An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat

Most artists dislike the art world; Mike Kelley was no exception. The Detroit-born conceptual artist, who established his reputation in Los Angeles—where he lived until his death by suicide in 2012—had little patience for the dominant approach to marketing and interpreting art, which, then as now, was biographical. The expectation that artists should peddle their “personal experience” for commercial gain disgusted him; so, too, did the criteria for success and failure within his profession.

To his mind, the celebrated modernist art of the 1970s was jaded and lacking in depth. It owed its success to the New York art market, from the city’s auction houses and blue-chip galleries to the trade publications—Frieze, Artforum, and the like—that inflated valuations by drawing a straight art-historical line from De Kooning to Koons. Kelley took inspiration instead from the “post-studio” tradition he encountered as a student at CalArts, what his former teacher John Baldessari described rather straightforwardly as “work that is done in one’s head.”

This was an unashamedly intellectual culture: artists prided themselves on the difficulty of their work and cultivated a performative hostility to the business side of their profession. (In the 1970s Baldessari burned all of his paintings and sold the ashes, baked into cookies.) Kelley’s conceptual art—of which a representative sample was on display at London’s Tate Modern earlier this year—was, like the milieu that formed it, primarily a reaction to the broader conditions in which it was produced. Over thirty-odd years, he used sculpture, text, video, and performance to track the fragmentation of a post-1968 America unable to reconcile high and low culture. 

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Born in 1954 in Wayne County, Michigan, Kelley grew up in Westland, a suburb of Detroit and perhaps the only city in the world to be named after a shopping mall. His father was a janitor and his mother a cook. He held no romantic feelings toward the world of America’s working class: “I might come from that,” he told an interviewer in 2010, “but I have no love for it.” Nor did he fawn over the chattering classes. They were provincial in their own way: “the Museum of Modern Art history of art,” which fashioned a cult out of the supposed originality of New York artists, “was pure bullshit,” he said in a 2004 conversation with the critic Gerry Fialka.

This reactive stance against the prevailing art market was partly a matter of necessity. In 1976, when Kelley graduated from the University of Michigan and moved west to study at CalArts, there were relatively few opportunities for LA artists to enjoy commercial success—which, on the east coast, was the reward for stupidity. Artists in the city could only sell “up to the $40,000 mark, say. After that you’ve got to grow up or you’ve got to move away,” Kelley said in 2004. The absence of commercial incentives created the conditions for the emergence of multimedia art that defied the tastes of the market, not least because its practitioners refused to develop a signature, recognizable “style.” Away from the New York circuit, artists like Kelley could instead reflect on America in all its complexity. “Manhattan isn’t part of America,” he said in the same interview. “It’s Europe.”

The language developed by era-defining art critics like Barbara Rose and Clement Greenberg, champions of American modernism, just did not apply to the performance art that emerged in the late 1970s. Kelley struggled hard to shake modernism’s influence: at the University of Michigan he had worked in the shadow of Hans Hofmann–inspired painters and learned almost by rote the elements of “push-pull formalism,” which treated composition as a game of balancing shapes and colors against one another on the canvas. But at CalArts he encountered performance art under the mentorship of Douglas Huebler and David Askevold, with whom he completed one of his first works, The Poltergeist, a series of drawings, texts, and photos inspired by the idea of demonic possession (shown in the Tate’s first room). One black-and-white image shows a young Kelley with reams of bunched-up tissue pouring from his mouth in a parody of a trashy, exorcism-themed B-movie; beside it hung a manifesto full of overintellectualized theories about the relationship between the sexual and occult (the poltergeist, one line reads, is “The Love That Burns; the Incendium Amorous”). The motivating insight behind this work, which Kelley would mine throughout his career, was that ordinary experience, especially in its most conspiratorial and fantastic expressions, had its own kind of coherence. An attentive artist simply had to excavate and present it.

This thinking, which would come into its own in Kelley’s later work, came with an interest in mass culture, which shaped the way people understood their own lives. During his student days, many of Kelley’s classmates and teachers were suspicious of his fascination with mainstream cultural products; they preferred instead to draw on images from art history. According to them, art that made use of pop culture was merely a “reiteration of the values of the dominant culture,” he recounted in 1997. “Critical usage of it was simply impossible.” He drew different fault lines: for him the crucial distinction was not between high and low culture but between the sayable and the repressed—a view informed, as was the case for many artists of his generation, by the backlash to the social transformations of the 1960s. In a 1992 essay reflecting on the career of the sculptor and painter Paul Thek, he observed that

contemporary American art history is spookily aligned with Reagan/Bush ideology. By excising artworks from the 1960s that mirror the social and political upheavals and countercultural activities of the period, or focusing on works primarily in the formalist tradition, an unspoken alliance is forged with the conservatives: both agree that these unsavory issues are not appropriate for art, and thus for society.

