By Sydney Smith
This has been a big year for counter-culture in the museum: the New Museum’s NYC 1993 exhibition this spring, the Met Costume Institute’s controversial exhibition PUNK: Chaos to Couture this summer, and now, MoMA PS1’s massive eponymous retrospective Mike Kelley, which opened this Sunday. The show, which includes over 200 works from the 1970s, early in Kelley’s career, until his sudden death last year at 57. It’s the biggest show that the warehouse-sized space has put on since 1976. None of the 200 pieces seem redundant. Kelley was a prolific multidisciplinary artist whose work is not easily chronologized or progressively organized. The way that he worked was inherently anti-institutional, and here it is, presented pro forma by a museum whose parent institution has the world’s most expensive painting (Munch’s The Scream) on display.
Kelley is quoted in PS1’s press release as being rooted in counter-culture: “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 meaning… Mass culture is scrutinized to discover what is hidden, repressed, within it.” Kelley’s most basic criteria was that whatever he made touched on something that would make somebody cringe: class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics — not polite dinner table topics.
The full extent of that multiform transgressiveness is overwhelming in PS1, signifying innocence lost: room after room full of lumpen rainbow-colored clouds made from stuffed animals on wire, photo and video of Kelley as characters like an unshaven baby and a prematurely aged young man, and quick one-liners like his early Catholic Birdhouse: a simple white wooden birdhouse with two smaller and larger sized holes and perches marked “The Hard Road” and “The Easy Road.” The piece brings to mind the idiomatic “free as a bird” and subverts it with the image of a sparrow facing an existential crisis at his front door (or a bird automatically flying through the larger, ignorant of his metaphysical options).
PS1 will also host a series of lectures and performances in conjunction with the exhibition, including a joint performance by Kelley’s longtime friend and collaborator (and world-renowned queen of fuck-you) Kim Gordon with performance artist Jutta Koether in February.
Mike Kelley also represents a current trend towards a kinda schizoid cross-fertilization within the art-world: the retrospective was organized by the Amsterdam’s modern-contemporary Stedelijk Museum and with a performance portion curated by Mark Beasly, a 28 year old artist with a newly minted MFA who lives in Chicago. The exhibition, which focuses exclusively on one artist, culls from international and intergenerational influence, reflecting the state of the union in a global art market where an artist might have simultaneous exhibitions in Rome, London, and New York, while other work is tied up zipping around to art fairs in Hong Kong and Jakarta. This exhibition has already travelled from the Stedelijk in Amsterdam to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and after closing at PS1 on January 5th, will make its way to MoCA in LA (where the Stedelijk’s recently departed artistic director, Ann Goldstein, served as curator for 26 years). The paratactic approach undertaken in this exhibition also reflects the difficulty of finding a single perspective or way into Kelley’s massive and wide-ranging body of work, spanning 35 years and themes as seemingly disparate as Burning Man and the Virgin Mary.
Within all of these mixed signals, Kelley’s work draws together disparate experiences which the contemporary art world is forever trying to distinguish between and make sacred: the enfant terrible, the world-class institution, the tragic genius, the sublime, and the perverse. The effect is, like much of Kelley’s body of work, knee-slappingly funny and terribly clever. Mike Kelley is at MoMA PS1 until January 5th.
