so that people could take them in quickly. I didn’t expect people to sit there and look at them for very long. The first one, Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ, was pretty long, but after that they were fairly short. The first presentation of Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ, at Beyond Baroque was as a play—you just sat and watched these two stuffed animals sitting there with a tape recorder. Later, I moved it into a sculptural arena and showed it in a gallery alongside other works doing different things, and taking different kinds of approaches!...!playing games, etc. It wasn’t until I began the EAPR series that I really re-engaged with music. I was really missing doing music at the time, so that’s when I shifted my approach, almost a hundred percent...

I remember that in your talk at the Getty when Day is Done was in progress you said that you were enjoying it tremendously to have the freedom to work with music—which implies that you felt you hadn’t had such freedom before, or not in the same way.

Well, first of all, I didn’t have the skills, and, secondly, there would have been no reason for me to make music that sounded like something played at a Nativity event, say. Why would I do that? It wouldn’t come to me in a flash. But I was confronted with the problem of respond- ing to a found Nativity image. How do I deal with this? As it was what I had to do, I had to get a collaborator to help me work these things out and decide how much they should reinforce or not reinforce the genre.

I like very much how this process suggests a whole circle, as performative elements are so central to Day Is Done, which, in turn, follows on from Educational Complex, filling its blank spaces with the actions of so many human—

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and dress-up—protagonists. To me, this important return is prompted by the temporal aspect of the music, and how it takes shape.

And also the idea that the work has always been built as pseudoritual—I’ve always thought that art is a kind of pseudoritual. It’s about the development of some kind of belief system, for want of a better term, that’s simply negated and replaced with another one. And to me, it’s very much like a materialist replacement for, say, politics and religion. For forms in which you have to invest some belief, art substitutes forms that don’t demand such affir- mation. You can say that’s just entertainment, and maybe it is. But perhaps religion and politics are just entertain- ment, too.

I think it’s a very human striving for knowledge and for consciousness about things.

Yes.

To me it’s not so negative!…. I want to talk a little bit about your involvement with UFOs, another place where noises, sounds, and music join with visual and other sensations. Your writing about Ufology deals with the question of how basic forms—lumpy masses or goo—are made and perceived, and the issues of “personification” that often arise from alien encounters.

First of all, most of my UFO projects were specifically about formlessness. I was responding to the discourse about formlessness that was popular at the time. It fol- lows, of course, that the music had to be formless as well, so I generally used drones or random machinic emana- tions. I was studying all this UFO literature to get information about the shapes and colors and sounds asso- ciated with extraterrestrial phenomena. I found one article with a specific analysis of a recording someone had supposedly made of a UFO. So I took this analysis to a sound engineer and had him re-create four or five varia- tions of the particular pitch relationships to which it referred. That’s the sound I used for The Keep10: a sound engineer’s interpretation of the interpretation of this tape of a UFO. A lot of the music from that series was like this, though that was the most literal. Using this as a guide, I just made things that sounded the same way.

Sound with no structure. The blankness of Educational Complex was never supplied with sound before you began Day Is Done, right? So the temporality of blankness and silence actually ended up in a very noisy narrative?

Yes, I wanted to do it as a real play.

All these inanimate objects playing mother, father, and the family.

Yes. And it’s all sort of random. They’re just ceramic objects I bought that were made in England—which turned out not to be as easy as I expected: there wasn’t a lot of export materials. They’re really kitschy objects.

There’s no sound other than human voices present?

Right. Although every once in a while there’s a sound of whipping or moaning, but yes, very, very little sound, and no music. There is a little bit of music in the video—but no speech. There are guttural sounds and two pieces of

“period” music in line with what you would think of the period based on the dress of the foppish main character. But yes, that separation wasn’t something I had initially planned. But the actors were incapable of learning such a complicated script, so I realized that no one was going to sit and listen to it anyway. Then I thought it was more funny to replace it—all the drama, this heavy bombastic speech—and just have it played out by a still life, sur- rounded by all these records, because no one ever listens to recordings (apart from books on tape or things like that). I remember when I was in school and took a Shakespeare course, the language was so impenetrable to me, “olde” English. I had to go and listen to these records four or five times before I could even understand what they were saying. To this day, I cannot stand to listen to a book on tape or anything like that. It repels me. I just thought it was funny to have all these records surround- ing you. No one’s ever going to listen to that record. A few people might take it away as a souvenir, but they’re never going to listen to it.

So what’s the future of the sound and musical components of your work? Will you follow up from Day is Done and the EAPR series?

Well, Day Is Done was a specific project based on a select group of found photos, so I would not continue to expand it. That piece was a collection of synced videos, with related set pieces, that functioned analogously to a fea- ture film, based on the genre of the musical. The flow of scenes was fixed and the viewer had to follow them in the gallery to watch the “plot” unfold. Day Is Done was an attempt to produce a spatialized, feature-length film. I’m continuing to make EAPR videos. None of them have been presented in as complex a manner as the Day is Done exhi- bition, and I probably won’t attempt to do that again. Technically, that installation was extremely difficult to set up.

That’s because the “content” of the Educational Complex was what was missing. So it was only when I decided that I wanted to start filling in the missing areas—with screen memories, basic false narratives, that could have been anything—that this shift began. I started collecting photo- graphs of inexplicable-looking rituals. Then came the problem of staging them. What are these people doing? What are they saying? What’s the music? Everything was

“projected”—but, at the same time, I had to think very hard about how to approach it. I didn’t want to do any- thing too literal. I also figured that if I was going to play with these tropes, I might as well have some fun.

But at other times, I’ve done things that are much more literal, like the piece for the Louvre, because that was a “serious” show, a response to an exhibition of nine- teenth-century American artists who had studied in Paris, so I picked specific paintings. I didn’t think the paintings in the Louvre exhibition were that good, so I chose to use works from the Detroit Institute of Art that were really good examples of these kinds of paintings. Dewing’s The Recitation, for example, is quite unusual, an American mix of Symbolist and Impressionist styles whose protago- nists are society women. I researched women’s literature of that period and found some really beautiful poems by several poets I’d never heard of. Then I worked with opera singers to develop a dialogue between the characters in the painting, based on these poems, that very much suited the action in the paintings.

A more sophisticated version of Day Is Done?

Yes. The other work [Copley’s Watson and the Shark] is sort of a sea scene, so I researched sea shanties and took various themes from them. As we did research for the operatic section, it turned out that there were almost no American Impressionist composers. We could only find one who was taken seriously, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, whom I’d never heard of before.11 The music is based on his approach, so it was a real learning experience for me to do this. I had to study poetic forms I’d never researched before and music I’d never heard before. It was great fun!

It’s a wonderful piece.

Of course, most people would never think twice about it. “Oh, he pulled that off a record or something.”

It reminds me of your approach in Made in England, part of the London exhibition Exploded Fortress of Solitude (2011), which was a kind of play with inanimate objects. You recorded the soundtrack on vinyl records; the viewer sits there and listens to this play surrounded by record shelves.12

I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I want to take a break from the EAPR project and work on something with less intensive production values. Videos are extremely expensive to produce. I do want to make more EAPR-related works in the future, because the found images provide me with interesting scenarios that spur me to write, and to compose music. I’m thinking of attempting to make some sculptures that function analo- gously to the videos. I would write dialogue and music for dramatic interactions between a group of sculptures or found objects—as with Made in England, which we just discussed.

So what comes first, the script or the sculptures?

It could be either way. It doesn’t matter. In fact, perhaps it doesn’t even matter if there is any connection between the script and the sculptures at all. The relationships could be random. Maybe that’s the best approach.**

10 First shown at Kelley’s exhibi- tion Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, June 5 to July 31, 1998. The Keep is in the collection of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich.

11 Studying in Berlin between 1904 and 1907, Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884–1920) was influenced by French Impressionist music and contemporary Russian composers, including Alexander Scriabin. His works for piano, chamber ensemble, and voice include White Peacock (piano, 1915; orchestrated 1919); Piano Sonata (1917–18; revised 1919); and the tone poem The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, after the fragment by Coleridge (1912; revised in 1916). Griffes taught at the Hackley School for boys, Tarrytown, New York, for the last thirteen years of his life before succumbing to influenza in 1920 at the age of thirty-five. See Edward Maisel, Charles Griffes (New York: Knopf, 1984).

12 See note 9.

Interview with Mike Kelley Meyer-Hermann

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Energy Made Visible, 1979 Photographic prints 40 × 27.5 inches (101.6 × 69.85 cm)

383

STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM

Bed Wetter One, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches!/!60.96 × 48.26 cm Collection of Margaret and Daniel S. Loeb

Cottage Cheese, 1974!/!1994 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches!/!60.96 × 48.26 cm Falckenberg Collection

New!, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches!/!60.96 × 48.26 cm Courtesy of Lehmann-Art Ltd. and Rashel-Art Ltd.

Rib Cage, 1974 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 18 inches!/!60.8 × 45.7 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Elegy to the Symbionese Liberation Army, 1975 Acrylic, ink, graphite on paper 24 × 36 inches!/!61 × 91.4 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Parallel Personality Development, 1975 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 19 inches!/!60.96 × 48.26 cm Collection De Bruin-Heijn

Pirate, 1975–93 Mixed-media on paper 24 × 18 inches!/!60.8 × 45.7 cm Private collection, courtesy Marc Jancou Contemporary

Shrimp, Head, Pot, 1976 Mixed-media on paper 18.75 × 27 inches!/!48 × 69 cm Falckenberg Collection

Untitled (Allegorical Drawings), 1976!/!2011 Reproduction of portfolio of 15 pigment prints on German etching paper 14 × 9.5 inches!/!35.56 × 24.13 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Bouncing Sheep Head, 1977–78 Painted cast rubber, artist’s made container bell jar, glass, wood base 5 × 7.75 × 4 inches!/!12.7 × 19.7 × 10.2 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Last Tool in Use, 1977 Wood, acrylic, metal 29 × 21.75 × 3 inches!/!73.66 × 55.25 × 7.62 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Nest, 1977–78 Rubber, pencil shavings, glass bell jar, painted wood base 9 × 9 × 9 inches!/!22.9 × 22.9 × 22.9 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Perspectaphone, 1977–78 Acrylic on wood 28 × 11 × 10 inches!/!71.1 × 27.9 × 25.4 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Birdhouse for a Bird That Is Near and a Bird That Is Far, 1978 Wood, acrylic, metal 27.625 × 37 × 11.25 inches!/!70 × 94 × 28 cm Private collection

Catholic Birdhouse, 1978 Wood, paint, composite shingles 22 × 18.5 × 18.5 inches!/!55.9 × 47 × 47 cm Private collection, New York

Diagram for My Space Performance, 1978 Ink on board 10.5 × 8 inches!/!26.67 × 20.32 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Gothic Birdhouse, 1978 Wood, paint, Plexiglas 9 × 13 × 14 inches!/!48 × 33 × 35.5 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Infinity Birdhouse, 1978 Wood, acrylic, lightbulb 20.125 × 21.625 × 16.75 inches!/! 51 × 55 × 42.5 cm Private collection, Switzerland

Title Drawing for Birdhouse for a Bird That is Near and a Bird That is Far, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Title Drawing for Birdhouse for Wide Bird to Tall Bird, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Title Drawing for Birdhouse with an Egg Chute, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Title Drawing for Catholic Birdhouse, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Title Drawing for Gothic Birdhouse, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Title Drawing for Infinity Birdhouse, 1978 Ink on lined paper, facsimile 9.5 × 6 inches!/!22.13 × 15.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Two Sound Producing Objects from a Dream, 1978 2 parts: wood, metal Left to right: 16 × 8 × 8, 17 × 9 × 7 inches!/!40.64 × 20.32 × 20.32, 43.18 × 22.86 × 17.78 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Wide Bird to Tall Bird, 1978 Wood, paint 11.5 × 40.5 × 12 inches!/!29.2 × 102.9 × 30.5 cm Private collection

Worldly Problems, 1978 Acrylic on paper 49.25 × 26.5 inches!/!125.1 × 67.31 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Birdhouse with an Egg Chute, 1979 Wood, acrylic, glass 39.5 × 13 × 10 inches!/!100.33 × 33.02 × 25.4 cm Collection of Margaret and Daniel S. Loeb

The Monitor and the Merrimac (Three Leitmotifs), 1979!/!2005 3 gelatin silver prints 26.7 × 70.8 × 3.8 cm, framed The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of the artist

The Monitor and the Merrimac (Performance Prop Models), 1979 Enamel on mat board, gelatin silver prints The Monitor: 2.5 × 3.75 × 9.75 inches!/! 6.35 × 9.53 × 24.77 cm; The Merrimac: 1.75 × 4.75 × 10.375 inches!/! 4.45 × 12.07 × 26.35 cm Collection of Blake Byrne, Los Angeles

The Poltergeist, 1979 Gelatin silver prints, 7 parts 2 photographs, 40 × 27.5 inches!/! 101.6 × 69.9 cm and 40 × 62.5 inches!/! 101.6 × 158.8 cm; text photograph, 40 × 33 inches!/!101.6 × 83.8 cm; 4 photographs, 40 × 30 inches!/! 101.6 × 76.2 cm each Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Early American Landscape #1, 1980 Acrylic on canvas with painted cardboard frame 25.5 × 25.5 inches!/!65 × 65 cm The Robert A. Rowan Collection, Pasadena

The Past and The Future 1980 2 parts: Acrylic on paper 18 × 24 inches!/!45.7 × 61 cm each Joni and Monte Gordon Family Trust, Los Angeles

Banana Man Costume, 1981 Cotton, linen Hat: 7.5 inches!/!19.1 cm diameter; shirt and pants: men’s small Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

The Logo on a Can of Vernors Drawn from Memory, 1981 Acrylic on paper 20 × 15 inches!/!50.8 × 38.1 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Insect Face, 1981–82 Acrylic on sheet metal, wood 16 × 28 × 6.375 inches!/!40.6 × 71.1 × 16.2 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Lannan Foundation

Monkey’s Ass, 1981–82 Acrylic on sheet metal, wood 16 × 28 × 6.375 inches!/!40.6 × 71.1 × 16.2 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Lannan Foundation

Studies for “The Banana Man” video (1983), 1981–82 4 parts: acrylic, ink, pencil on paper 11 × 14 inches each!/!27.94 × 35.56 cm each Emi Fontana Collection, Milano!/!Los Angeles

Two Islands, 1981–82 Acrylic on sheet metal, wood 16 × 28 × 6.375 inches!/!40.6 × 71.1 × 16.2 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Lannan Foundation

The One-Eyed King, 1981!/!2012 Piezo print on paper, exhibition copy 9.25 × 6.75 inches!/!23.5 × 17.15 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Amber-Gray, 1982 Colored wax, glass bell jar, wooden base, painted by the artist 7 × 7 × 7 inches!/!17.8 × 17.8 × 17.8 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Ambergris Landscape, 1982 Acrylic on paper 10.5 × 8.25 inches!/!26.67 × 20.96 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Cell Dividing, 1982 Acrylic on sheet metal, wood 16 × 28 × 6.375 inches!/!40.6 × 71.1 × 16.2 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Lannan Foundation

Expansions, 1982 Acrylic on brown paper 2 parts: part 1, 86 × 87 inches!/! 218.4 × 221 cm; part 2, folded: 15.25 × 14.75 × 5 inches!/!39.4 × 37.5 × 12.7 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

Fence Figure!/!Compound Eye, 1982 Gelatin silver print, acrylic, ink 4.375 × 6.375 inches!/!11.1 × 16.2 cm Collection of Peter Norton

Personality Crisis, 1982 3 parts: acrylic on graph paper 22.5 × 28.5 inches!/!57.22 × 48.26 cm Private collection

Symmetrical Sets, 1982 8 parts: acrylic, Mercurochrome, marker on paper 18 × 24 inches each!/!45.72 × 60.96 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

The Bells, 1982–83 Acrylic on paper 23.5 × 77.5 inches!/!59.69 × 196.85 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

The Bug Eye, 1982–83 Acrylic on paper 18.125 × 53.125 inches!/!46.04 × 134.94 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

Choreographic Figure, 1982–83 8 parts: acrylic on foam core Parts: 30.125 × 20 inches!/!76.5 × 50.8 cm each; 120.5 × 60 inches!/!306.1 × 152.4 cm overall The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