By the time Kelley graduated from CalArts, this reverence for modernism had developed into a vogue for minimalism within American sculpture—a movement that likewise valorized a socially detached, sanitized vision of art. Tony Smith, its lead practitioner, had been racing along the unfinished New Jersey turnpike when the expanse of unlit, unmarked tarmac, measured only by the speed of a car’s progress from nowhere to nowhere, led him to a realization: “There was no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.” Minimalism emphasized this sort of pure experience. It proposed, in effect, freeing the relationship between viewer and object from culture, politics, or any preconceived notion of what could or could not be art. Kelley found this conceptual move fundamentally dishonest. How could art be anything but a product of the world around it and a response to the conditions under which it was made? And why pretend otherwise?

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Kelley’s work drew its energy from the social mobility of the postwar years, which allowed people like him, who had grown up in a suffocating working-class culture, to encounter a disappointingly complacent elite public sphere. It’s hard to imagine that his twin dissatisfactions with these two worlds didn’t in some way inform his negative reaction to minimalism, a genre seemingly structured around an ideal of excellence. For Kelley, minimalism, as an artistic program, illuminated a problem at the heart of the commodity culture of postwar industrial society: mass-produced objects had shown human labor to be deeply inadequate when measured against technology’s ability to create ideal forms. The minimalists, in relying on highly trained fabricators to turn out handmade works that bore no trace of their creators, seemed to be trying to have it both ways—and obscuring the real conditions of the present in the process. “The manufactured object by virtue of its ‘untouched’ quality [is] a perfect object,” Kelley said in a 1992 interview. But it also followed that human touch had become a mark of failure.

The Tate show, “Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit,” opened with Kelley’s response to this dilemma: pieces exemplifying what he called “working-class minimalism,” a series of elegant birdhouses that he copied from how-to manuals but modified slightly. The project builds on his insight that mass production had rendered somehow pathetic the crafts—such as DIY birdhouses—embraced by ordinary people. In these sculptures, failure takes place twice. They fail first as birdhouses—they could have been made better by a machine—and second as art, because their attempt to take themselves seriously, by adding some slight spin or elaboration to a conventional form, comes across as ridiculous. Gothic Birdhouse (1978) has nine roofs, each placed above the last. Catholic Birdhouse, which was not on display at the Tate but was completed at the same time, is more roughly finished and has two holes, one small and splintered and the other twice as large; above the first has been printed “THE HARD ROAD,” while the words “THE EASY ROAD” appear below the second. Each birdhouse is accompanied by elaborate, semi-mystical justifications. One typical text reads:

ASSUMING THAT THE BIRD IS
A SYMBOL OF THE SOUL
THEN
THE BIRDHOUSE IS THE BODY
OR
ALL THINGS CARNAL
THEN
IT STANDS TO REASON
THAT
ANYTHING OTHER THAN A
BIRDHOUSE
IS
UNKNOWABLE

What Kelley aspired to was “an artwork that you couldn’t raise, there was no way that you could make it better than it was.” Turning a birdhouse into art, usually the province of sublimated sexual and religious desires, “actually makes it more uncomfortable.” There is, he observed, something “pitiful that all these energies are pumped into” an object so basic that it could have been constructed by a machine. This combination of the tragic and the pathetic is what appealed to Kelley about craft—he saw in it a kind of obstinate commitment to defeat in the face of a world that idealized perfection.

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In the 1980s critics began to interpret Kelley’s art in the biographical terms that would dog him until his death. One of the main accusations they made was that his work, from the mid-1980s on, was somehow about his own difficult childhood, because it used toys as readymades and referenced children’s TV shows.

In fact commodity culture interested him far more than personal hardship. In More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987), a wall tableau consisting of soiled teddy bears with an accompanying altar of melted candles, Kelley took care to try and preempt viewers from projecting their feelings onto what they saw: he wanted them to encounter something that, like the birdhouses, was already laden with pathos. The wall of toys—each wedged against the other, making it impossible to imagine one being removed without the whole structure collapsing—denies the viewer the possibility of entertaining fantasies of their own childhood, or Kelley’s, with any particular doll.

