Artillery Magazine

Category: reviews

  • Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

    Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

    You have to be ready for almost anything when you enter a Mike Kelley show:  a more or less conventional gallery view of objects or documents; a maze, matrix or mosaic of seemingly found or reconfigured objects; or an immersive multi-media experience of sculptural installations, with or without video or performance.  Kelley’s show at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills — even more expansive than its double-compound title — was all of these things, and what felt like a post-mortem, too.  

    For those unfamiliar with the Superman mythology, Kandor was the home city of the child Superman and his parents, who the adult Superman rescued from the doomed planet Krypton and preserved in miniaturized form in a vacuum bottle infused with an artificial atmosphere fed and refreshed by a tank of compressed gases. The appeal of the motive (and its disparate comic-book renderings) to Kelley is obvious: its trauma or projected traumas and implicit “repressions,” nostalgia; the uncertainty and ambiguity of memory, its corruption or adulteration, and its reconstruction, reconfiguration or simply re-imagination; parallel to this, the corruption of empire and its residue; and many opportunities for thematic cross-fertilization within this mesh of cultural and psychological strands.  

    The first walk-through of almost any Mike Kelley show can feel a bit like a scavenger hunt. So it was at Gagosian, although visitors to the gallery were made immediately aware of the show’s immersive aspect as soon as they opened the gallery door to a pinball cacophony of sound and stepped into the dimly lit gallery. A small pile of rolled-up rugs pushed against the rear panel of one “room” of the main gallery was immediately followed by an archway through the panel revealing a shallow stage or platform painted in camouflage swirls executed in a fire-color palette, with a mannequin standing just beyond it.  In the meantime, giggles and light screams pealed across the gallery spaces, overlaid with bells, chimes, hissing, rattling, and eerie echoes and reverberations.  At least one source appeared to be the video projection a few feet away. A shimmer of iridescent silk drapery (also in a fiery palette) on a tall stand set off to an angle led the way to a pile of pillows and bolsters on which the viewer might recline to take in the video.  

    The video performance was familiar Kelley territory in Greek (or maybe Roman or Oriental) geek guise — a college seraglio.  This was the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 — a pair of companion skits in neat reversal (“The King and Us” / “The Queens and Me”).  In the first, a dark, modish lout in brown cloak and pink toga sulks and gnaws petulantly at a mutton leg (or something) while his entourage of harem ladies recline about in silk and satin sarongs, tunics and veils, coyly competing for the boy’s attention.  The boy alternately spurns, ignores, or rewards their attentions and ignites their rivalries.  In the companion skit, the boy — in the same costume, but clearly servile — enters with a flagon of wine or coffee to serve his “queens” and is himself ignored or teased and mocked. A second monitor and seating between the rear gallery and the new main gallery south facilitated viewing of the loopy skits.  It’s something of an homage to Jack Smith — with the set’s bejeweled look and trays of pearls, beads and trinkets flung about; but Kelley doesn’t try to take it any further than his amateur cast can manage.
     
    Before even arriving at the first and seemingly most important of the Kandor installations, it was impossible not to be distracted by the lifelike mannequin in front of the platform (which figured as a set in the videos) — to all appearances of Colonel Sanders, founder and eternal pitchman of the KFC chicken empire — inclined over a veiled lectern or pedestal, as if in readiness to pitch his latest chicken recipe. Less clear was what Kelley was “pitching” here. “Kandor 10A” was enshrined in a grotto of what looked like molded asphalt or volcanic residue (actually foam coated with Elastomer). 

    Here, on another mound of “asphalt,” a “city” of pale yellow opalescent crystal “towers” (tinted urethane resin) clustered beneath a large glass dome connected to a tall lavender compressed gas tank standing beside it — the whole reflected against a green metal “control panel” or prop cabinet.  A pair of male under-briefs appeared discarded to one side, introducing a suggestion of masturbatory fantasy.
     
    In the rear gallery, “Kandor” exploded into a vari-colored “City 04” — a still more oriental-looking mass of crystal elements (in resin) that from certain angles had the look of perfume bottles and cosmetic jars massed over a vanity table. A wooden stairway wrapped around the “asphalt” mound to a platform that offered a better view of the emerald, ruby, topaz, sapphire, etc. “City.” Pretty — and prettier still when viewed from the clerestory window en route to the upper level gallery.