384 385

Figure II (Hair), 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.24 × 81.28 cm Collection Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Paris

Garbage Bag I, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102 × 81 cm Falckenberg Collection

Garbage Bag V, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.24 × 81.28 cm Collection Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Paris

Girl, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.24 × 81.28 cm LAC

Kissing Kidneys, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.24 × 81.28 cm Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Male and Female Brain Halves, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.24 × 81.28 cm Private collection

Manly Craft #2, 1989 Found yarn animals, tied 5.5 × 3.5 × 1.5 inches!/!14.22 × 8.99 × 3.99 cm Collection of Barry Sloane

Number One and Number Two, 1989 Found stuffed animals 32 × 16 × 8.75 inches!/!81.3 × 40.6 × 22.2 cm Private collection

Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989 10 parts: silkscreen on silk, reproductions Subtitles: Satan’s Nostrils, The Orange and the Green, Unlucky Clover, Twisted Shamrock, Peat Spade, Master Dik, Hangin’ – Heavy – Hairy – Horny, Emerald Eyehole, Country Cousin, Blood and Soil (Potato Print) 53 × 38 inches!/!134.62 × 96.52 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Reconstructed History: The Capitol Building, 1989 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches!/!25.4 × 20.3 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Reconstructed History: China Relief Expedition, 1989 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches!/!20.3 × 25.4 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Reconstructed History: Dancing the Quadrille, 1989 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches!/!20.3 × 25.4 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Reconstructed History: The Father of Our Country, 1989 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches!/!25.4 × 20.3 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Compound Eye, 1982–83 Acrylic on newspaper 22.25 × 27.5 inches!/!57.15 × 69.85 cm The Robert A. Rowan Collection, Pasadena

Early American Landscape #2, 1982–83 Acrylic on canvas with painted cardboard frame 31.5 × 31.5 inches!/!80 × 80 cm The Robert A. Rowan Collection, Pasadena

Infinite Multiplication, 1982–83 4 parts: acrylic on foam core 43.125 × 40 inches!/!109.5 × 101.6 cm each, 43.25 × 160 inches!/!109.5 × 406.4 cm overall The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

Monkey Island (Los Angeles Zoo #1), 1982–83 Gelatin silver print 11 × 14 inches!/!27.94 × 35.56 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Monkey Island: Travelogue, 1982–83 9 parts: acrylic, pen on paper 24.25 × 19.25 inches!/!61.6 × 48.9 cm each The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Gift of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing and of the artist, 1997

Shock, 1982–83 4 parts: acrylic and Mercurochrome on paper Panels A-C: 47.75 × 37.5 inches!/! 121.3 × 95.3 cm each; Panel D: 24 × 19 inches!/!61 × 48.3 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

The Tiny Insect Magnified Becomes Its Own Farm, 1982–83 Acrylic on paper 56 × 42.125 inches!/!142.2 × 107 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art

Infinite Expansion, 1983 6 parts, superimposed: acrylic on paper 140 × 140 inches!/!355.6 × 355.6 cm The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

The Banana Man, 1983 Video: color!/!sound; 28 min. 15 sec. Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

The One-Eyed Parrot, 1983 Acrylic on paper 36.75 × 17 inches!/!93.3 × 43.2 cm Private collection

Janitorial Banner, 1984 Glued felt, wood 49 × 17 × 2 inches!/!124.5 × 43.5 × 5.1 cm Collection of Joel Wachs

Know Nothing and If You Don’t Want to Know the Definition Don’t Open The Dictionary, 1984 2 parts: acrylic on paper 69 × 48 inches!/!175.3 × 121.9 cm; 42 × 28 inches!/!106.7 × 71.1 cm Sender Collection

The Silent Scream, 1984 Acrylic on paper 37.375 × 37.375 inches!/!93.98 × 93.98 cm JPMorgan Chase Art Collection

Reconstructed History: The Gateway to Freedom, 1989 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches!/!25.4 × 20.3 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Reconstructed History: The Lincoln Memorial, 1989 Gelatin silver print 10 × 8 inches!/!25.4 × 20.3 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Stained Glass Mattress, 1989 Mattress with glued felt cover 9.25 × 61.5 × 80 inches!/! 23.5 × 156.21 × 203.2 cm Goetz Collection

Pansy Metal!/!Clovered Hoof, 1989!/!2009 Series of 8 photographs (Piezo print on rag paper) 14 × 10 inches!/!35.5 × 25.4 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Arena #7 (Bears), 1990 Found stuffed animals, blanket 11.5 × 53 × 49 inches!/!29.2 × 134.6 × 124.5 cm Private collection

Arena #8 (Leopard), 1990 Found stuffed animals, blanket 12 × 65 × 43 inches!/!30.48 × 165.1 × 109.22 cm Collection Per Skarstedt

Arena #10 (Dogs), 1990 Stuffed animals on afghan 11.5 × 123 × 32 inches!/!29.2 × 312.4 × 81.3 cm Collection Metro Pictures

Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove) #3, 1990 2 parts: acrylic on panel, found handmade doll in painted wood box Part 1: 66.125 × 27.125 inches!/! 167.96 × 68.9 cm; part 2: 3.5 × 10.5 × 24.5 inches!/!8.89 × 26.67 × 62.23 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard

Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove) #5, 1990 2 parts: acrylic on panel, found handmade doll in painted wood box Part 1: 36.125 × 24 inches!/!91.76 × 60.96 cm; part 2: 4 × 9.125 × 13.625 inches!/! 10.16 × 23.18 × 34.61 cm Linda and Jerry Janger, Los Angeles

Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove) #7, 1990 2 parts: acrylic on panel, found doll in painted wood box Part 1: 24 × 19 inches!/!61 × 48 cm; part 2: 4 × 7.875 × 9.25 inches!/!10 × 20 × 23.5 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard

Four Wire Sculptures, 1990 4 parts: mixed-media with yarn and wire Dimensions variable Collection of Blake Byrne, Los Angeles

Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects, 1990 Black-and-white photograph 14 × 11 inches!/!35.56 × 27.94 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

The Sublime, 1984!/!1998 21 chromogenic color prints 20 × 24 inches each!/!50.8 × 60.96 cm Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Alphabet and Bee Beard, 1985 2 parts: acrylic on paper 56 × 42 inches!/!142.2 × 106.7 cm each Collection of Barry Sloane

Exploring, 1985 Acrylic on paper 60 × 50.75 inches!/!152.4 × 128.91 cm Collection De Bruin-Heijn

Freedom, 1985 Ketchup on canvas, framed in artist-painted and artist-constructed frame 79 × 43 inches!/!200.66 × 109.22 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

A Hippie’s Bedroom, 1985 Wax on carpet, candle 70.75 × 70.75 inches!/!179.71 × 179.71 cm Wendy Gondeln

Lincoln’s Beacon, 1985 Glued felt on canvas 69 × 69 inches!/!175.3 × 175.3 cm Private collection

More Tragic! More Plangent!... More Purple!, 1985!/!1996!/!2011 6 Ilfochrome classic photographs, mounted on Dibond aluminum board 30 × 24 inches each!/!76.2 × 60.96 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Nazi War Cave #1, 1985 Acrylic on paper 68.9 × 104 inches!/!175 × 264 cm Collection of Joe Austin

Rainbow Coalition, 1985 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 102.75 × 88.75 inches!/!260.99 × 225.43 cm Holzer Family Collection

Sic Semper Tyrannis, 1985 3 parts: acrylic on board 48 × 48 inches!/!121.92 × 121.92 cm each; 48 × 144 inches!/!121.9 × 365.8 cm overall Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Nazi War Cave #2, 1986 Acrylic on paper 60 × 87.5 inches!/!152.4 × 222.3 cm Private collection

Trickle Down and Swaddling Clothes, 1986 2 parts: acrylic on paper 60 × 95.5 inches!/!152.4 × 242.6 cm each Herbert Foundation

Untitled, 1986 Acrylic on carpet, artist-painted and artist-constructed frame 61.75 × 49.75 inches!/!156.85 × 126.37 cm Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo Collection

Animal Self and Friend of the Animals, 1987 2 parts: glued felt 96 × 72 inches!/!243.8 × 182.9 cm; 94.75 × 67.75 inches!/!240.7 × 172.1 cm Karin and Jules Schyls’ donation, The Schyl Collection, Malmö Konsthall

Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, 1990 Sepia-toned black-and-white photograph 14 × 11 inches!/!35.56 × 27.94 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Untitled (Chokwe Lumumba), 1990 Glued-felt banner 93.75 × 70.5 inches!/!238.13 × 179.07 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Untitled (Pasolini), 1990 Glued-felt banner 93.75 × 70.5 inches!/!238.13 × 179.07 cm Collection Rena Conti, Chicago

Untitled (Yarn), 1990 Cotton blanket, yarn 1.75 × 85.75 × 89.75 inches!/!4.45 × 217.81 × 227.97 cm Sammlung Schürmann

Ahh…Youth!, 1991 Set of 8 silver-dye bleach (Cibachrome) photographs, edition 2!/!10 24 × 20 inches!/!61 × 50.8 cm each; one at 24 × 18 inches!/!61 × 45.7 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Dialogue #5 (One Hand Clapping), 1991 Blanket, stuffed toy, cassette player with audio 41 × 162 × 103 inches!/!104.14 × 411.48 × 261.62 cm Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Lumpenprole and Ageistprop, 1991 Lumpenprole: yarn, found objects; Ageistprop: synthetic polymer on paper Lumpenprole: 240 × 360 inches!/! 609.6 × 914.4 cm; Ageistprop: 84 × 60 inches!/!213.36 × 152.4 cm Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Mechanical Toy Guts, 1991!/!2012 Mixed-media with audio 30 × 240 × 156 inches!/!76.2 × 609.6 × 396.24 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Minor Infraction, 1991 Acrylic on paper 60 × 72 inches!/!152.4 × 182.9 cm Private collection, courtesy BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services

Untitled (Communicating Vessels), 1991 Acrylic on paper 60 × 83.75 inches!/!152.4 × 212.7 cm Courtesy of Lehmann-Art Ltd. and Rashel-Art Ltd.

Colema Bench, 1992 Wood, plastic buckets, plastic tubing 84 × 67 × 17 inches!/!213.36 × 170.18 × 43.18 cm Grässlin Collection, St. Georgen

Colema Board Details, 1992 Gelatin silver print 72 × 48 inches!/!182.9 × 121.9 cm Grässlin Collection, St. Georgen

Orgone Shed, 1992 Wood, metal, glass wool, paper towels 88.6 × 89 × 59 inches!/!225.04 × 226.06 × 149.86 cm Grässlin Collection, St. Georgen

Antiqued (Prematurely Aged), 1987 Painted wood dresser, glass, magazine clippings, objects, mirror, plywood, ephemera (in drawers) Dresser: 30 × 33 inches!/!76.2 × 83.8 × 41.91 cm; mirror: 21 × 36 inches!/!53.3 × 91.4 cm; 75.5 × 35.875 × 22.125 inches!/! 191.8 × 91.4 × 56.2 cm overall Collection Norman and Norah Stone, San Francisco

Black-Eyed Susan, 1987 Glued felt 96.65 × 59.85 inches!/!245.5 × 152 cm Goetz Collection

Incorrect Sexual Models: Hermaphrodite, 1987 2 parts: acrylic on wood panel 72 × 48 inches!/!182.88 × 121.92 cm overall Courtesy of Lehmann-Art Ltd. and Rashel-Art Ltd.

Let’s Talk, 1987 Glued felt 94.5 × 59 inches!/!240 × 149.9 cm Goetz Collection

Incorrect Sexual Models: Mommy’s Penis, 1987 2 parts: acrylic on wood panel 72 × 48 inches!/!182.88 × 121.92 cm overall Collection S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987 2 parts: found handmade stuffed animals and afghans on canvas, dried corn; wax candles on wood, metal base 96 × 127 × 5 inches!/!243.84 × 322.58 × 15 cm; 52 × 23 × 23 inches!/!132.08 × 58.42 × 58.42 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee

Three-Point Program!/!Four Eyes, 1987 Glued felt with ribbon 94 × 59.5 inches!/!238.8 × 151.1 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Trash Picker, 1987 Glued felt 94.5 × 59 inches!/!240.03 × 149.86 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Incorrect Sexual Models: Utopia, 1987 2 parts: acrylic on wood panel 72 × 48 inches!/!182.88 × 121.92 cm overall Goetz Collection

From My Institution to Yours, 1987!/!2003 Acrylic on paper mounted on board, ribbon, carpet, wood, steel, aluminum Door: 36 × 84 inches!/!91.44 × 213.36 cm; battering ram: 120 × 12 inches!/!304.8 × 30.48 cm diameter; 194 × 186.375 × 123.5 inches!/!492.76 × 473.39 × 313.69 cm overall Collection of Eric Decelle

Garbage Drawing #17, 1988 Acrylic on paper 20 × 40.375 inches!/!50.8 × 102.6 cm Falckenberg Collection

Garbage Drawing #25, 1988 Acrylic on paper 23.82 × 28 inches!/!60.5 × 71.12 cm Herbert Foundation

Orgone Shed Plans, 1992 2 parts: gelatin silver prints 72 × 48 inches each!/!182.88 × 121.92 cm Grässlin Collection, St. Georgen

Two and Three Dimensions, 1994 Wood, enamel on aluminum, speakers, boom box Bookshelf: 59.06 × 32 × 10 inches!/! 150.01 × 81.28 × 25.4 cm; painting: 66 × 46.06 inches!/!167.64 × 46.06 cm; floor speaker 14 × 12 × 5.75 inches!/!35.56 × 30.48 × 14.61 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Collection of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard

Untitled #5, 1994 Acrylic on paper 35 × 23 inches!/!88.9 × 58.4 cm Courtesy Marc Jancou Contemporary

Untitled #6, 1994 Acrylic on paper 35 × 23 inches!/!88.9 × 58.42 cm Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC)

Untitled (Study for Untitled #4, Movie Alien Series), 1994 Acrylic on paper 35 × 23 inches!/!88.9 × 58.42 cm Collection of Barry Sloane

Educational Complex, 1995 Acrylic, latex, foam core, fiberglass, wood 51 × 192 × 96 inches!/! 129.54 × 487.68 × 243.84 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee

Backward Masking, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 20 × 26 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Blue Plaid Cap!/!Brown Plaid Body, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Joel Ehrenkranz Collection

Ecstasy and Me, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Private collection, Switzerland

Fluid Structure, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Courtesy Metro Pictures

Grid, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Plaid Dialogue, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Red, White and Blue, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Patrick Painter Inc.

Garbage Drawing #34, 1988 Acrylic on paper 17.875 × 22.75 inches!/!45.4 × 57.8 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Alan N. Kleinman from the Estate of Marsha Kleinman

Garbage Drawing #36, 1988 Acrylic on paper 26.25 × 29.875!/!66.68 × 75.88 cm Herbert Foundation

Garbage Drawing #58, 1988 Acrylic on paper 30 × 42 inches!/!76.2 × 106.7 cm Collection of Mandy and Cliff Einstein

Garbage Drawing #68, 1988 Acrylic on paper 24 × 36 inches!/!61 × 91.4 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Garbage Drawing #71, 1988 Acrylic on paper 24 × 30.75 inches!/!61 × 78.1 cm Falckenberg Collection

Garbage Drawing #73, 1988 Acrylic on paper 28 × 42 inches!/!71.1 × 106.7 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988 Oil on Tyvek, wood, acrylic, oil on paper by a violent criminal in Amsterdam, 2 donation boxes (collected money to be given to a victims’ rights organization) Structure: 9 × 12 × 82 feet!/! 274.32 × 365.76 × 2499.36 cm; banners: 96 inches high!/!243.84 cm; width variable; overall installation variable The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Timothy P. and Suzette L. Flood

Wallflowers, 1988 2 parts: acrylic on paper 71.75 × 60 inches each!/!182 × 153 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Ascending Hosts, 1989 Glued felt 93.5 × 18 × 12.5 inches!/!237.5 × 45.7 × 31.8 cm Wendy and Robert Brandow

Comedy and Tragedy Lung, 1989 Acrylic on paper 40.25 × 32 inches!/!102.2 × 81.3 cm Collection Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Paris

Descending Order, 1989 Glued felt 93.5 × 17 × 16 inches!/!237.5 × 43.2 × 40.6 cm Sammlung Peter Pakesch

Estral Star #3, 1989 Found stuffed animals, tied 23 × 10.5 × 5 inches!/!58.4 × 26.7 × 12.7 cm Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Eviscerated Corpse, 1989 Found stuffed animals 71.5 × 99.5 × 166 inches!/!181.6 × 252.7 × 421.6 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Lannan Foundation

386 387

SOLO AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS

1979 The Poltergeist: A Work between David Askevold and Mike Kelley, Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, California.