This was the aim, but critics of course couldn’t help themselves; the dirtiness of the toys set imaginations racing. Was Kelley trying to tell them something sinister about his own upbringing? To assertions that his art was an allusion to some abuse he must have suffered as a child, Kelley retorted: yes, he had been abused—by the formalist art training he had endured at the University of Michigan! More Love Hours was partly a nod to that period of ill treatment. The viewer encounters the wall of toys as a unified block of texture and color composed in accordance with the principles of push-pull formalism.

Kelley could not content himself with being clever just once. The dolls that made up the tableau were also, as he saw it, embodiments of the time, or labor, spent working over them. He wanted to point at the contradiction behind the anxiety, shared by many artists, that audiences might view their work—an object they would like to sell for money—as a commodity. Kelley poked at this incoherence in interviews. “I said if each one of these toys took 600 hours to make then that’s 600 hours of love; and if I gave this to you, you owe me 600 hours of love; and that’s a lot.”

The suggestion, made with a wink but also with a touch of nastiness, was that the avant-garde artist’s desire to avoid commodification was an attempt to exercise parental authority over the viewer—to treat the audience as children who should feel grateful for, and burdened by, the gift of what had been placed before them. As with most of Kelley’s ironic moves, this one didn’t seek to undermine one position in favor of another, but to show that the messages people send one another are often more complicated than they initially seem—even when those people are self-reflexive artists. Kelley, for his part, wasn’t trying to dictate the audience’s response. The social function of art, he said during his 2004 interview, was simple: “to fuck things up.”

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Kelley’s jabs at the pieties of high culture had, as their corollary, a lack of patience for claims that mass culture was somehow naïve. His aim was not so much to humanize the working class as to point out that there was a kind of implicit stupidity in dogmatically dismissing activities common to large sections of the population. He quipped in his writing that the strip club was the real modernist theater. The dancer who momentarily broke her façade to negotiate the cost of a lap dance or tell a man that he could look but not touch was, in Kelley’s words, putting on a “truly Brechtian” show. Only a bouncer watching out for wandering hands guarded the thin boundary between fantasy and reality.

The aim of Day is Done, a video and performance project he began in 2000, displayed to cacophonous effect in a single room at the Tate, was to remove the bouncer and allow fantasy to flow freely out of reality. Digging through postwar high school yearbooks, Kelley found documents of social rituals: “slave day,” where (white) participants dress up in outfits to be sold on an auction block; costume play of “thugs” attacking “sissies”; Catholicism in all its camp theatricality. To make Day is Done he staged reenactments of these rites, documenting them both in videos that play on television monitors and in stills from the films that hang alongside the original black-and-white source images on the wall. Kelley considered this work to be part of a larger series, which he called Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions and continued making until 2011.

The side-by-side photos are somewhat lifeless; the videos, however, are a joy. In one, based on a source image of students dressed for Halloween and seated politely at their desks, Kelley imagines the classroom breaking out into a fight that seconds later gets interrupted by the twang of a country guitar. A woman in overalls and gingham appears on a stage and sings a nonsense R&B pop number whose opening bars recall Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor,” but with lines like “Tijuana Hayride/men on all fours/animal sacrifice/liberal conspiracy,” performed and produced with the glitz one would expect from a Beyoncé track circa 2005.

Kelley’s discovery was that most people document their lives using images that, in their simplicity, are almost minimalist objects in themselves, lacking any particular meaning. In one series, taken again from postwar high school yearbook photos, he has young men dressed up in Nazi uniforms rap derogatorily about the “fat ass” of a Catholic woman lighting candles. The original photographs of both the young men and the woman are, for Kelley, depictions of ritual: the actions they recorded could be stripped of their actual significance, which Kelley found boring, and transformed for dramatic effect. This was not a political project, which would have demanded some kind of critique of the practices of ordinary people or the social structures that supported them. It was an attempt to open up quotidian life, which Kelley found fascinatingly bizarre, to the artist’s playful self-expression.

But in a broader sense there was something political, or at least critical, in Kelley’s art. Its general outlook was a dissatisfaction with the state of American culture. At its apex he perceived a provincial, narcissistic minimalism, founded on the idea that there was nothing left to see in the world, and an art media that worshipped the market. At its base was a desperate desire for creative expression among ordinary people, which took confusing, beautiful, sometimes frightening forms but lacked the freedom to interpret and reflect on itself. Kelley hovered between these two poles without idealizing either. His work instead recognized mass culture as inescapable and demanded of its viewers that they do the same.