Artillery Magazine

Tag: Gagosian Gallery

THE EVIL OF BANALITY – Rachel Feinstein at Gagosian

Times change. In 1963, Hannah Arendt famously wrote about Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil”; in 2018 we get artist Rachel Feinstein exploring the evil of banality. It’s not just that the pieces at Secrets, her latest show at Gagosian, are banal, they’re aggressively so. Unfortunately, that’s why the deepest aspect of the work is her unforgiveable intent to aesthetically defraud the audience. In the press release for the show, Feinstein is quoted as being “interested in portraying some kind of fantasy, then showing it’s completely constructed.” With only her current show of paintings and sculptures to prove this dictum, it appears that the artist needs a new fantasy, or some serious mental Botox to feel better about the one she’s putting on public display.

Painting installation view

Her oil enamel paintings on mirrors bring the viewer to places unstuck in time, and the anachronisms contained therein present a world that exists solely for the display of conspicuous consumption. In the painting Sunset Blvd., a contemporary gull-wing sports car is parked in the driveway of a Classical mansion as two 17^th Century courtiers and their dogs prepare for a day in the country. There’s not much going on conceptually in the work, as the juxtaposition of old and new high-class shenanigans is banal territory already over explored without Feinstein’s weak addition to the subject. Artistically, the work fares no better; the figures and architecture are painted in a bland representational style, and the clouds and vegetation worked so crudely as to be merely suggestive of what they are. But to give credit where credit is needed, the use of a mirror as a base for the painting does obliquely involve the viewer in the proceedings; even if it’s only to adjust makeup or check yourself out.

Sunset Blvd., oil enamel on mirror, 42 x 54 inches, 2018

Moving for relief to the other room to view the second part of Feinstein’s show only deepens the feeling of ill-intentioned banality. Her eight figurative sculptures of women that “reflect on the Victoria’s Secret phenomenon” may “reveal perfection as a form of burlesque”, but they only prove how acts of aesthetic evil can become commonplace if repeated enough. Any technological failing can be justified if presented openly and defended as artistic expression, so Feinstein’s lack of concern with “verisimilitude or refinement” becomes a commentary on, not ugliness, but anti-beauty. To make the repulsion even more impressive, the figures are rendered at just above human scale; the hands of Bandleader appearing as grotesquely large gardening gloves, the face so clowned-out as to appear unhuman.

Bandleader, hand applied color resin over foam, 76 x40 x30, 2018

Feinstein claims her sculptures “cannibalize notions of beauty” and that the paintings update “historical European Luxury.” But claiming isn’t the same as explaining, and as Arendt points out, “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” So, with no stories told in Feinstein’s exhibition, there remains nothing to define and no meaning to be found; its like a bedtime story that begins with “The End”.

RACHEL FEINSTEIN

SECRETS

JANUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2018

January 25, 2018
Walton Ford’s Natural History for California Dreamers

I’ve always thought the human preoccupation with borders and perimeters had more to do with its relationship with animal wildlife (not that humans have ever exactly been ‘tame’). I realize I’m speaking a bit off the top of my head – I’ve never done any serious research into this. But my superficial take-away from what I have learned about natural history over the years is that we’ve been a wandering species pretty much since the earliest hunters and gatherers. We’ve also been a species of inventors (on the plus side), tale-spinners, and mythologizers (and not incidentally, self-mythologizers). I tend to think the earliest mythological and medieval bestiaries had their origins in human wanderings past their immediate surrounding environments and tribal domains and the tall tales such wanderers spun when they returned to the places their tribes and families were tenuously homesteading, with their descriptions of wildlife embellished to emphasize the mysteries and dangers they encountered. (To enhance their standing in the ‘tribes’? To make themselves more attractive as mating material? When their potential mates were probably just thinking, ‘you jerk’?)

In the meantime, our fellow creatures were also on the move, though somewhat less ambitiously – usually in search of a good meal. Unlike our competitive and haphazardly creative species, they tended to stick to their own metropolis of the wild. Also unlike our self-mythologizing species, those quests actually entailed serious hazards, and occasionally mortal conflict with competitive species. Walton Ford’s great subject has always been, not simply a reconceived bestiary along the lines of the great naturalist and natural history painters and illustrators, but the fraught and tragic intersections and confrontations between these human mythologies and the wildlife humans have variously feared, revered, hunted, admired, exploited, tortured and killed to the point of extinction.