1981 Meditation on a Can of Vernors, Mizuno Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1982 “Monkey Island” and “Confusion”, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

1983 Monkey Island, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

The Sublime, Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York.

1984 The Sublime, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

The Sublime, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1985 Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1986 Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

1987 Vintage Works: 1979–1986, two-artist exhibi- tion with Chris Burden, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

Half a Man, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1988 Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. (exh. cat.)

Half a Man, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

1989 Why I Got Into Art: Vaseline Muses, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof, Robin Lockett Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.

Galerie Peter Pakesch, Vienna, Austria.

1990 Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Jessica Diamond, Mike Kelley, Interim Art, London, England.

Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

1991 Half a Man, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (exh. cat.)

Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain.

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany.

Lumpenprole, Galerie Peter Pakesch, Vienna, Austria. Toured to Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium.

1992 Alma Pater (Wolverine Den), Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany. Toured to Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Mike Kelley, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Toured to Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, and CAPC Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France. (exh. cat.)

“The Riddle of the Sphinx” and “Pansy Metal/ Clovered Hoof”, The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Mike Kelley and John Boskovich, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

LAX, with Paul McCarthy, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria. (exh. cat.)

1993 Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler: White Trash et Phobic (Installation-Video), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland. Toured to Kunst-Werke Berlin, Berlin, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Catholic Tastes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Toured to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany. (exh. cat.)

1994 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

13 New Untitled Black and White Photographs, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

1995 The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Paul McCarthy/Mike Kelley, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.

Mike Kelley: Recent Work, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan.

Flags and Video Heidi, Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich, Germany.

Mike Kelley: Politically Incorrect, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

Mike Kelley: Missing Time. Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Kandor 16, 2011 Mixed-media 77.25 × 49.75 × 40.375!/! 196.22 × 126.37 × 102.55 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Schematic Architecture 1–46, dates unknown Mixed-media on paper 12.5 × 9.5 in!/!31.75 × 24.13 cm each

Schematic Architecture 1 (Kandor) Schematic Architecture 2 (Kandor Fly-Through) Schematic Architecture 3 Schematic Architecture 4 (Fantasy Pool) Schematic Architecture 5 (Kelley Family Residence) Schematic Architecture 6 (Kelley Family Bathroom) Schematic Architecture 7 (Mobile Kelley Family Residence, MOCAD) Schematic Architecture 8 (Daly Drive- in!/!Bud’s Hamburgers) Schematic Architecture 9 (‘Day Is Done’ Gym Shoot 1) Schematic Architecture 10 (‘Day Is Done’ Gym Shoot 2) Schematic Architecture 11 (Woods Group!/!Candle Lighting) Schematic Architecture 12 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 13 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 14 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 15 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 16 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 17 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 18 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 19 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 20 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 21 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 22 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 23 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 24 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 25 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 26 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 27 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 28 (Felt-Divided Room with Symmetrical Stuffed Animals) Schematic Architecture 29 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 30 (Petting Zoo) Schematic Architecture 31 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 32 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 33 (Liquid Diet Details) Schematic Architecture 34 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 35 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 36 (Kandor-Con 2000) Schematic Architecture 37 (Unknown) Schematic Architecture 38 (Rose Hobart II) Schematic Architecture 39 (Profondeurs Vertes) Schematic Architecture 40 (Fontana Gallery) Schematic Architecture 41 (Fontana Gallery Office) Schematic Architecture 42 (Esprits de Paris) Schematic Architecture 43 (WIELS) Schematic Architecture 44 Schematic Architecture 45 Schematic Architecture 46

Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Screening Room

The Banana Man, 1983 Color!/!sound; 28:15 min.

Kappa, 1986 (with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto) Color!/!sound; 26 min.

Heidi’s Four Basket Dances, 1992!/!2001 (with Paul McCarthy) Color!/!sound; 15 min.

Superman Recites Selections from “The Bell Jar” and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999 Color!/!sound; 7:19 min.

Pole Dance, 1997 (Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Anita Pace) Color!/!sound, 31:18 min.

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000 Black-and-white!/!sound; 29:44 min.

Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip), 2004 Color!/!sound; 17:53 min.

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011 Color!/!sound; 25:15 min.

To the Tune of Batman, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Patrick Painter Inc.

Virgin, 1997 Mixed-media on paper 26 × 20 inches!/!66.04 × 50.8 cm Private collection, Switzerland

Free Gesture Frozen, Yet Refusing to Submit to Personification (Green Fingerpainting), 1998 Acrylic on wood 102.5 × 60.25 × 5.5 inches!/!260.3 × 153 × 14 cm Wendy Gondeln

Free Gesture Frozen, Yet Refusing to Submit to Personification (Orange Fingerpainting), 1998 Acrylic on wood 101.5 × 66.5 × 6.25 inches!/ !257.8 × 168.9 × 15.9 cm Private collection

Missing Time Color Exercise #2, 1998 Acrylic on wood panels, magazines, wood, Plexiglas 46 × 91 inches!/!118.62 × 231.14 cm Private collection

Performance Related Objects, 1998 Mixed-media installation comprising: The Spirit Collector (1978), Spirit Voices (1978–79), Indianana‚ Three B!/!W leitmotif photographs (1978), Indianana—main prop (1978), Two Machines for the Intellect (1978–79), The Base Man (1979), Tube Music: Wind and Crickets (1978–79), Tube Music: The Flying Flower (1977–78), Tube Music: Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object (1978–79); also including 6 documentation photos from performances. Wood platform: 6 × 239.75 × 96.125 inches!/!15.24 × 609 × 244 cm; overall dimensions variable Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris

Abandoned Faux Rock Building, 1999 Chromogenic color print 44 × 64.5 inches!/!111.76 × 163.83 cm Private collection

Duck Blind (Grassy Island Detroit River), 1999 Chromogenic color print 44 × 64.5 inches!/!111.76 × 163.83 cm Private collection

The Secret, 1999 2 chromogenic color prints, 1 movie poster 41.75 × 91.5 inches!/!106.05 × 232.41 cm Collection of Judy and Stuart Spence

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, 1999 Video: color!/!silent; 51 min. 18 sec. Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

In Memory of Camelot, 2000 Mixed-media installation 3 parts: tree: 71 × 16 × 16 inches!/ !180.34 × 40.64 cm; pedestal: 67 × 12 inches!/!170.8 × 30.48 cm diameter; newspaper: 30.25 × 21.25 inches!/! 76.84 × 53.98 cm, framed Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création

Lazy Susan, 2000 Papier-mâché, acrylic, containers 30 × 80 × 80 inches!/!76.2 × 203.2 × 203.2 cm Private collection, courtesy BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services

SS Cuttlebone, 2000 Mixed-media 73 × 106 × 44 inches!/! 185.42 × 269.24 × 111.76 cm Herbert Foundation

Butter-Colored Vision of the Land O’ Lakes Girl Peche Island, 2001 Cibachrome print mounted on board 70 × 48 inches!/!178 × 122 cm Goetz Collection

John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972, Wayne!/!Westland Eagle), 2001 Mixed-media 136.5 × 216.25 × 249 inches!/! 345.5 × 548.7 × 632.5 cm Rennie Collection, Vancouver

Memory Ware Flat #18, 2001 Mixed-media on wood panel 85 × 125 × 6 inches!/!216 × 318 × 15 cm Herbert Foundation

Photo Show Portrays the Familiar, 2001 26 gelatin silver prints, matted 16 × 20 inches!/!40.6 × 50.8 cm or 20 × 16 inches!/!50.8 × 40.6 cm Collection of Judy & Stuart Spence

Psychic Waveforms (Gerome Kamrowski’s Sculpture Garden, Ann Arbor, MI), 2001 Gelatin silver print 23.25 × 85 inches!/!59.1 × 215.9 cm Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (Graham Action), 2001 Diptych: chromogenic color prints, from edition of 3 23 × 49.75 inches!/!71.12 × 124.46 cm each Ringier Collection, Switzerland

Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid #2: School System Work Net (With Flashback), 2002 Mixed-media on butcher paper mounted on rag paper 50.5 × 44.5 inches!/!128.27 × 113.03 cm Private collection, Los Angeles

Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid #3: Reconfiguration of Wayne High into the Ritual Presentation Arena of the Educational Complex, 2002 Mixed-media on butcher paper mounted on rag paper 48 × 66.5 inches!/!121.92 × 168.91 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Missing Time Color Exercise (Reversed) #2, 2002 Acrylic on wood panels, magazines, wood, Plexiglas 44.625 × 111 inches!/!113.35 × 281.94 cm Collection Gian Enzo Sperone, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid #2: School System Work Net (With Flashback), 2002 Aluminum, steel, radio, speaker, Plexiglas 35 × 60 × 60 inches!/!89 × 152 × 152 cm Private collection, Los Angeles

Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid No. 3: Reconfiguration of Wayne High into the Ritual Presentation Arena of the Educational Complex, 2002 Aluminum, steel, ceramic, cloth 33 × 64 × 43 inches!/! 83.82 × 162.56 × 109.22 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Memory Ware Flat #42, 2003 Mixed-media on wood panel 76.25 × 52.25 × 4 inches!/! 193.68 × 132.72 × 10.16 cm Barbara Gladstone

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil’s Door), 2004–05 Mixed-media with video projections and photographs 113 × 156 × 80 inches!/! 287.02 × 396.24 × 203.2 cm Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #9 (Fresno), 2004–05 Mixed-media with video projections, video monitor, audio, photographs 90 × 192 × 176 inches!/! 228.6 × 487.68 × 447.04 cm Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #28 (Nativity Play), 2004–05 Mixed-media with video projections and photographs 144 × 180 × 161 inches!/! 365.76 × 457.2 × 408.94 cm Gagosian Gallery

Switching Marys, 2004–05 Mixed-media with video projections 74 × 166 × 40 inches!/ !187.96 × 421.64 × 101.6 cm Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Mr. and Mrs. Hermaphrodite, 2005 2 parts: mixed-media on paper 62 × 20.25 inches each!/!157.48 × 51.44 cm each Collection Broere Foundation

Sister, 2005 Mixed-media on paper 90 × 36 inches!/!228.6 × 91.44 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Animation 2, 2007 Video on flat-screen monitor: color!/!sound; 20 min. loop Private collection

Animation 6, 2007 Video on flat-screen monitor: color!/!sound; 20 min. loop Private collection

Animation 19, 2007 Video on flat-screen monitor: color!/!sound; 20 min. loop Private collection

Animation 20, 2007 Video on flat-screen monitor: color!/!sound; 20 min. loop Private collection

City 5, 2007 Tinted urethane resin, illuminated base; edition 1!/!5 58.3 × 25 inches!/!148.08 × 63.5 cm diameter Collection Allard and Natascha Jakobs

Kandor 15, 2007 Mixed-media with video 95.5 × 123.25 × 85 inches!/! 242.57 × 313.06 × 215.9 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Jablonka Galerie

Lenticular 15, 2007 Lenticular panel, light box 71 × 49.75 × 3.5 inches!/! 180.34 × 126.37 × 8.89 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Lenticular 16, 2007 Mixed-media 51.2 × 30.5 × 3.5 inches!/! 130.05 × 77.47 × 8.89 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

City 6, 2008 Acrylic, resin, light, wood; edition 1!/!5 50.75 × 22 inches!/!128.91 × 55.88 cm diameter Collection Allard and Natascha Jakobs

Memory Ware Flat #48, 2008 Mixed-media on wood panel 96.5 × 72.5 × 3.5 inches!/!245.1 × 184.2 × 8.9 cm Private collection, Brussels

Naked Majas (Bettelheim’s Genital), 2008–09 18 parts on two shelves: acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel, 70.5 × 192 × 6 inches!/! 179.07 × 487.68 × 15.24 cm Collection of Larry Gagosian

Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009 Acrylic on wood panels, steel, video monitors, media players, SD video cards, wiring 96 × 192 × 24.0625 inches!/! 243.84 × 487.68 × 61 cm Glenstone

Odalisque, 2010 Mixed-media 56 × 115 × 43 inches!/! 142.24 × 292.1 × 109.22 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011 Lenticular panel, light box; edition 1!/!5 32.5 × 48.25 × 4 inches!/! 81.92 × 122.56 × 10.16 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

Kandor 2B, 2011 Mixed-media 77 × 93 × 85 inches!/!195.58 × 236.22 × 215.9 cm Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

388 389

1998 Crossings, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California. Toured to MAK, Vienna, Austria, 1998; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

1999 The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950–2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

On the Sublime, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden.

Zeitwenden, Ausblick, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany. Toured to Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 20er Haus, k/haus-Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, Austria.

2000 Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London, England.

Let’s Entertain, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Toured to Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; as Sons et lumières, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; and Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida.

Made in California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.

2001 Artists Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan.

Eye Infection, curated by Mike Kelley and Jan Christiaan Braun, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

2002 2002 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Almost Warm & Fuzzy: Childhood and Contemporary Art, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Sonic Process: A New Geography of Sound, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Toured to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

2003 Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon 2003: C’est arrivé demain, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France.

The Not-So-Still-Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California.

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland. Toured to International Center for Photography, New York.

1993 1993 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Sonsbeek ’93, Sonsbeek, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

1994 Hors limites: L’art et la vie 1952–1994, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Radical Scavenger(s): The Conceptual Vernacular in Recent American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.

1995 1995 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Action/Performance and the Photograph, Turner/Krull Galleries, Los Angeles, California.

Zeichen & Wunder, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Galego, Spain.

1996 Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Féminimasculin: Le sexe de l’art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

L’informe: Le modernisme à rebours, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

1997 Art at the End of the 20th Century, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Chambres d’Amis, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Gent, Ghent, Belgium.

Display: International Exhibition of Painting, with Paul McCarthy, The Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Documenta X, with Tony Oursler, Kassel, Germany.

Im Reich der Phantome: Fotografie des Unsichtbaren, with David Askevold, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany. Toured to Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. Toured to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; and UCLA at The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California.

Artificial Intelligence in the Arts: Nr. 1 “Brainwork”, Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria.

B & W, curated by Mike Kelley, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California. (no exh. cat.)

1986 Headhunters, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California.

Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

Social Distortion, curated by Mike Kelley, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, California. (no exh. cat.)

Spectrum: Natural Settings, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

1987 Avant-Garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.

CalArts: Skeptical Belief(s), The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Toured to Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, 1988.

L.A. Hot and Cool: The Eighties, List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Saxon-Lee Gallery, with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Los Angeles, California. (no exh. cat.)

Toyama Now ’87, Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan.

1988 The 43rd Biennale of Venice, Aperto ’88, Venice, Italy.

The BiNational: American Art of the Late 80’s/ German Art of the Late 80’s, Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts. Toured to Städtische Kunsthalle, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany; and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.

1989 1989 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

Prospect 89: Eine Internationale Ausstellung aktueller Kunst, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany.

What Is Contemporary Art?, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden.

1990 Editionen, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany. (artist’s book, 1990)

Le désenchantement du monde, Villa Arson, Nice, France.

Just Pathetic, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

Word as Image: American Art, 1960–1990, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Toured to Oklahoma City Art Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas.

1991 1991 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

The Carnegie International 1991, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Toured to Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California.

El jardín salvaje, Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, Spain.

Lieux communs, figures singulières, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, France.

Metropolis: International Art Exhibition, Berlin 1991, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany.

1992 Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.

Désordres: Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak, Tunga, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.

Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany.

Doubletake: Collective Memory and Current Art, Hayward Gallery, London, England, 1992; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Expanded Art: II, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria.

Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, California. Toured to Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California, and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Robert Williams & Others, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California. Toured to Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, and Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, Washington.

Post Human, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne, Switzerland. Toured to Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.

Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, Italy. (exh. cat.)

