Mike Kelley was an epic poet of abjection. His tragic suicide at the age of 57 in 2012, which turned a planned mid-career survey into this conclusive retrospective, only seems to reinforce that idea. But as early as his student days, at CalArts in the late 1970s, Kelley’s work focused on the low, the dirty, the embarrassing, the ugly, the amateur, the discarded, the victimized, the failed.
The long series of works made from stuffed animals and crocheted afghans rescued from thrift stores, perhaps the most recognizable of his protean output, demonstrates this most clearly. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987), a two-part installation, includes a rectangular wall hanging encrusted with found homemade plush toys, yarn dolls, and handcrafted potholders and baby blankets; two bundles of dried ears of corn adorn the upper corners. Standing nearby, a table supports a nearly geologic formation of half-melted novelty candles.
The “love hours” in the title of this assemblage of degraded, literally corny objects (and we should not overlook the class connotations of Kelley’s choices; these are not the trappings of late 20th-century aristocracy) suggest the stretches of time during which these unassuming objects gave joy and comfort to children, who have since abandoned them. Yet in the artist’s estimation, according to the exhibition’s hefty catalogue, they also represent the “the familial obligations or emotional debt foisted onto children by acts of ‘giving.'”
Similar combinations of the saccharine and the sinister recur throughout Kelley’s art. Here, embodied in somewhat repellent objets trouvés, they generate a striking consonance of the material and the psychological. One can only guess how much drool or other bodily fluid stains the component parts.
Another installation (which is not included in this exhibition, but recently entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), the room-size Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991–1999), makes this explicit. Twelve globular clusters of stuffed animals, each coordinated in a different bright monochrome, hang from the ceiling on pulleys and orbit a central, more amorphous mass of the toys, coloured in a spectrum of hues, like some sort of mad planetarium. On the walls, ten geometric sculptures covered in glossy automotive paint intermittently emit puffs of air freshener, sanitizing not only the cast-off toys, but the visitors and the institution as well. That the artist sewed the animals together all facing inwards adds to the inchoate mood of corporeal shame.
This is dark, if funny, stuff, particularly for sunny Southern California, yet Kelley spent his entire career in Los Angeles and was an integral, influential part of its art scene. This final stop on the exhibition’s tour represents a homecoming and, in fact, the show makes a lot of sense here, as a cacophony of images and sound in the vast open spaces of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. Previously, in multiple rooms on several floors at MoMA PS1 in New York (organized by, and first seen at, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the show also traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris), Kelley’s self-referential, recursive production felt more compartmentalized and episodic.
A case in point: at MOCA the two parts 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”) from 1999 occupy adjacent bays on a balcony gallery. One bay holds an eccentric topography in the form of a small mountain roughly made of faux concrete, nearly three metres high. On peaks and in numerous grottoes stand tacky figurines, both “Oriental” and not—a crucifix surmounts the highest pinnacle—as well as receptacles for tossed coins. A stumpy tree trunk rises on each side, and scores of spray-paint blotches tint the whole. In the other bay resides the object’s protective enclosure, the “frame” of the title, a low brick parapet surrounded on two sides by chain-link fencing with barbed wire, and on another by a schematic paifang gate with a row of suspended paper lanterns.
Exhibited at MOCA, this work enacts a doubled displacement: the strange kitsch artifact separated from its contextualizing device, and also from its own double, the actual structure on which the artist based it, a now-decrepit 1938 tourist attraction in L.A.’s Chinatown, a mile and a half from the museum. With its original—itself a representation of a natural feature in China—unseen but not distant, Kelley’s replica becomes simulacrum as much as sculpture, and a bit uncanny, insinuating the vertiginous effect of a mise en abyme. That beneath the wooden supports in Kelley’s version lies a mattress, condoms, and a container of Vaseline hints that even the original Chinatown monument’s ostentatious performance of ethnicity—and what could be more quintessentially American?—hides a seamy underbelly of furtive, tawdry, uncontrollable bodily urges.
The riotous heart of the exhibition, positioned front and centre, the works collectively referred to as Day Is Done (2004–2010) comprise a funhouse extravaganza of videos with battling soundtracks, most projected on structures that resemble the sets seen in the moving images themselves. Each work, titled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, usually derives from a vintage high-school yearbook or local newspaper photo, most of pageants or costumed subjects. Kelley meticulously restaged these, often substituting adult actors for adolescents, and filmed elaborate scenarios as extrapolated backstories to the still images, many involving implied psychosexual trauma of one kind or another.
In one Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction work, a pair of barbers, one unctuously fey, torment a young blond boy with threats and pornography. In another, the same child runs from a menacing Virgin Mary, while pleading desperately to wake up. Other works take a more comic tone. Vampires and zombies work in campus offices. Three young women in black leotards and mime makeup perform a clunky line dance through the corridors of an empty school. Kelley’s raucous play with the notion that commonplaces of vernacular culture might manifest not only recoverable narratives but repressed memories of abuse possesses the character of an assault, albeit one that holds us spellbound with its gleeful and deliberately awkward comedy coupled with a compellingly creepy affect.
Day Is Done marked a high point for Kelley in terms of its ambition, scale, and complexity, and his ability to marshal the resources and budget necessary for its realization. Yet, with hindsight, it also looks like something of a culmination. The major work that followed—the multiple iterations of models of Superman’s hometown, the Kandors (2007–2011), some contained in large glass bottles, some resting on rocky pedestals—suffers from slickness and repetitiveness, making Kelley, for the first time in his career, into just another creator of overproduced, market-ready product. It’s a slightly inglorious landing to the trajectory of a giant.