    There were other objects — kitsch, generic and bejeweled — both in this gallery and upstairs, all seated on their asphalt foam/Elastomer plinths; and many more iterations of the “Kandor” motive (or “Cities”) in variously colored resins — that did little to expand or elaborate its possible meanings. “Cat Head” looked like a found object — the sort of pail or container that might be used by a child for Halloween treats — but there were also generic Florence flasks on the same mound. Lab equipment for the clinical witch? Her dwarves — or gnomes — were obviously hard at some work in “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35” — a purple-tinted photographic lenticular representation of which hung here.  In the new south main gallery, in the setting of their workshop, the “Dour Gnomes” could be viewed lumbering determinedly around a workbench – apparently forging their own demise as well as Kandor’s, which appeared ultimately to be vaporized in the video projection at the rear of the set. A snake of flattened plush remnants of their bodies, or at least their gray suits and pointed hats, coiled around cases of Corona beer in “Mexican Blind Cave Worm.”

    The kitsch and Kandors upstairs were eclipsed by “Odalisque” — what appeared to be an asphalt- (foam-) covered mummy, the face hollowed out of its skull, with soot-drenched flowing hair resting on a divan or catafalque. A glass canister holding manacles or restraints was visible at the foot of the divan.

    Which brings us back to Colonel Sanders (which was not even on the gallery’s checklist).  His pedestal was actually a partially veiled Plexiglas box — containing yet another set and figure — miniaturized, but recognizably Sigmund Freud. That pairing raises questions about the uses of mythology — more specifically, mythologies of aspiration, their intersection with the algebra of need, and their susceptibility to distortion and manipulation.  Col. Sanders’ product was greasy, crumb-laden chicken, the appeal of which is inevitably diminished in the wake of its potentially pathological sequelae.  Without attempting to confine Kelley’s multi-valent mosaic to a singular interpretation, it was difficult to “escape” from the “Kandors” and their variously associated or dissociated “EAPRs” without sensing a similar pattern of ingestions and evacuations — and their ultimate pathology and futility.

  • Burning Man of Love

    Burning Man of Love

    Though the annual festival known as Burning Man has received the occasional serious sniff from the art world, my overall anecdotal accounting of the festival rep in what one might call the high-end international art world has been one of mild disgust and pity. In general, art worlders like nothing better than to sneer at the post-hippie amateurs, as urbane Parisian aristocrats might sneer at their feudal country cousins right before both lost their heads. It’s easy to dismiss Burning Man (as opposed to documenta with its lower-case, self-serious Mittel-European pretensions or the Venice Biennale — which more often than not is a cavalcade of vaguely nationalistic bureaucratic cock-ups) as there’s no hierarchy of taste enforced, the works of art trotted out prefer experience over critical reflection and are largely uncommodifiable (exempting of course the costs of your ticket, transit, and survival, also payable in Kassel). Artistic participation in Burning Man looks bad on CVs and will hardly convince a trophy-hunting billionaire (or his Bard-educated advisor) to invest. The whole thing could, however, be considered by some lights to be a “kind of carnivalesque folk ritual” or at least some version thereof.

    Michael Smith went to Burning Man as Baby Ikki, one of the artist’s long-running performance persona (constituting an 18-month-old as played by Smith, now almost 60, wearing a knit bonnet and white Crocs).  Collaborator Mike Kelley stayed away. After the fact, Kelley and Smith edited the many hours of footage down to a movie that plays on six screens within the installation of their exhibition, called (mockingly? earnestly? both?) “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery.” This iteration took place at Kelley’s monumental studio in the Farley Building in Eagle Rock, following an inaugural showing last year at the Sculpture Center in New York.

    Production stills photographed by Malcolm Stuart. Courtesy of West of Rome Public Art, image courtesy of West of Rome Public Art, photography by Fredrik Nilsen
    Production stills photographed by
    Malcolm Stuart. Courtesy of West of Rome
    Public Art, image courtesy of West of Rome
    Public Art, photography by Fredrik Nilsen

    Though much of Kelley’s work draws from the psycho-spirituality of thrift store finds, the work in the installation looked all too easily cadged from the real Burning Man: a metal geodesic half-dome with stuffed animals (once a Kelley standby) sewn to its carpet, a jungle gym, a metal rocket with some plastic flags, a semi-abandoned VW van with a throne in the back made of more plush toys  (though this time much dirtier) and a mock Burning Man made of metal junk depicting a reaching Baby Ikki. Though the visual language seems wholly appropriated from the Mad Max dystopia/Utopia of Black Rock City, they also oddly reminded me of proper works (buyable from your local Gagosian outlet) by the significant international artist known as Mike Kelley, creating in my mind some kind of Venn diagram of high and low, a strategy oft employed by Kelley thoughout his career.

    Though Kelley purports to hate pop culture (and has said so in numerous texts), he still dissects it with the glee one can only have from loving your subject. Going back to this imaginary Venn diagram of the high and the low coming together in Kelley’s work, I can’t help but also jump to the conclusion, amidst the flashing strobe lights and dance music of the Kelley/Smith collaboration, that the contemporary art world is no better or worse than the disparaged psychedelic festivalism of Burning Man, which — like most artists (Kelley likely included) — is both loved and hated simultaneously.