2004 The Uncanny, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England; as Das Unheimliche, toured to Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria. (exh. cat.)

Cultural Folk, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

2005 Day Is Done, Gagosian Gallery, New York. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley: 1975–1994 Works, Medium, St. Barthélemy, French West Indies. (exh. cat.)

2006 Liquid Diet and Related Works, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

Profondeurs Vertes, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. (Exh. brochure)

Skarstedt Fine Art, New York, New York.

2007 Hermaphrodite Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London, England. (exh. cat.)

Memory Ware Flats, Skarstedt Fine Art, New York, New York.

Kandors, Jablonka Galerie, Berlin, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Kandor-Con 2000, Jablonka Galerie in coop- eration with Harald Falckenberg at Halle 037, Berlin, Germany.

2008 Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, Belgium. Toured to Museion, Bolzano, Italy. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany. (exh. cat.)

2009 Mike Kelley: A Selection of Photo Editions, Patrick Painter Editions, Santa Monica, California.

Selections from Kandors, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, with Michael Smith, Sculpture Center, Long Island, New York. Toured to West of Rome, Los Angeles, California.

Photographs: Sculptures, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, Japan. (exh. cat.)

Horizontal Tracking Shots, Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York. (exh. cat.)

Hungry for Death, Printed Matter, New York. Toured to White Flag Projects, St. Louis, Missouri, and venues in Oslo, London, Rome, Lausanne, Athens, and Paris.

2010 Gerhard Richter, Mike Kelley: Gallery Show, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, Japan.

Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany.

Arenas, Skarstedt Gallery, New York, New York. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley + Martin Kippenberger, Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain.

2011 Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34, Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California.

Kandors, Museen Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Exploded Fortress of Solitude, Gagosian Gallery, London, England. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley and Rosemarie Trockel: Works from the Michael and Eleonore Stoffel Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, 2011–12.

Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, PRISM, Los Angeles, California, 2011–12.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS Exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues unless otherwise noted.

1979 Sound, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California. Toured to P.S. 1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Long Island City, New York.

1980 Jim Casebere, Michael Glier, Mike Kelley, Kathryn Mish, Tom Sansone, and Others, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, New York. (no exh. cat.)

1981 Beware of the Dog: Work from Artists in the Cave Canem Book Project, The Mudd Club, New York, New York. (no exh. cat.)

1983 The First Show: Painting and Sculpture from Eight Collections, 1940–1980, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

1984 The Fifth Biennale of Sydney—Private Symbol: Social Metaphor, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

First Newport Biennial: Los Angeles Today, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California.

1985 1985 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Art in the Anchorage, The Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, New York, New York. (artist’s book, 1986)

Towards a Utopian Arts Complex, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

1996 Land O’ Lakes, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, Japan. (exh. cat.)

1997 Mike Kelley: 1985–1996, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. Toured to Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden, and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. (exh. cat.)

Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, Japan.

The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, Documenta version, with Tony Oursler, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan. (exh. cat.)

The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, Barcelona version, with Tony Oursler, Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, California.

1998 The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, Barcelona version, with Tony Oursler, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, New York.

The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, Documenta version, with Tony Oursler, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany.

Destroy All Monsters Archive, with Jim Shaw and Carey Loren, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. (In conjunction with the group exhibition I rip you, You rip me: honey, we’re going down in history with Jim Shaw and Carey Loren.)

Strange Früt: Detroit Culture, with Jim Shaw and Carey Loren, Centrum Beeldende Kunst/ Villa Alkmaer, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. (In conjunction with the group exhibition I rip you, You rip me: honey, we’re going down in history with Jim Shaw and Carey Loren.)

Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Sod & Sodie Sock, Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria. (exh. cat.)

1999 Odd Man Out, Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, California.

Mike Kelley and Ed Ruscha: Photographs, Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, California.

Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Unisex Love Nest, Steirischer Herbst 99, Palais Attems, Graz, Austria.

Framed and Frame, Test Room, Sublevel, Le Magasin: Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley, Franz West, OneTwoThree, Hôtel Empain, Brussels, Belgium. (exh. cat.)

2000 The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, Documenta version, with Tony Oursler, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Mike Kelley and John Miller: Consolation Prize, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. (exh. cat.)

Unisex Love Nest, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany.

Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada. (exh. cat.)

Sublevel, Framed and Frame, Test Room, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, Italy.

Mike Kelley: Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Sammlung Goetz and Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Categorical Imperative and Morgue, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Destroy All Monsters: Postmodern Multimedia and Musical Mutations (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Cary Loren), Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, Washington.

Mike Kelley: Paintings and Drawings from the Rowan Collection, Christie’s, New York, New York. (Brochure)

Memory Ware, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France.

2001 Memory Ware: Paintings and Sculptures, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany. (exh. cat.)

Mike Kelley, Sperone Jr., Rome, Italy.

2002 Test Room, Galerie Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland.

Mike Kelley: Selected Works, 1982–1990, Skarstedt Fine Art, New York.

Black Out, Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, California.

The Poetry of Form: Part of an Ongoing Attempt to Develop an Auteur Theory of Naming, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France.

Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Editions, Metro Pictures, New York, New York.

2003 The Poetics Project: 1977–1997, with Tony Oursler, Barbican Centre, London, England.

390 391

2006 Reading with John C. Welchman. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

“Works in Progress: Mike Kelley.” Lecture with discussant Branden W. Joseph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

Performance. Private space, Los Angeles, California. Benefit for SASSAS.

2007 “A Conversation with Mike Kelley,” with Michael Kimmelman. The American Academy in Berlin, Germany. In cooperation with Jablonka Galerie, Berlin.

2008 Performance with Masaya Nakahara Hair Sylistics and Paul McCarthy. The Echo, Los Angeles, California.

Performance. Private space, Brentwood, California. “Blast! 3, Sasster Blaster” benefit for SASSAS.

Presentation and Book Signing for Sex to Sexty: The Most Vulgar Magazine Ever Made with Dian Hansen. Taschen store, Beverly Hills, California.

2009 “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33, Plus.” Judson Memorial Church, New York, New York. Part of

“Performa 09.”

“At a Gong,” solo performance; as Destroy All Monsters with Cary Loren and Jim Shaw; and as Extended Organ with Paul McCarthy, Fredrik Nilsen, and Joe Potts; “A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music,” all Gramercy Theater, New York, New York.

Performance with Raymond Pettibon. Private residence, Los Angeles, California. Benefit for SASSAS.

2010 “Mobile Homestead.” Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan. On the occasion of the maiden voyage of Mobile Homestead, sculpture christening, community spirit event, and opening remarks by John Sinclair and others.

2011 Extended Organ performance. Los Angeles Free Music Society, Sunday Nights at the Getty, Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center, Los Angeles. Part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980.

The Futurist Ballet (documentation of a live improvisational event with Jim Shaw and others), 1973; 27 min.; b&w/sound

The Banana Man, 1983; 28:15 min.; color/sound

Kappa (with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto), 1986; 26 min.; color/sound

Blind Country (with Ericka Beckman), 1989; 19:57 min.; color/sound

100 Reasons—Spank O Rama (with Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose), 1991; 6:41 min.; color/sound

Beat of the Traps (with Anita Pace and Stephen Prina), 1992; 55:22 min.; color/sound. Performed at the Remise, Vienna, Austria, in conjunction with Wiener Festwochen.

Heidi (with Paul McCarthy), 1992; 62:40 min.; color/sound

Heidi’s Four Basket Dances (with Paul McCarthy), 1992/2001; 15 min.; color/sound

Fresh Acconci (with Paul McCarthy), 1995; 45 min.; color/sound

The Pole Dance (with Tony Oursler and Anita Pace), 1997; 31:18 min.; color/sound

Out O’ Actions (with Paul McCarthy), 1998; 4:25 min.; color/sound

Strange Früt (with Destroy All Monsters), 1998; 60 min.; color/sound

A Dance Incorporating Movements Derived from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and Choreographed in the Manner of Martha Graham, 1999; 8:32 min.; b&w/silent Cross Gender/Cross Genre, 1999; 119:06 min.; color/sound

Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna Cut) (with Paul McCarthy), 1999; 17:38 min.; color/sound

Superman Recites Selections from “The Bell Jar” and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999; 7:19 min.; color/sound

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, 1999; 51:18 min.; color/silent

A Haute Voix (with Franz West), 2000; 99:46 min.; color/sound

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), 2000; 29:44 min.; b&w/sound Runway for Interactive DJ Event, 2000; 48:23 min.; color/sound

Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip), 2004; 17:53 min.; color/sound

Day Is Done: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2–32, 2005/06; 120:50 min.; color/sound

“Monkey Island.” Beyond Baroque Literary/ Arts Center, Venice, California.

“X-C.” Performance in collaboration with Tony Oursler. Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, Venice, California.

“Ericka Beckman/Mike Kelley.” Reading and video presentation. Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York.

1984 “The Sublime.” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. Part of the performance series Explorations.

“Godzilla on the Beach.” Performance in collaboration with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, Venice, California.

Reading. Anti Club, Los Angeles, California.

Performance with Idiot Bliss. Beyond Baroque, Old Venice City Hall, Venice.

1985 “Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley.” Reading. The Permanent Contemporary Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

“Get It in Writing: An Evening of Readings by Dennis Cooper, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Benjamin Weissman.” Artists Space, New York, New York.

“Monkey Island Part Two.” Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Theater, Los Angeles, California.

“Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, #1 Brainwork.” Symposium. Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California; and Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria. In conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles Summer/Styrian Autumn.

1986 “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” Performance with Molly Cleator and Sonic Youth. Artists Space, New York, New York.

1987 Reading. Benefit for Foundation For Art Resources, Lhasa Club, Los Angeles, California.

1989 “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ.” Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, Venice, California.

“Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof.” Dance presentation of silk-scarf series in collabora- tion with Anita Pace. Private space, Los Angeles, California. Sponsored by Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles.

1991 “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ #2.” Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, Venice, California.

1992 “Beat of the Traps.” Collaboration with Anita Pace and Stephen Prina. Expanded Art, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria; and Gindi Auditorium, Los Angeles, California. Exh. cat.

“Far Fetched.” Music performance. Foundation for Art Resources, Sokol Hall, Los Angeles.

1993 “100 Reasons—Spank O Rama.” Performance in collaboration with Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose. The Lab, San Francisco, California.

1996 “Sad and Sadie Sack USO Party.” Performance in collaboration with Paul McCarthy and Violent Onsen Geisha. P-House Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.

“Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.” Music performance. Stratos Selskapslokaler, Oslo/ RockFestival, Norway.

“Jean Beaudrillard with the Chance Band.” Music performance. Whiskey Pete’s Casino and Hotel, Stateline, Nevada.

1998 “The Thin Monotonous Piping of an Accursed Flute.” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California. In conjunction with the exhibition Beyond the Pink. Sponsored by the Cortical Foundation.

“Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Violent Onsen Geisha.” Sound performance. Secession, Vienna, Austria.

2000 “A Haute Voix.” Theater performance. Espace Franquin, Angouleme, France. In conjunction with the exhibition Mike Kelley/Franz West.

2002 Destroy All Monsters performance. Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles. In conjunction with “All Tomorrow’s Parties” music festival (curated by Sonic Youth).

2004 Extended Organ performance (with Paul McCarthy and Dave Muller). Private space, Los Angeles, California. “Get Off the Grass & Blast” benefit for the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS).

Destroy All Monsters performance. Pontins, Camber Sands, East Sussex, United Kingdom. In conjunction with “All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Nightmare Before Christmas” music festival (curated by Jake and Dinos Chapman).

2005 “Mike Kelley and John Welchman: Contemporary Art in Conversation.” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Performance. Private space, Los Angeles, California. “Get Off the Grass & Blast 2” benefit for SASSAS.

1978 “A Big Question.” The Exploratorium, California State University, Los Angeles. Part of the performance series Airwaves and Stars.

“Indianana.” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California.

“Poetry in Motion.” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California. Part of “An Evening of Performance, Audio Tape, and Film.”

“My Space, 1879” “Two Pieces of Tube Music,” “A Big Question(Chocolate Kiss),” “A Race Memory Story,” and “A Healthful Activity.” La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California.

1979 “The Monitor and the Merrimac.” Performance at Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, California. In conjunction with a collaborative exhibition with David Askevold.

“The Poltergeist.” Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California. In conjunction with the exhibition Sound. Exh. cat.

1980 “Three Valleys.” Performance at a private space. Sponsored by Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, California.

“The Parasite Lilly.” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles. Part of the performance festival Public Spirit: Live Art L.A., presented in association with the Highland Art Agents; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; University of California, San Diego; The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance, New York, New York; and Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

1981 “The Monitor and the Merrimac.” Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York.

“Meditation on a Can of Vernors.” Performance at a private space. Sponsored by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California.

1982 “Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each Set More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last.” Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego; and Film in the Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“The Artist in Television.” Live interactive performance with Michael Smith. Telesatellite Conference, University of California, Los Angeles.

1983 “Confusion: A Play in Seven Sets, Each Set More Spectacular and Elaborate Than the Last.” Pilot 1 Theater, Los Angeles, California.

Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, England. Toured to Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany.

The View from Here, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California.

2011 The Luminous Interval, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain.

Museum der Wünsche/Museum of Desires: Jeff Wall, Louise Lawler, Mike Kelley, Isa Genzken, Franz West, Stephen Prina, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973–1977, Prism Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

The Spectacular Vernacular, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Toured to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; and Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

2012 L’Institut des archives sauvages, Villa Arson, Nice, France.

This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Toured to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

2004 100 Artists See God, organized by Independent Curators International, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California. Toured to Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England; and Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

100 Artists See Satan, Grand Central Art Center, California State University, Fullerton, California.

Site Santa Fe: Fifth International Biennial/ Disparities and Deformations. Our Grotesque, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

2005 Flashback: Revisiting the Art of the Eighties, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland.

Mixed-Up Childhood, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.

Translation, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.

2006 The 80s: A Topology, Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal.

Im Anfang war das Wort, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany. Toured to Power Plant, Toronto, Canada.

L.A. Art Scene, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Toured to Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida.

Mike Kelley: Martin Kippenberger. Albert Oehlen, Kunstraum Grässlin, St. Georgen, Germany.

Sculpture, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California.

Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.

2007 Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, Münster, Germany.

Sympathy for the Devil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.

2008 Close-up: Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film, and photography, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. Toured to Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England.

Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Puppet Show, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Toured to Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; and Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington.

Translocalmotion, 7th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China.

Yokohama 2008: International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Shinko Pier Exhibition Hall, Yokohama, Japan.

2009 All Creatures Great and Small, Zachęta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland.

Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.

Dance With Camera, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Toured to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London, England. Toured to Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; National Gallery of Canada, Musée des beaux arts du Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria.

Sequence 1: Painting and Sculpture in the François Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi, Punta Della Dogana, Venice, Italy.

SONIC YOUTH etc.: Sensational Fix, LIFE, Saint-Nazaire, France. Toured to Museion, Bolzano, Italy; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden; and CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Spain.

Trahison, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France.

2010 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea.

Imaginary Museum, New Museum, New York, New York.

Ordinary Madness, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Rewind: 1970s to 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.