Mythology is rife with rationalizations for human misbehavior, and human civilizations have not shied away from exploiting such ideas and motives to rationalize their own extensions and expansion into unprotected wilderness and for that matter colonial exploitation (by way mythology’s successors – Western religions). Ford makes one such latter-day mythology – the Spanish legend of Calafia – a motif actually taken from a 16^th century novel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo which inspired the Spanish conquistadors to name this part of the American southwest ‘California’ – the focus of his show at Gagosian. In the original novel, the island of Esplandian (Calafia is its queen) is inhabited by flying griffons. In Ford’s Calafia, the griffin is California-nized into a half-California condor, half-native mountain lion beast, encountering a California (‘island’ only in political terms) transformed by human encroachments. In Isla de California, we see a magnificent specimen with its stealth-span articulated wings and lavender breast swooping in to land on one such emblem of progress – the utility pole – looming in the foreground in the hills over Malibu. Some distance away another such creature can be seen making explosive contact with a transformer. The year 1938 appears after the title – obviously bearing no relationship to the inscription from the Rodríguez de Montalvo novel, but not insignificant. We can trace California’s evolution through such dates – from its original Spanish ranchos to agricultural, small local industry and land development companies, and finally to what it is today.

Yet Ford’s scheme here is clearly intended to match ‘Manifest Destiny’ expansionism with a temporally expansive scheme of its own. This is an ‘Isla’ that moves forward and back through time. In another painting, the Grifo de California sprawls against the cliffs in repose, its furry black mantle and white under-plumage splendidly articulated. The date inscribed is 1533, which may have marked the first Spanish expeditions into California – or at least Baja California (Cortez entered Mexico in 1519, and by 1532, Pizarro had taken the Incan empire of Peru.); but serious Spanish colonization of California would not begin until the 18^th century.

Ford gives us a glimpse of that period (1749?) in La Madre – the mother referenced in the title being a grizzly bear, ensnared (though not fatally) by some part of a trap seen just inches from her claws. Oso Madre appears suspended here somewhere between fight and flight; and just to her left, in a meadow far below the cliff’s edge, we glimpse what has frozen her in terror – not for herself, but for her cubs. It’s hard not to almost instantly leap to the assumption that the bears in the meadow being chased by a trio of horsemen – not far from a structure that looks like a Spanish mission – are her own, at least in spirit. The pathos we read in her eyes may simply be more anthropomorphizing on the viewer’s part – this, too, being part of Ford’s subject here. But this contemporary anthropomorphizing has more to do with time. Where our hypothetical Madre’s thoughts are likely only on the immediate whereabouts of her cubs, the contemporary viewer has a privileged view of what will unfold in the future. Ranchos and missions will continue to be claimed, cleared, variously cultivated and plundered; and small and large native species alike (humans included) exploited to the verge of extinction.

Then, too, this is another warm-blooded mammal not so far removed from the super-predator species – and who has not seen fear in a cornered or panicking animal’s eyes?

Unlike our colonial predecessors, Ford gives due respect to the mythical Esplandian queen. In La Brea, a triptych roughly 30 feet long (and 5 feet tall – the three panels were each 60.5 x 119.5 inches) that took up an entire wall of Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery, the sun rises somewhere to the east of a prominence (between Inglewood and Baldwin Hills?) overlooking what might be the post-Rancho/pre-20^th century La Brea Boulevard itself – we can see the most prominent thoroughfares that will mark the urban grid. Climbing over the hills, though, we see some very large animals, including a few species that could only have crossed into North America in Rodriguez de Montalvo’s imagination – further complicating the ‘when’ of this scheme. The second panel shifts the focus further into the foreground, and a kind of waking nightmare. Familiar silhouettes give way to what we can see are intended as prehistoric specimens come back to life, shlepping up hillsides fresh from the tarry lakes that gave the rancho and later the boulevard its name. Vengeance is taken in the last panel on a hillside we now recognize as the Hollywood Hills (John Lautner’s Chemosphere house – owned by Ford’s patron, Benedikt Taschen looms in the background) where two tar-slicked saber-tooth tigers pounce upon a comparatively defenseless local mountain lion – not all that distant from an actuality where it’s just as likely to die from blunt force trauma (as in automobile collision) or rat poison.