    Most of the reviews (of both installations) have suggested that Smith and Kelley’s bringing Ikki to Burning Man is a way for the Mikes to satirize the safe hedonism of Black Rock City. The reviewers laugh along approvingly in a way that all seems very cynical and dismissive (from frieze to The New York Times, it’s read as Burning Man = Infantilism). Many of them project their own prejudices onto the affair of Baby Ikki: playing with matches and lighters while watching scenes from the 1973 film The Wicker Man and dreaming of pendulous breasts splashed suggestively with milk, wandering the desert with his cherished stuffed animal and overeating FireBalls, playing tetherball and getting grinded by volunteer strippers (most everyone but the federal police are volunteer at Burning Man) at Spike’s Vampire Bar.

    In one astute accounting of Baby Ikki, an anonymous writer at EAI called the overgrown tyke less a take on infantilism and more a blank canvas to project on. The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, saw the Black Rock Desert where the festival is held as an “enormous blank canvas.” Perhaps there’s a problem in projecting our desires, failings and existential dreads on either a grown man dressed as a toddler or a paid festival in the desert.
    The convergence of these two observations does leave one wondering how these two blanknesses collide. Though Smith’s performance has something to do with infantilism, I pull back on the cynical read (though it may be echoed by Smith/Kelley) and put forward that Baby Ikki and Burning Man are both blank spaces upon which we can project whatever reading we want. So rather than a closed-down sardonic laugh-along, I’m going to let my own projection play out.

    Baby Ikki is like one of symbolist prankster Alfred Jarry’s characters dropped into an Antonioni film — parties and vacations only serving to hide the fact that Baby Ikki’s life is rather absurdly purposeless. Burning Man is symbolically a stand-in for a whole host of things, good and bad, ranging from the failure of progressive ideals to pop’s debasement of traditional values, leaving us to find spiritual succor where we can. The tension in the work isn’t the Smith-as-Ikki versus a world that unflinchingly accepts his infant-play, but rather a love-hate relationship with pop, sub-pop, marginal communities, Dada-istic nonsense, and folk art (or in other words, art made by nonprofessional artists).

    But Baby Ikki and Burning Man are whatever you make them, receptacles to pour whatever meaning you want into. Whatever they mean, their discomforting overlaps make their significance a little more slippery than most contemptuously facile readings would seem to allow.

  • Mike Kelley and Michael Smith

    Mike Kelley and Michael Smith

    Mike Kelley and Michael Smith are iconoclasts who for years have challenged accepted conventions, creating artworks that provoke and titillate. Although friends since 1975, they have never collaborated before. “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” their first work together, is significant in this regard. Here each man has brought his own sensibilities — the signature stuffed animals for Kelley; Baby Ikki for Smith — and in collaboration have fashioned an environment where documentation of Baby Ikki at an arts festival (Burning Man) is surrounded by sculptures, lights and artifacts that transport viewers both physically and spiritually to the event’s local.

    The installation moves from outside to inside. Viewers are first greeted by a row of portable toilets and Baby Ikkii’s dilapitated VW van, the interior of which contains a chair-like sculpture created by assembling numerous stuffed toys. As the viewer moves into the gallery space they cross the threshold from day to night and are immediately confronted by pulsating lights and a room filled with music.

    In the darkened space six video projections recant Baby Ikki’s journey to and during the festival, culled from hours of footage and edited into a six part narrative. Smith attended Burning Man as Baby Ikki, staying in character and filming his performance at the four-day event. Watching the videos in fragments reflects the event where many things happen simultaneously and where what is thought of as the ultimate group experience can also become quite isolating. Each screen is hung in or near its own individually spotlit structure, separating the journey into discrete segments.

    The environment adds vitality to the piece that both celebrates and critiques the festival. Using sections of metal tubing the artists have assembled open tents and domes that resemble Buckminster Fuller’s architecture. These empty structures house the screens upon which Smith’s videos are projected and suggest what remains when the crowds have gone. In one the floor is littered with a rug of stuffed animals — a recognizable Kelley trademark. Wandering through this environment one is thrust into confronting the pros and cons as to whether this is an adult or child’s world. The centerpiece of the installation, like the centerpiece at Burning Man, is a larger-than-life size junk sculpture that towers above the installation. Both docile and threatening this man/child is Baby Ikki, still intact, as the sculpture has not been burned. The sculpture is an amazing tower of discarded objects that speaks of what is sacred and what is waste in today’s society.

    “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery” is just that. It charts the voyage of an invented character at a real festival that is the ultimate fantasy world. Rather than recreate the environment that reflects the hot desert days, Kelley and Smith have created the chill of the night, when all that remains is the memory.