392 393

Destroy All Monsters, My Cowboy Hero/Calling All Girls. Flexi-record released in “Geisha This,” Destroy All Monsters Magazine. First printing, Time Stereo, 1995

Destroy All Monsters, Silver Wedding Anniversary. Sympathy for The Record Industry, 1996 (CD; rereleased as Compound Annex #6, 1998)

Destroy All Monsters, Backyard Monster Tube. The End is Here/Time Stereo, 1996 (audiocassette)

Carey Loren, Radio Teardrop. Includes mixes of Destroy All Monsters tracks. The End is Here Records, 1996 (edition of 500 CDs)

The Poetics, The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings 1977 to 1983, Compound Annex #1, #2, and #3. Compound Annex Records, 1997 (3-CD box-set)

The Poetics, Critical Inquiry in Green, Compound Annex #4. Compound Annex Records, 1997 (CD)

Gobbler, Skin of Flesh All Mighty!, Compound Annex #5. Compound Annex Records, 1997 (CD)

Destroy All Monsters, “Raga,” Bring Your Own Walkman!. Produced by W139 Amsterdam and Jack Jaegger, 1997 (CD compilation)

Gobbler, “Manamana,” Bring Your Own Walkman!. Produced by W139 Amsterdam and Jack Jaegger, 1997 (CD compilation)

Destroy All Monsters, Typical Girl/Attack of the Chiggers. Flexi-record released in “Geisha This,” Destroy All Monsters Magazine. Third Printing, Time Stereo, 1997

Destroy All Monsters, “Mom’s and Dad’s Pussy,” Gummo soundtrack. London Records, 1997 (CD compilation)

Mike Kelley, “Odd Man Out” and “The Hole,” in Crossings: Kunst Zum Horen un Sehen. Released with catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition Crossings: Zum Horen un Sehen. Kunshalle Wien, 1998 (CD compilation)

Destroy All Monsters, Backyard Monster Tube and Pig. Released by The End is Here, 1998 (CD; songs 1 –11 previously released as Backyard Monster Tube by Time Stereo, 1996)

Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy/Violent Onsen Geisha, Sod and Sodie Sock, Compound Annex #7. Compound Annex Records, 1998 (CD, released with Studio C)

Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy/Violent Onsen Geisha, Studio C, Compound Annex #8. Compound Annex Records, 1998 (CD, released with Sod and Sodie Sock)

Destroy All Monsters, “Boots,” Make it Funky. Released with Make it Funky: Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde and Art, edited by Ulrike Groos and Markus Muller, Cologne: Oktagon, 1998 (Jahresring 45, CD compilation)

Mike Kelley, “Lock Groove #258,” Various 500 Lock Grooves By 500 Artists. RRR records, 1999 (LP compilation)

Mike Kelley, “Untitled (Voices),” RAS #4. Revista de Arte Sonoro, Centro de Creación Experimental, Universidad de Castilla- La Mancha, 1999 (CD compilation)

Mike Kelley, “Anal Sadistic,” The New Sounds of Today! Songpoems by Twenty-one Contemporary Artists. Art Issues Press, 2000 (CD compilation)

Mike Kelley, Black Betty. Published for the exhibition Kim’s Bedroom, curated by Kim Gordon. Mu-De Witte Dame, Eindhoven Netherlands, 2000 (CD)

Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Violent Onsen Geisha, “Born on the Catwalk,” Rearcar. Leiterwager Records, 2001 (CD compilation)

Jean Baudrillard with the Chance Band, Suicide Moi, Compound Annex #9. Compound Annex Records, 2002 (CD)

Destroy All Monsters, “Silver Wedding Anniversary, Pig”, Music in Me 1 (Concerting an exhibition). By Octavian Esanu. Geselleschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2002 (CD compilation)

Destroy All Monsters, The Detroit Oratorio,

Mike Kelley, The Peristaltic Airwaves & Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, High Performance Audio, 1987 (audiocassette)

Mike Kelley with Sonic Youth, extracts from Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, Tellus: The Audio Cassette Magazine, No. 18, 1988 (audiocassette)

The Dogz, It’s Easter in my Brain/Willy Nilly. Produced and arranged by Jim Shaw. Cameo Appearance Records, 1990 (45 rpm)

Raymond Pettibon and Super Session, Torches and Standards. Blast First Records, 1990 (disc 33 1/3 rpm)

Destroy All Monsters, 1974–1976. Ecstatic Peace/Father Yod, 1994 (3-CD box-set)

Mike Kelley, Dry Hump, Oostende 94. Bigg Truck Records, 1994 (CD compilation)

Jim Shaw, Good Looking Corpse, Oostende 94. Bigg Truck Records, 1994 (CD compilation)

Destroy All Monsters, Live in Detroit. Ecstatic Peace, Father Yod, 1995 (7” EP)

Destroy All Monsters, Paranoid of Blondes. Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1995 (45 rpm)

Ann Magnuson, The Luv Show. Collaboration with Super Session. Geffen Records, 1995 (CD)

Destroy All Monsters, Grow Live Monsters. Special edition boxed audiocassette and mini-book. Time Stereo, 1995

Destroy All Monsters, My Cowboy Hero/Calling All Girls. Flexi-record released in “Geisha This,” Destroy All Monsters Magazine. First printing, Time Stereo, 1995

Masaya Nakahara, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy Live in Los Angeles 2008, 2010; 35:40 min.; color/sound

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (with Michael Smith), 2010; 1:30 min.; color/sound

Mobile Homestead Documentary (suite of three videos):

Going East on Michigan Avenue from Westland to Downtown Detroit, 2011; 76:17 min.; HD video, color/sound

Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland, 2011; 76:15 min.; HD video, color/sound

Mobile Homestead Christening Ceremony and Launch, September 25, 2010, 2011; 55:01 min.; HD video, color/sound

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011; 25:14 min.; HD video, color/sound

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 B (Made in England), 2011; 27:59 min.; HD video, color, sound

The Judson Church Horse Dance: Selections from Mike Kelley’s “Day Is Done” and “The Offer” (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33), 2011; 1:10 min.; color/sound

* Single-channel videos only

Bo Bo Cuck Cuck, 1979 Marker on paper 40 × 62.5 inches (101.6 × 158.75 cm)

Compound Annex #10. Recorded live in Rotterdam and Vienna, 1998. Compound Annex Records, 2003 (CD)

Mike Kelley and Scanner, Esprits de Paris, Compound Annex #11. Compound Annex Records, 2003 (CD)

Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Violent Onsen Geisha, Comp. O.S.O., Compound Annex #12. Compound Annex Records, 2003 (CD)

Destroy All Monsters, Live in Osaka and Tokyo, Compound Annex #13. Compound Annex Records, 2004 (CD)

Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, Day Is Done, Compound Annex #14. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Compound Annex Records, 2005 (CD)

Mike Kelley, Yummy Puffy Mommy Yoni, Compound #15. Compound Annex Records, 2008 (CD)

Destroy All Monsters, Double Sextet, Compound #16. Compound Annex Records, 2009 (LP)

Destroy All Monsters, 1974–76, Compound # 17, #18, and #19. Compound Annex Records, 2009 (CD)

Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, Dance Beats for Baby with Baby Ikki, Compound #20. Compound Annex Records, 2009 (CD)

Dolphin Explosion, Boogie Man, Compound #24. Compound Annex Records, 2011 (CD)

Mike Kelley, Kandor 10/Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34, Kandor 12/ Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35, Compound #25. Original Soundtrack. Compound Annex Records, 2011 (CD)

Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley, Duets (1975–1976), Compound #34 and #35. Compound Annex Records, 2011. (CD)

Mike Kelley, Vice Anglais, Compound #36. Compound Annex Records, 2011 (LP)

Destroy All Monsters, Get Out of my Bedroom: A Mixtape. Included in Hungry for Death: Destroy All Monsters, edited by Cary Loren, exh. cat., Boston: Journeyman Press, 2011. End is Here, 2011 (CD)

Mike Kelley and Black to Comm, Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage. EN/OF 041, 2011 (LP with print)

Mike Kelley with Sonic Youth, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile and The Peristaltic Airwaves, Compound Annex #38. Compound Annex Records, 2012 (2-CD set; portions of both were previously released in 1987 on audiocassette)

Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, Profondeurs Vertes, Compound Annex #39. Compound Annex Records, 2012 (CD)

2002 Mike Kelley: Memory Ware. Paintings and Sculptures. Cologne, Germany: Jablonka Galerie, 2002. Exh. cat.

2003 Welchman, John C., ed. Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection. Essays and Criticism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003.

2004 Mike Kelley: Memory Ware, Wood Grain, Carpet. Milan, Italy: Galleria Emi Fontana, 2004. Exh. cat.

Grunenberg, Christoph, ed. The Uncanny: By Mike Kelley, Artist. Liverpool, England: Tate Liverpool; Vienna, Austria: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004. Exh. cat.

Welchman, John C., ed. Mike Kelley: Minor Histories. Statements, Conversations, Proposals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004.

2005 Welchman, John C., ed. Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1986–2004. Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier; Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel, 2005.

2006 Mike Kelley: 1975–1994 Works. St. Barthelémy, French West Indies: Medium, 2006. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. New York, New York: Phillips de Pury & Company, 2006. Auction cat.

2007 Francis, Mark, and Mike Kelley, eds. Mike Kelley: Day Is Done. London, England: Gagosian Gallery; and New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

Francis, Mark, ed. Mike Kelley: Hermaphrodite Drawings. London, England: Gagosian Gallery, 2007. Exh. cat.

2008 Goetz, Ingvild, Karsten Löckemann, and Stephan Urbaschek, eds. Mike Kelley. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2008. Exh. cat.

2009 Mike Kelley. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008. Brussels, Belgium: Wiels, 2009. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Horizontal Tracking Shots. New York, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Photographs/Sculptures. Tokyo, Japan: Wako Works of Art, 2009. Exh. cat.

2010 Mike Kelley: Arenas. New York, New York: Skarstedt Gallery, 2010. Exh. cat.

Jablonka, Rafael, ed. Mike Kelley: Kandors. Berlin, Germany: Jablonka Galerie; and Munich: Hirmer, 2010. Exh. cat.

Heymer, Kay, ed. Mike Kelley: The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter). Cologne, Germany: Jablonka Galerie, 1995. Exh. cat.

1996 Ichihara, Kentaro. Mike Kelley. Anti-Aesthetic of Excess and Supremacy of Alienation. Tokyo, Japan: Wako Works of Art, 1996. Exh. cat. Published concurrently with the 1996 solo exhibition Land O’ Lakes.

1997 Stals, José Lebrero, ed. Mike Kelley: 1985–1996. Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Malmö, Sweden: Rooseum: Center for Contemporary Art; Eindhoven, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1997. Exh. cat.

Watari, Koichi, et al. Tony Oursler/Mike Kelley: Poetics Project. Tokyo, Japan: Watari-um, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. Exh. cat.

1998 Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy: Sod & Sodie Sock. Vienna, Austria: Wiener Secession, 1998. Exh. cat.

1999 Mike Kelley. Grenoble, France: Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 1999. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Sublevel—Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. Braunschweig, Germany: Kunstverein Braunschweig, 1999. Exh. cat.

Welchman, John C., Isabelle Graw, and Anthony Vidler. Mike Kelley. London: Phaidon Press, 1999.

2000 Arden, Roy, and Scott Waston, eds. Mike Kelley and John Miller: Consolation Prize. Vancouver, Canada: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2000. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works. Toronto, Canada: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 2000. Exh. cat.

Schumacher, Rainald, ed. Mike Kelley: Peter Fischli, David Weiss. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2000. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Sublevel, Framed and Frame, Test Room. Zurich, Switzerland: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2000. Exh. cat. [German translations of texts published in 1999 Grenoble exh. cat.]

2001 Jamie, Cameron, and Mike Kelley, eds. Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2001.

Jocks, Heinz Norbert, ed. Mike Kelley im Gespräch mit Heinz Norbert Jocks. Cologne, Germany: Dumont, 2001.

Pontégnie, Anne, ed. Mike Kelley, Franz West. Brussels, Belgium: OneTwoThree, Hôtel Empain; Vienna: P&S, 2001. Exh. cat. [Published after the exhibition.]

AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS

1986 Kelley, Mike. Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. Venice, California: New City Editions; New York, New York: Artists Space, 1986. Artist’s book published on the occasion of the 1985 group exhibition Art in the Anchorage.

1988 Kelley, Mike, John Miller, and Howard Singerman, eds. Mike Kelley: Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay For Your Pleasure. Chicago, Illinois: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1988. Exh. cat.

1989 Mike Kelley. Cologne, Germany: Jablonka Galerie, 1989. Exh. cat.

1990 Kelley, Mike. Reconstructed History. Cologne, Germany: Galerie Gisela Capitain; New York, New York: Thea Westreich, 1990. Artist’s book.

1991 Cruz, Amada. Mike Kelley: Half a Man. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1991. Exh. cat.

1992 Bartman, William S., and Miyoshi Barosh, eds. Mike Kelley. New York, New York: Art Resources Transfer, 1992.

Mike Kelley. Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Basel; Frankfurt, Germany: Portikus; London, England: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1992. Exh. cat.

Paul McCarthy / Mike Kelley: Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media- Engram Abreaction Release Zone. Vienna, Austria: Galerie Krinzinger, 1992. Exh. cat.

1993 Kelley, Mike. The Uncanny. Arnhem, The Netherlands: Gemeentemuseum, 1993. Published concurrently with the 1993 group exhibition Sonsbeek ’93. Exh. cat.

Sussman, Elizabeth. Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. Exh. cat.

1994 Kellein, Thomas, ed. Mike Kelley / Thomas Kellein: Ein Gespräch. A Conversation. Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1994.

1995 Schwenk, Bernhart. Mike Kelley: Katholische Vorlieben. Munich, Germany: Haus der Kunst, 1995. Exh. cat.

Mike Kelley: Missing Time. Works on Paper 1974–1976, Reconsidered. Edited by Carl Haenlein. Hanover, Germany: Kestner-Gesell- schaft, 1995. Exh. cat.

394 395

1983 Gardner, Colin. “Out of the Frog.” Artweek, March 12, 1983.

Knight, Christopher; “Mike Kelley Turns Confusion into Art.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 27 1983, p. E4.

Pincus, Robert L. “Michael Kelley at Beyond Baroque and Rosamund Felsen.” Art in America, September 1983, p. 181.

1984 Adams, Brooks. “Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures.” Art in America, October 1984, pp. 196–97.

Burkhart, Kathe. “Nuclear Cheesecake.” High Performance 28 (1984): pp. 68–69.

Norklun, Kathi. “The Flow of Belief: Can Art Replace Wrong-Headed Thinking?” High Performance 26 (1984): pp. 36–37.

Private Symbol: Social Metaphor. The Fifth Biennale of Sydney. Sydney, Australia: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984. Exh. cat.

Schimmel, Paul, ed. First Newport Biennial 1984: Los Angeles Today. Newport Beach, California: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1984. Exh. cat.

1985 Gardner, Colin. “Exorcising Philosophical Demons.” Artweek, September 28, 1985.

Gordon, Kim. “American Prayers.” Artforum, April 1985, pp. 73–77.

Kriesche, Richard, ed. Artificial Intelligence in the Arts: Nr. 1 “Brainwork”. Graz, Austria: Steirischer Herbst festival; and Los Angeles, California: Municipal Art Gallery, 1985. Exh. Cat.

Rugoff, Ralph. “High Art Meets Low Culture.” L.A. Style, October 1985, pp. 23–24.

1986 Cameron, Dan. “Mike Kelley’s Art of Violation.” Arts Magazine, June 1986, pp. 4–17.

Welchman, John C. “Image and Language: Syllables and Charisma.” In Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. Exh. cat.

McGuigan, Cathleen, and Janet Huck. “Picasso in Lala Land.” Newsweek, November 24 1986, pp. 86–88.

Richard, Paul. “The New Lay of Landscape.” The Washington Post, January 11 1986, p. G9.

Vangelisti, Paul. “Flawed Polemics.” Artweek, July 25, 1986.

1987 Drohojowska, Hunter. “The Artists Who Matter, L.A.’s New Scene Makes History.” Antiques & Fine Arts, June 1987, pp. 49–52.

Howell, John. “Mike Kelley, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” Artforum, May 1987, pp. 151–52.

Jones, Ronald. “Mike Kelley, Metro Pictures.” Flash Art, February–March 1987, pp. 106–07.

Knight, Christopher. “‘Half a Man’ is wholly compelling: Artist moves into the third dimension.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, December 13, 1987.

L.A. Hot and Cool: The Eighties. Edited by Dana Friis-Hansen, et al. Cambridge, Massachu- setts: List Center for the Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987. Exh. cat.

O’Dell, Kathy. “Mike Kelley at Artists Space.” Art in America, May 1987, p. 184.

1988 Fairbrother, Trevor, David Joselit, and Elisabeth Sussman. The BiNational: American Art of the Late 80s / German Art in the Late Eighties. Boston, Massachusetts: The Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, 1988. Exh. cat.

Fehlau, Fred. “Mike Kelley at Rosamund Felsen.” Flash Art, March–April 1988, pp. 115–16.

The 43rd Biennale of Venice, Aperto ’88. Milan, Italy: Fabbri Editori, 1988. Exh. cat.

Hixson, Kathryn. “Mike Kelley.” Arts Magazine, November 1988, p. 97.

Palmer, Laurie. “Mike Kelley: Renaissance Society.” Artforum, September 1988, pp. 146–47.