No nostalgia is possible here (as if we needed to be reminded in Hollywood where no house goes unburned!). But Ford updates the disillusionment with a glassy-eyed Leo the Lion lounging poolside at a more generic contemporary canyon abode in Ars Gratia Artis (2017) – which pre-GenX-ers might remember as the motto of M-G-M. Nothing but mergers and merchandising on this horizon, though we can hope the residuals keep coming in. The dream factory is gone – and so are the dreams. Yet some of us (even in Hollywood) go right on dreaming them.

Of course the great thing about Leo’s Hollywood was that it never bought its own press. Today culture and technology seem to push in the opposite direction – seemingly manufacturing and consuming it in a chain reaction spin cycle. (That is, when it’s not trying to break it or shut it down.) Ford’s is an alternate version, an alternate dimension, removed from this relentless fakery. Lions and griffons and bears (‘oh my!’) are really at the periphery of this human-centered diorama, where the past can and will return to haunt us – much as the melting icecaps and plastic-filled oceans will eventually melt and suffocate us.

December 20, 2017
Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler

It is almost an existential question – of art, creation, medium – the ‘still point of the turning world … (w)here the dance is,’ to paraphrase Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” Helen Frankenthaler was already well into her early maturity by 1962, which is where this 25 year survey begins; but those critical, quasi-existential questions of figure and ground, defining a contour out of the surround – the ‘formless void’ lit by the ‘grace’ of color – remain at the heart of an artistic project that luxuriated in its paradoxical conditions and never compromised. Within the scope of only seventeen large canvases – the most succinct and self-contained of the current crop of museum quality exhibitions in L.A. galleries right now – the show takes us from an almost lyrical abstraction verging on landscape to a kind of linear gesture against ephemeral color field that’s almost a painterly haiku; from the most vibratile exegesis of edge and morphing shape to surreal abstraction alive with incident both linear and chromatic. A video excerpt from Frankenthaler: Toward a New Climate (did she foresee that, too?) gives us a taste of her incisive intellectual clarity. We go out the way we came in; and Frankenthaler’s work never loses sight of it.

Gagosian Gallery
456 N. Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Show runs thru October 29, 2016

October 19, 2016
‘Are the stars out tonight?’ Harmonic convergence for a new art season

The beginning of another arts and culture season also marks a point where we really start to feel the impact of everything we’ve been experiencing over the preceding orbital/calendar year and start to take its measure. Events move swiftly; you can feel as if you’re stepping onto a speeding train just leaving your apartment; and to miss an event in one’s agenda, or just a day’s news can make you feel as if you’ve missed a station. Our connection to the everyday realities can seem so fragile, so contingent; yet that connection, those realities are themselves being continuously redefined and renegotiated. We need to make course adjustments, reorient the compass, re-navigate. We’re looking forward to the new – thrilled by the possibility of fresh ideas, sensations, beauties (and maybe a little desperate?); taking charge of the negotiations; but it helps to make sense of where we’ve been. (Then again – do we ever really know?)

This year, the best of the first major fall museum exhibitions and gallery solo shows collide, converge, fuse and spark to give us a hint of resonance, new direction, fresh looks at things we might have missed or overlooked, as well as those elements of course correction and perspective that always need to be refreshed.

We get more than a hint of resonance with Doug Aitken’s mid-career retrospective, Electric Earth, which (with MOCA Director, Philippe Vergne’s unstinting and hands-on commitment) practically makes MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary over into a resonant vessel of sight and sound. For Aitken’s show, the Geffen – which has never looked better – is splayed out into an open maze of almost 20 years of Aitken’s architectural/sculptural/experiential multi-screen installations, along with various photographs, lightboxes, collages, sculptures or other objects that offer a kind of emblematic road map to Aitken’s process, a connective tissue that invite the viewer to ‘walk this way.’ Vergne has reconfigured and plotted out the space to parallel Aitken’s process, with its infinite expansion or compression of the moment, convergence of microcosm and macrocosm, and sense of harmonic decay.