Rugoff, Ralph. “Mike Kelley at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.” Artscribe, May 1988, pp. 83–84.

Schjeldahl, Peter. “New Blue Collar.” 7 Days, October 5, 1988.

Smith, Roberta. “Mike Kelley.” New York Times, September 23, 1988.

1989 Cameron, Dan. “Pop ’n’ Rock.” Art Issues 7, November 1989, pp. 9–17.

Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. “The Price of Goodness.” Artscribe, November–December 1989, pp. 48–53.

Goldstein, Ann, Mary Jane Jacob, and Howard Singerman, eds. A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989. Exh. cat.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Whitney’s ’89 Biennial Exhibit: Bourse of Marketing Reputations.” New York Observer, May 15, 1989.

McKenna, Kristine. “In the Footsteps of Warhol.” Los Angeles Times Calendar, May 7, 1989.

Messler, Norbert. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum, Summer 1989, p. 156.

1990 Cottingham, Laura. “Mike Kelley, Metro Pictures.” Tema Celeste (July–October 1990): p. 66.

El jardín salvaje. Madrid, Spain: Fundación Caja de Pensiones, 1990. Exh. cat.

Koether, Jutta. “B-B-Bildung” / “C-Culture and B-Culture.” Parkett 24 (1990): pp. 97–101; pp. 102–06.

Knight, Christopher. “Disheveled Dolls Center of Mike Kelley’s Show.” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1990.

———. “Is L.A. a World-Class Art City?” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1990.

Kornblau, Gary. “Mike Kelley.” Art Issues, March–April 1990, pp. 24–25.

Parachini, Allan. “NEA Won’t Fund Boston Show of L.A. Artist.” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1990.

Rimanelli, David. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum, September 1990, p. 151.

1991 Bass, Ruth. “Carroll Dunham, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman.” Art News, May 1991, pp. 151–52.

Fehlau, Fred. “Mike Kelley.” Flash Art, January–February 1991, p. 136.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Mike Kelley’s Toys Play Nasty Games.” New York Times, April 7, 1991.

Kuoni, Carin. “Der halbe Mensch.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 30, 1991.

Lewis, James. “Beyond Redemption.” Artforum, Summer 1991, pp. 71–75.

McEvilley, Thomas. “New York: The Whitney Biennial.” Artforum, Summer 1991, pp. 98–101.

Perl, Jed. “Stuffed.” The New Criterion, June 1991, pp. 45–47.

1992 Adams, Brooks. “Mike Kelley ou l’esthétique de l’échec.” Art Press, June 1992, pp. 32–37.

Bernardi, David. “The ABC’s of Perversion.” Flash Art, January–February 1992, p. 126.

Cooke, Lynne, and Mark Francis, eds. The Carnegie International 1991, Vol. 1. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The Carnegie Museum of Art, 1992. Exh. cat.

Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Noch eine Entdeckung Amerikas: Mike Kelley in Videofilmen” / “Yet Another Discovery: Mike Kelley in Video.” Parkett 31 (1992): pp. 74–76; 77–81.

Documenta IX. Kassel, Germany: Museum Fridericianum; Stuttgart: Edition Cantz; New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Exh. cat.

Fairbrother, Trevor. “Mike Fucking Kelley.” Parkett 31 (1992): pp. 64–68; 69–73.

Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. Exh. cat.

Kandel, Susan. “Join the Club.” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1992.

Knight, Christopher. “Mike Kelley, at Large in Europe.” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1992.

Marcadé, Bernard. “Der Mundgeruch der Welt” / “The World’s Bad Breath.” Parkett 31 (1992): pp. 93–95; 97–99.

Deitch, Jeffrey, ed. Post Human. Lausanne, Switzerland: Musée d’art contemporain, 1992. Exh. cat.

Relyea, Lane. “Wild Kingdom.” Parkett 31 (1992): pp. 82–85; pp. 86–91.

Schmitz, Rudolf. “Die Metaphysik der Muppet-Show.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 12, 1992.

Segal, Lewis. “Troupe Drums up Rock’s Barest Essence.” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1992. Review of Beat of the Traps.

Steiner, Bettina. “Vereinzelung für Auge und Ohr.” Die Presse, June 5, 1992. Review of Beat of the Traps.

1993 Avgikos, Jan. “Mike Kelley, Metro Pictures.” Artforum, March 1993, pp. 92–93.

Heath, Chris. “Artful Dodgers.” Details, November 1993, pp. 118–23, 175.

Joo, Michael. “Mike Kelley, Metro Pictures.” Flash Art, March–April 1993, p. 82.

Knight, Christopher. “Mike Kelley’s Messy, Underbelly World.” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1993.

Larson, Kay. “Valley of the Dolls.” New York Magazine, November 22, 1993.

McKenna, Kristine. “Mike Kelley’s Disturbing Memories.” Art News, November 1993, pp. 150–55.

———. “The Outlaw Gets Legit.” Los Angeles Times Magazine (December 1993).

Philbrick, Jane, ed. Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995. Exh. cat.

Princenthal, Nancy. “Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures.” Art in America (April 1993), p. 127.

Smith, Roberta. “Mike Kelley’s Messages: Mixed and Emotional.” New York Times, November 5, 1993.

Wallis, Brian. “Mike Kelley’s ‘The Uncanny.’” Art in America, October 1993, p. 55.

1994 Clearwater, Bonnie. “Arrested Childhood.” Art Press, December 1994, pp. 33–40.

Curtis, Cathy. “Images of Behavior.” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1994.

Decter, Joshua. “Stupidity as Destiny: American Idiot Culture.” Flash Art, October 1994, pp. 73–76.

Duncan, Michael. “Kelley’s Junk Shop Pop.” Art in America, June 1994, pp. 84–89.

Graaf, Vera. “Den Nerv der Zeit getroffen.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 4, 1994.

2011 Francis, Mark, ed. Mike Kelley: Exploded Fortress of Solitude. Edited by Mark Francis. London, England: Gagosian Gallery, 2011. Exh. cat.

Hentschel, Martin, ed. Mike Kelley: Kandors. Krefeld, Germany: Museen Haus Lange und Haus Esters; and Munich: Hirmer, 2010. Exh. cat. [German translation of texts published in 2010 Jablonka exh. cat.]

Kelley, Mike, and Dan Nadel, eds. Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters. Brooklyn, New York: PictureBox; and Los Angeles, California: PRISM, 2011. Exh. cat.

Welchman, John C., ed. On the Beyond: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and John C. Welchman. Vienna: Springer- Verlag Wien, 2011.

GROUP EXHIBITION CATALOGUES AND REFERENCE BOOKS; SELECTED REVIEWS AND ARTICLES Group exhibition catalogues and reference books (or individual essays featured within), as well as exhibition reviews and articles from periodicals.

1979 Armstrong, Richard. “Michael Kelley’s Performance: A Healthful Activity?” LAICA Journal 22 (March–April 1979): pp. 50–53.

———. “Sound.” Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art 22 (July 1979): pp. 50–53.

———. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum, November 1979, pp. 75–78.

Singerman, Howard. “Self-Expression, Seventies’ Style.” Artweek, July 14, 1979.

1980 Beal, Suzy. “Mike Kelley’s Trip.” Pro-Fun Magazine, April 1980, p. 15.

Sisco, Liz. “A Review of Mike Kelley’s Performance.” The Vis Arts Newspaper 2, June 16, 1980.

1981 Hertz, Richard. “L.A. Flesh Art.” High Performance 11/12, vol. III, nos. 3/4 (1981).

Knight, Christopher. “A Meeting of Media.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner: California Living Magazine, November 22, 1981.

Pincus, Robert L. “Mike Kelley.” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1981.

Rickey, Carrie. “Art Attack.” Art in America, May 1981, pp. 41–48.

Singerman, Howard. “The Artist as Adolescent.” Reallife (Summer 1981): pp.14–19.

———. “Michael Kelley: Reflections on a Can of Vernors.” Artforum, December 1981, p. 78.

1982 Eisenman, Stephan F. “Mike Kelley.” Arts Magazine (Nov. 1982), 57. April 1982, p. 14B.

Princenthal, Nancy. “Gallery Installations: Performance in Place.” A Life Magazine, November–December 1982, pp. 44–45.

Jocks, Heinz-Norbert. “Mike Kelley.” Kunstforum International 126 (March–June 1994): pp. 362–64.

Knight, Christopher. “Nothing Like a Little Enlightened Impurity.” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1994.

Lewis, Jim. “Mike Kelley.” Texte zur Kunst 13 (March 1994): pp. 32–35.

Myers, Terry R. “The Mike Kelley Problem.” New Art Examiner (Summer 1994): pp. 24–29.

Pincus, Robert L. “Kelley passionately presents visions of disturbing dreck.” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 24, 1994.

Rimanelli, David. “More Art Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid.” Frieze, January–February 1994, pp. 16–21.

Welchman, John C. Review of Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes. Art & Text 48, April 1994.

Ziegler, Ulf Erdmann. “Die verschlüsselten Knuddeltiere.” Die Zeit, January 14, 1994.

1995 Albig, Jörg-Uwe. “Mike Kelley: Ein Künstler bekämpft die Romantik.” Art: Das Kunstmagazin (April 1995).

Holert, Tom. “Mike Kelley: Vater, Lehrer, Kind.” Texte zur Kunst 18 (May 1995): pp. 95–111.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Mike Kelley.” New York Times, November 24, 1995. Review of Towards a Utopian Arts Complex.

Miro, Marsha. “Destroy All Preconceptions.” Detroit Free Press, October 16, 1995.

Rein, Ingrid. “Der Griff unter Barbies Rock.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 17, 1995.

Schütz, Heinz. “Mike Kelley: Katholische Vorlieben.” Kunstforum International 130 (May– July 1995): pp. 371–74.

Sussman, Elizabeth. “Mike Kelley.” Art in America, January–February 1995.

Winter, Peter. “Gedächtnisirrwege.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 26, 1995.

1996 Chapman, Jake, and Dinos Chapman. “Jake & Dinos Fine Arts Inc.” Dazed & Confused, 1996, pp. 78–88.

Drohojowska, Hunter. “L.A.’s Künstler auf der Jagd nach dem Teen Spirit.” Kunstforum International 134 (May–September 1996): pp. 194–98.

Foster, Hal. “The Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October 78 (Fall 1996): pp. 107–24.

L’informe: Le modernisme à rebours. Paris, France: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996. Exh. cat.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Informe Without Conclusion.” October 78 (Fall 1996): pp. 86–105.

Van de Walle, Mark. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum, January 1996, p. 81.

1997 Duncan, Michael. “Cultic Crossover: Mike Kelley in Barcelona.” LA Weekly, March 14, 1997.

Kandel, Susan. “Poetics Project Relives Group’s Heady Days.” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1997.

Pecoil, Vincent. “Mike Kelley, A Minor Art.” Documents sur l’art (Fall 1997): pp. 125–35.

Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997. Humlebæk, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Exh. cat.

Sztulman, Paul. “Mike Kelley / Tony Oursler.” In Documenta X: Short Guide / Kurzführer, 114–15. Kassel, Germany: Museum Fridericia- num; Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1997. Exh. cat.

1998 Crawford, Ashley. “Monster Men.” World Art (Winter 1998): pp. 28–31.

Duncan, Michael. “A Trip Down False- Memory Lane.” Art in America, January 1998, pp. 45–47.

Heiser, Jörg. “Mike Kelley.” Frieze, November– December 1998, pp. 82–83.

Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Vienna, Austria: Museum für angewandte Kunst; Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani; Tokyo, Japan: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Exh. cat.

Shamash, Diane. “A History Lesson.” Art in America, October 1998, pp. 112–15.

1999 Aupetitallot, Yves. “Mike Kelley: Le Magasin.” Art Press, October 1999, pp. 14–17.

Chris, Cynthia and John C. Welchman. “The Freshness of Acconci.” Texte zur Kunst (September 1999): pp. 276–80. [Text in German.]

Ise, Claudine. “A Timely, Ironic Exhibition from Mike Kelley.” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1999.

Miles, Christopher. “Mike Kelley at Patrick Painter, Inc.” Artforum, April 1999, p. 127.

Rimanelli, David. “Mike Kelley: Metro Pictures, New York.” Artforum, September 1999, p. 165.

Shulman, Dave. “What Makes the Worm Growl: Mike Kelley’s Health Plan.” L.A. Weekly, January 28, 1999.

Spiegel, Andreas. “Mike Kelley: Unisex Love Nest.” Camera Austria 68 (Winter 1999): p. 83.

Storr, Robert. “Mike Kelley.” In Zeitwenden: Ausblick. Edited by Dieter Ronte and Walter Smerling, pp. 156–61. Bonn, Germany: Kunstmuseum; Vienna, Austria: Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig; and Cologne, Germany: DuMont, 1999. Exh. cat.

Winter, Peter. “Folterkammern für Schmuddelkinder.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 14, 1999.

2000 Basting, Barbara. “Im Inneren des Glücksbrunnens.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 25, 2000.

Hall, James. “Playground for Adults.” In Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. Edited by Norman Rosenthal and Michael Archer. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000. Kihm, Cristophe. “Mike Kelley, Franz West: FRAC Poitou-Charentes.” Art Press, May 2000, pp. 79–80.

Monk, Philip. “Indepth Arts News: Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works.” Absolutearts.com. http://www.absolutearts. com/artsnews/2000/03/28/26760.html.

Pecoil, Vincent. “I Rip You, You Rip Me.” Documents Sur L’Art 12 (2000): pp. 108–115.

Poli, Francesco. “Mike Kelley.” Tema Celeste 82 (October–December 2000): p. 80.

Pouncey, Edwin. “Multi Media: Edwin Pouncey Decodes the Sex-Trash Art of Mike Kelley.” The Wire (February 2000), n.p.Scott, Michael. “Shocking Stuff.” Vancouver Sun, January 22, 2000.

Vidler, Anthony. “Deep Space/Repressed Memory: Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex.” In Warped Space, pp. 159–71. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000.

2001 Eye Infection. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2001. Exh. cat.

Foerster, Barbara. “Mike Kelley.” Kunstforum International 156 (August–October 2001): pp. 400–01.

Haddad, Natalie. “Here and Then: Mike Kelley joins DIA for the Artists Take of Detroit.” Real Detroit Weekly, November 14, 2001.

Welchman, John C. Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001.

2002 Chapuis, Yvane. “Mike Kelley: The Body General.” Art Press, September 2002, pp. 36–40.

De Brugerolle, Marie. “The Missing Link in California Conceptual Art.” Art Press, September 2002, pp. 34–35.

Freudenheim, Susan. “Singular Commitment.” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002.

Hainley, Bruce. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum, October 2002, p. 150.

Harvey, Doug. “Digging the Dirt: Mike Kelley, Relentlessly.” L.A. Weekly, May 15–23, 2002.

Knight, Christopher. “Dredging Up a Sense of Adolescent Place.” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2002.

LaBelle, Charles. “Mike Kelley.” Frieze, September 2002, pp. 102–03.

396 397

2005 Davis, Ben. “I Want My Mike Kelley.” Artnet.com, November 16, 2005. http://www. artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/ davis11-16-05.asp.

Fox, Dan. “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Frieze, March 2005, p. 79.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Adults Playing Children’s Scary Games.” New York Times, November 25, 2005.

Lewis, Jim. “Mike Kelley: The Last Great 20th-Century Artist.” Slate.com, November 30, 2005. http://www.slate.com/id/2131218.

PressPlay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation. London, England: Phaidon, 2006.

Saltz, Jerry. “Clusterfuck Aesthetics.” The Village Voice, November 29, 2005.

Welchman, John C. “Day Is Done: The False, the Real, and the Memory in Mike Kelley’s Thirty-Two Stations.” Flash Art, November– December 2005, pp. 59–61.

2006 Daftari, Fereshteh. “Islamic or Not.” In Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Exh. cat.

Géniès, Bernard. “Mike Kelley: Agitateur Culturel.” Le Nouvel Observateur (March 2006): pp. 6–10.

Mike Kelley: Martin Kippenberger. Albert Oehlen. St. Georgen, Germany: Kunstraum Grässlin, 2006. Exh. cat.

Mooney, Chris. “Mike Kelley: Profondeurs Vertes.” Art Review, November 2006, p. 198.