I thought the passage in Vergne’s catalogue commentary, expanding on Aitken’s [film] editorial process, summed up both his own installation strategy and Aitken’s fundamental approach: “ … a visual and temporal space conceived to suggest the expectation of narrative order, a tension toward ‘what comes next,’ a dynamic that is endlessly pointing forward giving rise to an open form – improvised and interfaced with thematic relations between sounds and images that strategically dissolve and reconstitute a visual, time-based, and harmonic landscape. This sense of pacing, of interrupted moments, of shifting and floating is simultaneously a summary of a narrative and the negation of that narrative.”

This is the museum exhibition as immersive experience; and the viewer floats away from it ready for pretty much anything that follows. Assuming you’re not spent from the experience (and pace yourself – you may need more than one), you might segue over to Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel for a museum-level exhibition of the work of the Austrian artist, Maria Lassnig, surveying in 31 paintings almost the entire span of her long and diverse career – a kind of prismatic kernel of the major retrospective of her work that appeared at the Tate Liverpool this summer and will soon travel.

Maria Lassnig is quite simply the greatest painter you’ve never heard of – except you actually may have, in recent years anyway, only to … well, … push her off the radar again. Lassnig finally began to achieve the recognition she deserved in the last quarter of her career; but her growing audience had really only the barest clue of her daunting scope. The Tate curators – and here in L.A., Lassnig Foundation Chairman, Peter Pakesch and our own Paul Schimmel – have done us all the favor of seizing upon the breadth of this extraordinary career and unfolding its varied objectives and mechanisms of inquiry, its approaches to media, its psychology and overall consciousness, sheer mystery and abundant humanity, into a kind of compact narrative of the artist’s life that, spread out through only five beautiful galleries, is quietly breathtaking.

Grounded in a figurative tradition informed by expressionism, Lassnig veered early into abstraction of varying degrees of painterliness and coolness, but always true to herself and her own artistic investigative spirit. The bodily, performative aspect of her gestural style turned her toward a more distinctly psychological, introspective and body-conscious approach, and her work in the 1960s and 1970s took on a more self-conscious, even surreal cast. Her later work, though cooler in palette and approach, partook of even more intimate, diaristic detail. Her subject is, above all else, consciousness itself – and she is true to it to the end.

Helen Frankenthaler, “Brother Angel” (1983), acrylic on canvas, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Across town, there are two other museum quality surveys – and no less breathtaking. The Gagosian Gallery’s 25 year survey of Helen Frankenthaler’s painting, Line Into Color, Color Into Line, clarifies (with some curatorial help from Yale art historian Carol Armstrong and the eminent writer and curator, John Elderfield) the complex genesis and structural sophistication of work that is occasionally viewed through an over-simplistic ‘color field’ prism. The 18 canvases that span the years 1962 to 1987 demonstrate a complex and evolving dialogue, not merely of drawing/line/design and color in the classic sense, but formal conundrums of the line in two-dimensional color-zoned space; line and/or color and edge; mark, subject and (colored) ground; and depiction and mark-making generally. They’re also, quite simply, gorgeous paintings; and if you’re heading to Gagosian to ‘educate the eye,’ be assured that your eyes will also be satiated with pleasure.

John Altoon, from the Ocean Park series

You may experience a sensation of time warp or displacement at the Kohn Gallery’s exhibition of painting and drawing by John Altoon (but then, hey – after the Aitken show, you’re ready for it, right?). ‘Didn’t I just…?’ Sort of – especially if you were at the Altoon retrospective at LACMA in 2014. But rest assured, you’re at Kohn – it’s just that good. Just about everything you would want from an Altoon survey is here, from the more densely abstract paintings (some from the 1950s, some from the 1960s); the commercial pastiches of the early 1960s; the slightly surreal and brilliant color abstractions of the 1960s; the Ocean Park series; those tussles between the abstract and figural that occur throughout; to (finally!) the virtuoso erotic and quasi-sexual farces and fabliaux executed well into the late 1960s. It’s all here – so just go crazy and try not to spend all your money. It’s a commercial gallery, not LACMA, goddamnit!

Okay – so naturally, you’re now thinking of heading to LACMA – and why not? It’s not too far and there two more superb shows that demand your attention: The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L., a 50^th anniversary survey, an elegant and compact survey of the classic best of Gemini’s groundbreaking editions; and an absolutely sublime show of 17^th century Chinese landscape painting, Alternative Dreams: 17^th –Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection.

And now this ‘brief list’ is getting out of hand, so before I break off (to pick up again before the week-end), let me just give you a quick list of the remaining essential shows so far:

Henry Taylor, Blum & Poe, Culver City

Tom Knechtel: Astrolabe, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Tom Knechtel “The Reader of His Own Self” (do you get the impression we might be going somewhere with this? See, Artillery’s “Pick of the Week” for this week) – with

Mira Schor: “Power” Frieze and War Frieze (1991-94), CB1 Gallery, downtown Los Angeles

Edith Beaucage, Luis de Jesus, Culver City

Ry Rocklen, Honor Fraser, Culver City

Rodney McMillian, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City

Jun Kaneko: Mirage, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Culver City

And we haven’t even talked about music or theatre (or opera) or movies – or fashion. But we will. Before I go, here’s one thing that’s definitively out of fashion: the Peter Zumthor ‘Gumby’ blob that wants to eat Wilshire Boulevard. Do we have to resurrect Godzilla and Mothra to dispatch this thing? Calling Roger Corman….

Tom Knechtel, “Avery (2)” (2015), ink on paper, courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art

September 21, 2016
Refresh the screen: Anthony Caro at the Gagosian Gallery

File this under ‘better too late than never’ (i.e., of a piece with the story of my life). You have only two days to see this show; but if you’re in the Beverly Hills vicinity, I encourage you to run to it. This is a fabulous, albeit extremely compact, show in the same league with last year’s great Calder show (at LACMA) – or at least a small section of it. You don’t have to follow or write about developments in contemporary art to occasionally feel a bit overwhelmed, but it helps. This is where the museums usually come into play, offering us fresh historical reference points or just letting us get lost in a random browse of one collection or another. Then there are the fresh perspectives afforded by music, movies, dance; or the distractions of fashion and pop culture. The right show, book, music, etc. can function like a palate cleanser, refreshing us and priming us for the next course. Every once in a while a gallery will itself offer an opportunity to refresh the cultural screen; and such is the case right now – but only for the next two days – at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Anthony Caro – Works from the 1960s.

Caro’s work made important linkages between the movements that comprise modernism’s arc throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st. But his work also inaugurated them, usually with work that became central and almost iconic to the times in which it was made, though remaining sui generis, bearing his unmistakeable signature, however they might ‘relate’ to contemporary work. Such is the case with his work of the 1960s, which not only reached discreetly back to his biomorphic phases (he famously apprenticed with Henry Moore), but to the Cubist and Constructivist legacies of early modernism, while at the same time opening the door to a way of seeing and encountering sculpture that was entirely new. To see these sculptures, whether for the first or sixty-first time, is to be struck by that freshness anew. Caro became famous for a kind of sculpture that veered into the domain of what might be termed architectural, but what is really simply intrinsic to the syntax of the work. The work claims the space it requires to complete its statement, expression, gesture – nothing more, nothing less. The work urges us forward into its space – not to dance with it exactly (it occurs to me how much that expression would have horrified Michael Fried, who himself famously applauded Caro’s work), but to position and shift our bodies and viewpoints in tandem with its articulation.

Without necessarily abandoning the raw unfinished or neutrally painted steel elements that characterized much of his immediately preceding and later work, Caro, very much in tune with his times, fastened onto color – in primaries and bold secondaries – as a means to heighten this articulation, to make it emphatic. It all but pops in Gagosian’s airy and softly lit space. Consider the simplicity of First National’s (1964) deconstructed cube (really a kind of homage to Cubism) with its obliquely pitched inverted zig-zag central element in bright (almost taxicab) yellow positioned between two I-beams in bright green, with the elements spatially coordinated by thin yellow axes lightly hovering above and behind the principal ‘figures.’ (And yes – there is ‘figuration’ here without being at all figurative.)

As if to underscore that secondary point, consider another gorgeous geometric deconstruction (in a slightly burnt orange) that beckons us into the second gallery, Purling’s conic dis-sections that unfold in an almost teasingly rational manner that nevertheless evokes Julio Gonzalez or even (dare I say it?) a swimmer. Then – as if returning to that linear rigor – we’re pulled back towards the clean gesture of Wide (1964) in bright red, with its splayed 100 degree V pitched forward over a thin, perfectly flat-standing short horizontal, with the slightly shorter upward extension forming a kind of check mark figure under three projecting rays. Caro again plays with an array of thin planes, trapezoids and quasi-Cubistic concavities (e.g., the abstracted leaf; the eye) in Drift (1970), drawing us around and over with its folds – a dancer’s turn in bright blue.