Pennings, Mark. “Gross Out: Day Is Done, Mike Kelley.” Eyeline 60 (2006): pp. 52.

Rochette, Anne, and Wade Saunders. “Place Matters: Los Angeles Sculpture Today.” Art in America, November 2006, pp. 168–70.

Stern, Steven. “Tomorrow Never Comes.” Frieze, March 2006, pp. 112–19.

Welchman, John C. “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites.” In Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, n.p. New York: Phillips de Pury & Company, 2006.

2007 Chang, Chris. “Night Has Come: The Warped Space of Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done.” Film Comment (September–October 2007): p. 17.

Draxler, Helmut. “Mike Kelleys Allegorie der Realisierten Demokratie: Partizipative Perversion.” Artnet.de, September 4, 2007. http://www.artnet.de/magazine/reviews/ hdraxler/draxler09-04-07.asp.

Gilligan, Melanie. “The Beggar’s Pantomime: Melanie Gillian on Performance and its Appropriations.” Artforum, Summer 2007, pp. 426–33.

Kuhn, Nicola. “Mike vom Jupiter.” Der Tagesspiegel, October 6, 2007.

Mania, Astrid. “Im Gehirn des Supermänner.” Von Hundert (November 2007): pp. 3–4.

Müller, Markus. “Fortress of Plenitude.” Texte zur Kunst 68 (December 2007): pp. 246–49.

Müller, Sabine. “Salzsäule im Streichelzoo: Mike Kelleys Tierpavillon am Bahnhof.” Münstersche Zeitung, May 25, 2007.

Singerman, Howard. “Extended Caption to Alfred Barr’s History and Mike Kelley’s Entry Way.” Dot Dot Dot (S as in Stenographer) 14 (Summer 2007): pp. 62–65.

Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. Edited by Brigitte Franzen, Kaspar König, and Carina Plath. Münster, Germany: Westfälisches Landes- museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte; Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007. Exh. cat.

Welchman, John C. “Mike Kelley.” In Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, pp. 13–16. Edited by Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007.

Willis, Holly. “Variety Show: Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done.” L.A. Weekly, January 19–25, 2007.

2008 Chun, Kimberly. “Video Mutants: Booby calls. Lost in bizarre pop idolatry with artist Mike Kelley.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 23, 2008.

Hafner, Hans-Jürgen. “Mike Kelley: Kandors.” Kunstforum International 189 (January– February 2008): pp. 287–88.

Holthof, Marc. “Raised by Zombies: Over modernisme als misbruik en het werk van Mike Kelley.” De Witte Raaf 134 (July– August 2008).

Liebs, Holger. “Mike Kelley.” Frieze, January–February 2008, p. 192.

Life on Mars. Edited by Douglas Fogle. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2008. Exh. cat.

Munder, Heike. “Curator’s Key.” Spike (Summer 2008).

Phillips, Glenn J. California Video: Artists and Histories. Los Angeles, California: Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008.

Pohlen, Annelie. “Mike Kelley.” Kunstforum International 192 (July–August 2008): pp. 369–72.

Rottmann, André. “Mike Kelley.” Artforum 46, January 2008, p. 295.

Singerman, Howard. “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies.” October, 126 (Fall 2008): pp. 44–68.

Ullrich, Wolfgang. “Er steht, über allem: Dem Horror folgt das Lachen. Die hintersin- nige Kunst des Amerikaners Mike Kelley in einer Münchner Ausstellung.” Die Zeit, December 4, 2008.

Wolf, Falk. “Mike Kelleys kryptisches Laboratorium: Kandor #6.” In Wallraf-Richartz- Jahrbuch 70, 281–90. Edited by Diether Budde. Cologne, Germany: DuMont, 2008.

2009 Fontana, Emi. “Mike Kelley.” Mousse Magazine, November 2009.

Jahn, Jeff. “Mike Kelley and Michael Smith at Sculpture Center.” PORT Portland Art News, September 21, 2009. http://www.portlandart. net/archives/2009/09/mike_kelley_and.html. Konigsberg, Eric. “Culture Warriors’ (Serious) Fun House.” New York Times, September 27, 2009.

Leingre, Guillaume. “Détruire Tous Les Monstres: Mike Kelley et la photographie.” 20/27 (2009): pp. 98–127.

Licht, Alan. “Mike Kelley and Michael Smith.” Artforum, December 2009, pp. 222–23.

Neset, Anne Hilde. “Performa 09: Atrocity Exhibition.” The Wire (November 2009).

Rickels, Laurence. “Einsame Gespenster: Zu Sinn und Richtung des ‘Reenactment’.” Texte zur Kunst 76 (December 2009): pp. 68–83.

Schere, Stein, Papier: Pop-Musik als Gegenstand Bildender Kunst/Rock, Paper, Scissors: Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art. Graz, Austria: Kunsthaus Graz, 2009. Exh. cat.

Schreiber, Daniel. “Der Anti-Warhol.” Monopol (January 2009).

Schwenk, Bernhart. “Mike Kelley.” In Museum Brandhorst: Ausgewählte Werke, pp. 294–303. Munich, Germany: Prestel, 2009. Exh. cat.

Sonna, Birgit. “Wenn Systeme implodieren.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 23, 2009.

Smith, Roberta. “Performa 09: Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity.” New York Times, November 19, 2009, n.p.

Welchman, John C. “L’arte e le instituzione: Riempire (e cancellare) dei vuoti.” In Le funzione del museo: Arte, museo, pubblico nella contemporaneità. Edited by Stefano Chiodi. Florence, Italy: Le Lettere, 2009.

2010 Grabner, Michelle. “Mike Kelley and Michael Smith: A Voyage of Growth and Discovery.” X-tra 12, vol. 3 (Spring 2010): pp. 49–53.

Hafner, Hans-Jürgen. “Verflüssigtes Utopia.” Artnet.de, February 10, 2010. http://www. artnet.de/magazine/mike-kelley-im-schinkel- pavillon-berlin.

Harvey, Doug. “Baby Ain’t Got Back (Yet): Mike Kelley and Baby Ikki wander the desert of the real.” L.A. Weekly, June 25–July 1, 2010.

Knight, Christopher. “Art Review: Michael Smith & Mike Kelley @ West of Rome.” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2010, n.p.

Lebowitz, Cathy. “Kelley, Dunham, Breuning.” Lacanian Ink 35 (Spring 2010): pp. 162–71.

Levine, Cary. “Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending.” CAA Art Journal 69 (Spring–Summer 2010): pp. 74–91.

Lopez, Ruth. “Mike Kelley goes home again.” Art Newspaper, October 11, 2010.

Morley, Simon. “Staring in the Contemporary Abyss.” Tate etc. 20 (Autumn 2010): pp. 70–77.

Plagens, Peter. “Production Values.” Art in America, January 2010, pp. 41–42.

2011 Griffin, Jonathan. “Portrait of the Artist as Superhero.” Texte zur Kunst 82 (June 2011): pp. 256–59.

Knight, Christopher. “Art Review, Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery.” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2011.

Nisbet, James. “Critics’ Picks: Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery.” Artforum.com, February 10, 2011. http://artforum.com/archive/id=27468. Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973–1977. Los Angeles, California: Turnaround; New York, New York: PictureBox, 2011–12. Exh. cat.

Schimmel, Paul, and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds. Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011. Exh. cat.

2012 Sanders, Jay and Elizabeth Sussman, eds. Whitney Biennial 2012. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012. Exh. cat.

Welchman, John C. “Documents, Dreams and Fantasies: Passages through the Involuntary from Photography to Sculpture in the Work of Mike Kelley.” In Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art. Edited by Julia Kelly and Anna Dezeuze. New York: New York: Ashgate, 2012.

———. “Plato in America: Hopper, Rothko, Kelley.” In Plato’s Mirror and the Actuality of the Cave Allegory, Inspired by Projections by Mischa Kuball, pp. 235–58. Edited by Andreas Beitin, Leonhard Emmerling and Blair French. Cologne, Germany: König, 2012.

———. “Stopgap Measures: Reading Mike Kelley’s Writings.” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture 5 (2012): pp. 48–69.

2013 Welchman, John C. “History and Time in the American Vernacular: Mike Kelley’s Work with Photography.” In Imaging History: Photography After the Fact. Edited by Bruno Vandermeulen and Danny Veys. Brussels, Belgium: ASP, 2013.

Rinder, Lawrence, ed. Whitney Biennial 2002. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. Exh. cat.

Summers, Francis. “Hungry for Death?” Untitled 28 (Summer 2002): pp. 16–19.

2003 Ardenne, Paul. Art Press-Édition Spéciale, Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, 2003: 10.

Diederichsen, Diedrich. “A Fan’s Notes: Diedrich Diederichsen on Mike Kelley’s Writings.” Artforum, January 2003, pp. 33–34.

Harvey, Doug. “Don’t Look Back: Mike Kelley’s Proposal.” L.A. Weekly, December 12, 2003.

It Happened Tomorrow. Lyon, France: Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, 2003. Exh. cat.

Leffingwell, Edward. “Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures.” Art in America, April 2003, p. 134.

Pouncey, Edwin. “Anti Conso.” The Wire (September 2003).

Welchman, John C. “Provisorische Maßnahmen: Mike Kelley als Autor.” Texte zur Kunst 51 (September 2003): pp. 126–31.

2004 Breerette, Geneviève. “Mike Kelley: L’irréductible.” Le Monde, December 4, 2004.

Buchhart, Dieter. “Mike Kelley: Das Unheimliche – Eine Ausstellung als Kunstwerk.” Kunstforum International 172 (September–October 2004): pp. 374–75.

Farquharson, Alex. “The Uncanny.” Frieze, May 2004, pp. 90–91.

Janus, Elizabeth. “Mike Kelley: Galleria Emi Fontana.” Artforum, April 2004, p. 167.

Jones, Leslie. “Street Credibility: Artist Mike Kelley Curates a Photography Exhibition at Los Angeles MoCA.” Art on Paper (May–June 2004): pp. 70–73.

Knight, Christopher. “Photo Synthesis.” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2004.

Müller, Vanessa Joan. “Monster’s Ball: The Uncanny von Mike Kelley in der Tate Liverpool.” Texte zur Kunst 54 (June 2004): pp. 206–08.

Newall, Michael. “Repetition Compulsion: Mike Kelley’s Uncanny Reanimated.” Broadsheet 33 (June 2004): pp. 38–40.

Singerman, Howard. “Helter Skelter: Howard Singerman on Pop Noir.” Artforum, October 2004.

Storr, Robert. “What’s Not to Like?: Robert Storr on Mike Kelley.” Artforum, October 2004, pp. 263–65, 306.

Tumlir, Jan. “Jan Tumlir on Destroy All Monsters.” Artforum, October 2004, pp. 85–86.

Interviews with and texts by Mike Kelley. All major interviews and texts were compiled by John C. Welchman and published as anthologies in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Texts are only listed below if not reprinted in these anthologies or available in translation.

Anthologies Welchman, John C., ed. Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection. Essays and Criticism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003.

———. Mike Kelley: Minor Histories. Statements, Conversations, Proposals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004.

———. Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat 1986–2004. Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier; Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel, 2005.

1979 Kelley, Mike. “The Runaway Wheel.” LAICA Journal (March 1979).

1980 Kelley, Mike. “The Parasite Lily.” High Performance 11–12 (Fall–Winter 1980). [Artists’ Chronicle.]

1981 Kelley, Mike. “The Monitor and the Merrimac.” High Performance 14 (Summer 1981). [Artists’ Chronicle.]

———. “Monkey Island.” Lightworks (February 1981).

McMullen, Dan. “Interview: Mike Kelley.” Artists News, February 1981.

1982 Kelley, Mike. “Monkey Island.” In Cave Canem: Stories and Pictures, pp. 122–46. New York, New York: Cave Canem Books, 1982.

———. “Meditation on a Can of Vernors.” High Performance 17–18 (Spring–Summer 1982). [Artists’ Chronicle.]

1985 Gholson, Craig. “Mike Kelley.” Bomb (Winter 1988), p. 85.

Kelley, Mike. “Excerpts from Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” LAICA Journal 42 (Fall 1985): n.p.

1986 Kelley, Mike. Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. Venice, California: New City Editions; New York, New York: Artists Space, 1986. [Artist’s book]

1987 Cotter, Holland. “Eight Artists Interviewed: Mike Kelley.” Art in America, May 1987, pp. 165, 197.

1989 Kelley, Mike. “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ. (Dinner Conversation Overheard at a Romantic French Restaurant).” Forehead 2 (1989): pp. 12–21.

1990 Taylor, Paul. “Mike Kelley: Toying with Second- hand Souvenirs.” Flash Art, October 1990, pp. 141–43.

1992 Kelley, Mike. “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile” / “Platons Höhle, Rothkos Kapelle, Lincolns Profil.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 44–47; pp. 32–38. Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Germany: Portikus; London, England: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1992. Exh. cat.

———. “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ. (Dinner Conversation Overheard at a Romantic French Restaurant).” In Mike Kelley, pp. 64–69. Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Basel; Frankfurt, Germany: Portikus; London, England: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1992. Exh. cat.

McKenna, Kristine. “The Taboo Artist.” Los Angeles Times, July 5 1992.

Miller, John. “Mike Kelley Interviewed by John Miller on March 21, 1991.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 7–51. Edited by William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh. New York, New York: Art Resources Transfer, 1992.

Rugoff, Ralph. “Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed.” XXIst Century (Winter 1991–92): n.p.

———. “Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed”!/ “Schmutziges Spielzeug: Im Gespräch mit Mike Kelley.“ In Mike Kelley, pp. 86–90. Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Basel; Frankfurt, Germany: Portikus; London, England: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1992. Exh. cat.

Sylvester, Julie. “Talking Failure”!/!“Über das Scheitern.” Parkett 31 (1992): pp. 100–06.

Taylor, Paul. “Mike Kelley: Toying with Second- hand Souvenirs”!/!“Spielen mit Secondhand- Souvenirs.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 58–61. Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Basel; Frankfurt, Germany: Portikus; London, England: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1992. Exh. cat.

1993 Kremer, Mark. “Mike Kelley: A Fucked-Up Mirror of Dominant Image Making.” Art Press, September 1993, pp. 5–8.

1994 Storr, Robert. “An Interview with Mike Kelley.” Art in America, June 1994, pp. 89–93.

1995 Jocks, Heinz Norbert. “Mit Sex kann man der Bourgeoisie heute keinen Schlag mehr verpassen.” Kunstforum International 130 (July 1995): pp. 272–93.

1996 Miller, John. “Die Depolitisierung der Hippiekultur trug zu ihrer Mystifizierung bei.” Kunstforum International 134 (September 1996): pp. 199–205.

1997 Jocks, Heinz Norbert. “Als Kind war ich ein Bücherwurm, der davon träumte, eines Tages ein Erzähler zu werden.” Kunstforum International 139 (December 1997–March 1998): pp. 186–92.

Martin, Timothy. “Mike Kelley im Gespräch mit Timothy Martin.” In Künstlerinnen, pp. 138–41. Bregenz, Austria: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 1997. Exh. cat.

1998 Bessa, Sergio. “Historic Kiosk.” Zingmagazine 2 (Summer 1998), n.p.

Groos, Ulrike, and Markus Müller. “Interview mit Mike Kelley.” In Make It Funky: Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde und Kunst, pp. 190–204. Edited by Ulrike Groos and Markus Müller. Cologne, Germany: Oktagon, 1998.

1999 Graw, Isabelle. “Isabelle Graw in Conversation with Mike Kelley.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 6–41. Edited by Isabelle Graw, John Welchman, and Anthony Vidler. London, England: Phaidon Press, 1999.

Kelley, Mike. “An Endless Script: A Conversa- tion with Tony Oursler.” In Introjection: Tony Oursler, Mid-Career Survey 1976–1999. Williamstown, Massachusetts: Williams College Museum of Art, 1999. Exh. cat.

———. “The meaning is confused spatially, framed” / “Le sens est un espace trouble encadré.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 62–76; pp. 85–98. Grenoble, France: Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 1999. Exh. cat.

———. “Mike Kelley.” In Art at Ringier 1995–1998, pp. 78–81. Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier, 1999.

2000 Antoine, Jean-Philippe. “Basket nocturne à dos d’âne: Une conversation avec Mike Kelley.” Les cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 73 (Fall 2000): pp. 103–23.

Cooper, Dennis. “Trauma Club.” Artforum, October 2000, pp. 126–29.

Kelley, Mike. “Alma Pater (Wolverine Den).” In Mike Kelley: Peter Fischli, David Weiss, pp. 70–72. Edited by Rainald Schumacher. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2000. Exh. cat. [German translation of 1991 English text; reprinted in Welchman, 2004]

———. “Die Bedeutung ist verworrene Räumlichkeit, gerahmt.” In Mike Kelley: Sublevel, Framed and Frame, Test Room, pp. 37–60. Exh. cat. Zurich, Switzerland: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2000. Exh. cat. [German translation of 1999 Grenoble solo exh. cat. text]

———. “Cross Gender/Cross Genre.” In Mike Kelley: Peter Fischli, David Weiss, pp. 32–37. Edited by Rainald Schumacher. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2000. Exh. cat. [German translation of 1999 English text; reprinted in Welchman, 2003]

398 399

———. “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ. (Dinner Conversation Overheard at a Romantic French Restaurant)” / “Theorie, Müll, Stofftiere, Christus. (Tischgespräch, mitgehört in einem romantischen franzö- sischen Restaurant).” In Mike Kelley, pp. 63–68; pp. 58–62. Edited by Ingvild Goetz, Karsten Löckemann, and Stephan Urbaschek. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2008. Exh. cat.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Shocking People with a Pretty Show.” Berlin Journal (Spring 2008): pp. 26–31.

Löckemann, Karsten, and Stephan Urbaschek. “A Telephone Conversation with Mike Kelley, August 2008” / “Ein Telefongespräch mit Mike Kelley, August 2008.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 83–93; pp. 72–82. Edited by Ingvild Goetz, Karsten Löckemann, and Stephan Urbaschek. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2008. Exh. cat.

O’Brien, Glenn. “Mike Kelley.” Interview Magazine, December 2008–January 2009, pp. 172–79.

2009 Berwick, Carly. “Mike Kelley: An Interview by Carly Berwick.” Art in America, November 2009, pp. 170–75.

Halle, Howard. “Mike Kelley and Michael Smith.” Time Out New York, August 27, 2009.

Kelley, Mike. “Complex Events Postings.” In Mike Kelley. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, pp. 76–77. Brussels, Belgium: Wiels, 2009. Exh. cat. [Text from 1995]

———. “Light (Time)-Space Modulator.” In The Collection Book: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, pp. 220–27. Edited by Francesca von Habsburg. Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009. [Reprint of 2003 text]

———. “Rose Hobart II.” In Mike Kelley. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, pp. 114–19. Brussels, Belgium: Wiels, 2009. Exh. cat. [Text from 2007]

Rugoff, Ralph. “Existing in an Ahistorical Fantasy Space of Trauma.” In Horizontal Tracking Shots, pp. 115–27. New York, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009. Exh. cat.

2010 Kelley, Mike. “Kandors.” In Mike Kelley: Kandors, pp. 53–60. Edited by Rafael Jablonka. Berlin, Germany: Jablonka Galerie, 2010. Exh. cat.

2011 Bechtler, Christina, ed. On the Beyond. A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and John C. Welchman. Vienna, Austria: Springer-Verlag Wien, 2011.

Kelley, Mike. “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991–1999).” In Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, n.p. Auction cat. New York, New York: Phillips de Pury & Company, 2006.

Rochette, Anne, and Wade Saunders. “Place Matters: Los Angeles Sculpture Today.” Art in America, November 2006, pp. 190–91, 224.

“Speaking Volumes: 19 Interviews.” Art in America, November 2006, p. 190.

Welchman, John C. “God, Family, Fun and Friends: Mike Kelley in Conversation with John C. Welchman.” In Institutional Critique and After, pp. 337–66. Edited by Welchman. Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier, 2006.

2007 Kelley, Mike. “Day Is Done.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, pp. 461–65. Edited by Mark Francis and Mike Kelley. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

———. “Libretto.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, pp. 519–67. Edited by Mark Francis and Mike Kelley. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

———. “The Music of Day Is Done.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, pp. 507–17. Edited by Mark Francis and Mike Kelley. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

———. “Scene Notes.” In Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, pp. 487–505. Edited by Mark Francis and Mike Kelley. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

2008 Bogaert, Pieter von. “Mike Kelley over zijn tweede leven.” (H)art 35 (April 2008): p. 5.

Kelley, Mike. “The Banana Man.” In Mike Kelley, pp. 138–39. Edited by Ingvild Goetz, Karsten Löckemann, and Stephan Urbaschek. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2008. Exh. cat. [German translation of English text from 1983; reprinted in Welchman, 2004] See also “Blind Country,” p. 146; “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene),” p. 164–66; “Fresh Acconci,” p. 158; “Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone,” pp. 152–54; “Kappa,” pp. 142–43; and “One Hundred Reasons,” pp. 148–49.

———. “Presenting the Preservationist Journal of Hick Erotic Folklore.” In Sex to Sexty. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2008.

———. “Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999) and A Dance Incorporating Movements from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and Choreographed in the Manner of Martha Graham (1999).” In Mike Kelley, pp. 160–61. Edited by Ingvild Goetz, Karsten Löckemann, and Stephan Urbaschek. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2008. Exh. cat. [German translation of English text from 1999; reprinted in Welchman, 2004]

PROJECTS AND COVERS FOR MAGAZINES AND JOURNALS

“Conserve Energy.” In conjunction with “A Meeting of Media” by Christopher Knight. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, California Living Magazine, November 22, 1981.

Spectacle 1 (1984). Drawing.

Beyond Baroque Foundation (Spring 1984): Cover Drawing.

“The Spot Syndrome.” New Observations (1984). With Ericka Beckman.

The Paris Review (Fall 1985). Cover image.

Artweek, September 28, 1985. Cover image.

Flanagan, Bob. Slave Sonnets. New York, New York: Cold Calm Press, 1986. Cover design and artwork.

Zyzzyva (Spring 1988). Drawings.

“Artist Page.” Artpaper (February 1988).

“The Silent Scream.” Art Issues 2 (February 1989).

Ruh Roh 1 (December 1992): pp. 16–18.

Color This!: A Collection of Los Angeles Artists’ Drawings. Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles Foundation for Art Resources, Inc., 1994, p. 56.

“Monster Manse.” Grand Street 49 (Summer 1994): pp. 224–233. Text by Mike Kelley, photographs by Daniel Faust, captions by Forrest J. Ackerman.

“Fresh Acconci.” Snowflake 3, vol. 26 (1996): p. 4. Still photo, with Paul McCarthy.

“Sod and Sodie Sock,” Wirtschaft (Austria) September 23, 1998. Artist page, with Paul McCarthy.

Artist Designed Recipe Cards, 2002. Artist’s recipe card.

“Sketchbook Issue.” X-tra 3, vol. 4 (Spring 2002).

“Portfolio/ Mike Kelley: Day Is Done (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction Series), 2004/2005.” Mouvement Anniversary Issue (March–June 2005): pp. 144–155. Production Stills from Day Is Done.

“Biblische Dame.” Advertisement. Focus Magazin Verlag. September 10, 2007. For Lot’s Wife Salted Soap on a Rope.

“Lot’s Wife. Salted Soap on a Rope (Mike Kelley Texte Zur Kunst-Sonderedition Heft Nr. 67.)” Texte Zur Kunst (September 2007): pp. 332–333. Advertisement.

“Project Related Flow Chart.” Published as a poster for the exhibition Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onward 1995–2008, Wiels, 2008. Reprinted in Kelley, Mike and Anne Pontegnie, eds. Educational Complex Onwards 1995–2008. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2009.

“Pagan Michigan.” Artillery Magazine, April 2009, pp. 24–25.

Visionaire 57 (2010): n.p.

All artwork by Mike Kelley is © the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Unless otherwise noted, photographs of Kelley and his work have been provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. The following list, keyed to page numbers, applies to those photographs for which separate or additional credit is due:

Front cover: photo by Helene Toresdotter, courtesy Malmö Konsthall; pp. 2, 4, 16-17, 19, 20 left, 21 top, 29, 78 bottom right, 96, 111, 153–155, 167, 192, 198, 199, 214–215, 223, 224 left, 257, 274–275,276 bottom, 280–282, 284–285, 294–295, 298–299, 300, 301, 303–305, 346: photos by Fredrik Nilsen; pp. 6, 226: photos by Andre Morin; pp. 14, 314, 320: photo by Cary Loren; pp. 15, 33 bottom left and right, 82–83: photos by Paula Court; pp. 20 right, 23 bottom, 25–28, 181, 307 bottom: photos by Mike Kelley; p. 23: photo by Brian Forrest, courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; pp. 30 bottom, 31 bottom, 32: photos courtesy Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); pp. 33 top left, mid-right, 34 mid, 328 left: photos courtesy Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles; pp. 36, 242: photo by Roberto Marossi; p. 38: photo courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; p. 41 bottom: photo courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; p. 43: photo by Jim McHugh; p. 46: photo courtesy University of California, San Diego; pp. 50, 144, 158, 188–189: photos courtesy Rosamund Felsen Gallery; pp. 62, 63, 69, 79 bottom right, 90 top, 102–103, 105, 145–147, 152, 187, 190, 191: photos by Douglas M. Parker Studio; p. 70: photo courtesy Orange County Museum of Art; pp. 73 top, 120–21, 156: photo by F. Delpech; p. 73 bottom: photo by Jan Engsmar; p. 74: photo by L. Barry Hetherington; pp. 92 bottom, 93, 97, 116, 219, 221, 251, 297: photos by Nic Tenwiggenhorn; pp. 94–95, 243: photos by Andrea Stappert, courtesy Kunstverein Braunschweig; p. 110: photo by Brian Forrest; p. 119: photo by Tom van Eynde, courtesy The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago; pp. 123, 138–139: photos courtesy Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot; p. 139 top: photo courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; p. 149: photo by Vincent Monthiers; p. 150: photo courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art; pp. 169, 195 bottom, 258–259: photos courtesy Metro Pictures; p. 171: photo courtesy Galerie Krinzinger; p. 172: photo by Karl Krauss; p. 180 bottom: photo courtesy The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; p. 193: photo courtesy Jablonka Galerie; p. 195 top: photo by Göran Örtegren; p. 202: photo courtesy Wako Works of Art; pp. 212, 253, 256: photos courtesy Patrick Painter Inc.; p. 224 right: photo by Philippe de Gobert; p. 250: photo by Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian Gallery; p. 263: photo by Ben Blackwell; p. 264: photo courtesy Galleria Emi Fontana; p. 266: photo by Lepkowski Studios, Berlin; p. 276 top: photo by Achim Kukulies; p. 302: photo by Mary Clare Stevens; p. 308 left: photo courtesy Escher GuneWardena Architecture; p. 309: photo by Corine Vermeulen; p. 317: photo by Larry E. Wright; p. 358: photo courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art; p. 400 (colophon): photo by Robert Gallagher, courtesy The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; back cover: photo courtesy the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC-organization the copyrights have been settled with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2013

Every effort has been made to clear appropriate permissions for images in this book. However, despite our best efforts, it may not always have been possible to establish correct copyright ownership. The publishers would appreciate notification of additional credits for acknowledgement in future editions.

———. “Theory, Garbage, Stuffed Animals, Christ. (Dinner Conversation Overheard at a Romantic French Restaurant)” / “Theorie, Müll, Stofftiere, Christus. (Tischgespräch, mitgehört in einem romantischen franzö- sischen Restaurant).” In Mike Kelley: Peter Fischli, David Weiss, pp. 67–69; pp. 63–68. Edited by Rainald Schumacher. Munich, Germany: Sammlung Goetz, 2000. Exh. cat.

2001 Kelley, Mike. “A Minor History.” In Mike Kelley. Franz West, pp. 11–12. Edited by Anne Pontégnie. Brussels, Belgium: OneTwoThree, Hôtel Empain; Vienna, Austria: P&S, 2001. Exh. cat.

———, and Franz West. “To Be Read Aloud.” In Mike Kelley. Franz West, pp. 20–43. Edited by Anne Pontégnie. Brussels, Belgium: OneTwoThree, Hôtel Empain; Vienna, Austria: P&S, 2001. Exh. cat.

2002 Kelley, Mike. “Memory Ware.” In Mike Kelley: Memory Ware. Paintings and Sculptures, pp. 69–71. Edited by Rafael Jablonka. Cologne, Germany: Jablonka Galerie, 2002. Exh. cat.

Lütticken, Sven. “De infantiliseringscultuur.” De Witte Raaf 96 (March–April 2002): p. 9.

Storr, Robert. “Obscured Visions.” Artforum, March 2002, pp. 114–19.

2003 Cooper, Dennis. “Mike Kelley Talks to Dennis Cooper.” Artforum, April 2003, pp. 224–25.

Kelley, Mike. “Light (Time)-Space Modulator.” In Capp Street Project: 20th Anniversary Exhibition, pp. 81–83. San Francisco, California: CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2003. Exh. cat.

2004 Eikmeyer, Robert. “Destroy All Monsters.” In FACE/OFF: Im Körper des Feindes, pp. 63–69. Edited by Robert Eikmeyer. Frankfurt, Germany: Revolver Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2004.

Sconce, Jeffrey. “I’ve Got this Strange Feeling: Mike Kelley and Jeffrey Sconce on The Uncanny.” Tate etc. (Summer 2004): pp. 88–93.

2005 Waters, John. “Mike Kelley, You Have Made an Epic!” Flash Art, November–December 2005, pp. 54–58.

Welchman, John C., and Mike Kelley. “1000 Words: Mike Kelley Talks About Day Is Done.” Artforum, October 2005, pp. 233–35.

2006 Graw, Isabelle. “Isabelle Graw in Conversation with Mike Kelley.” In Press-Play: Contemporary Artists in Conversation, 380–95. London, England: Phaidon, 2006. [Reprint of 1999 text for Phaidon]

Hershman, Lynn. “Transcript of Interview with Mike Kelley.” July 27, 2006, Santa Monica, California. !W.A.R. collection, Stanford University Libraries. http://lib.stanford.edu/ women-art-revolution/transcript-interview- mike-kelley.

FRONT COVER Animal Self and Friend of the Animals, 1987

BACK COVER Studio view of John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972, Wayne / Westland Eagle), 2001

page 2 Interior view of Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude), 2011 Mixed-media 114 × 600 × 900 inches (289.56 × 1524 × 2286 cm) overall

page 4 The Logo on a Can of Vernors Drawn from Memory, 1981

page 6 Detail of Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction “Chinatown Wishing Well” built by Mike Kelley after “Miniature Reproduction ‘Seven Star Cavern’ Built by Prof. H. K. Lu”), 1999

pages 8 and 9 Black Out (Detroit River), 2001 Series of 8 Cibachrome prints mounted on board 26.5 × 50.125 inches (67.31 × 127.32 cm) each, framed

Mike Kelley is organized by Stedelijk Museum Director Ann Goldstein, in cooperation with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. The curator of the first exhibition concept is Eva Meyer-Hermann.

Mike Kelley is made possible by lead support from the Turing Foundation, with major support from Cees and Inge de Bruin-Heijn and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by All Art Initiatives.

The Stedelijk Museum received the Turing Art Grant in 2009

EXHIBITION ITINERARY Centre Pompidou, Paris May 2–August 5, 2013

MoMA PS1, New York October 13, 2013–February 2, 2014

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles March 23–July 28, 2014

Coedited by Eva Meyer-Hermann and Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Text editing and publication management by Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Proofreading by Jane Hyun and Jennifer MacNair Stitt

Design by Lorraine Wild and Xiaoqing Wang, Green Dragon Office, Los Angeles

Separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, California

Printed by Conti, Florence

This book is typeset in Ideal Sans and Sentinel

Printed and bound in Italy

Produced by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam PO Box 75082 1070 AB Amsterdam www.stedelijk.nl

Copyright © 2013, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise without written permission from the co-publishers.

ISBN 978-3-7913-5241-1 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam cat. no. 897

Published in conjunction with the exhibition MIKE KELLEY

at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (December 15, 2012–April 1, 2013)

Published in 2013 by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing

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