Subtle narratives unfold, entirely abstractly (albeit in vivid color) in industrial and shaped pieces in, e.g., The Window (1966-67) and Month of May (1963 – you were thinking 1968, maybe?), but also in smaller pedestal pieces that can be viewed in the upstairs gallery. I only wish you had more time to do so. Run to it if you can.

May 30, 2015
MIKE KELLEY: STRAIGHT OUTTA DETROIT

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! ART STAR STOPS MAKING ART!
That was going to be my headline after hearing the remark Mike Kelley made at the close of our interview.

I was wrapping up our conversation, all ready to ask the final question, like Barbara Walters: “What’s next, Mike?” But before I could, Kelley preempted me: “I’ve been working nonstop for years and years, and now I’m not in the mood to make art. I’m trying to slow down.”

Considering he was just back from his London show with Gagosian Gallery, and that that very week his Destroy All Monsters noise/art band group show at Prism gallery in Los Angeles was being installed, maybe he was just plain worn out, and perhaps being a little melodramatic. He continued, “I have a lot of things I have to do, like a big survey show that’s coming up in 2012; it’s traveling. And some other shows that have been scheduled for a long time. I just did two shows this year, and big-scale shows. So I just want to stop for a couple of years.”

It got quiet toward the end of our interview, and if I didn’t know better, I might even say he seemed a bit melancholy that late morning. It’s true, Los Angeles-based artist Kelley has been making art for a long, long time. So to say he’s taking a break is something akin to Duchamp’s famous hiatus from making art to play professional chess.

But stop making art? I hate to break the news to him, but it’s doubtful: He’s in the Whitney Biennial (for the eighth time) this year with an ongoing project. (More on this later.) That doesn’t sound much like taking a break.

Known for his stuffed-animal sculptures and his wry text drawings, his performance art, his videos, his musical activities and his writing, Kelley is arguably one of the most influential living artists, and I’ve been wanting to feature him in Artillery for some time now.

Mike Kelley, Kandor 14, 2011, photo by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Mike Kelley and Gagosian Gallery.

Kelley finally agreed to an interview, but only reluctantly. Last issue, our gossip columnist got carried away, and Kelley was not happy with what he took to be gratuitous character assassination. But he honored his word and met with me anyway, and I couldn’t help but be impressed by his integrity.

Kelley invited me to meet him at his office, which is actually his former studio/home, located in Highland Park on the eastside of Los Angeles. It still has the feel of a home—it actually is a house—as you enter at the back through an alley. I opened the wooden screen door to a bright spotless kitchen with shiny green tiles. Assistants were buzzing from one room to another.

Kelley greeted me as he was hastily finishing a piece of toast, which may have served as his breakfast. Casually dressed, with short-cropped graying hair, his intense blue eyes seldom caught mine. He was gracious though, and asked me if I wanted a cup of tea as he led me to the front living room, where the curtains remained drawn. There were two modern L-shaped couches and a coffee table in the middle with one lone ashtray that looked like it hadn’t seen a cigarette in a long time. There was a large Lari Pittman on one wall, on another leaned a tall pink John McCracken, and the adjacent wall had an army-green James Hayward frosting painting hanging near the front door. He told me Hayward was an old friend to whom he would be forever indebted to for recommending him for his first teaching job in Minneapolis. This ultimately led to his professorial career of over 30 years in Southern California, where he has developed a following among students who, in turn, have perpetuated his influence in the contemporary art world.

DETROIT

Mike Kelley was raised Catholic and attended Catholic School— any Kelley aficionado knows this, as Catholicism is frequently addressed in his work. So I decided to start from the beginning. When I asked him if he ever believed in Heaven and Hell, he responded deliberately, in his deep, gravelly Detroit accent, “No. I never believed in anything.” He seemed sad when he said that, with a faraway look in his eyes. Even as a child, he said he never bought into the Catholic Church: “No. I never believed in it at all. I was stuck in it. It was pounded into me, but I wasn’t indoctrinated. I suffered because I felt that something was wrong with me. I thought I should believe, and I just couldn’t understand why I didn’t.”

Aha! There’s the Catholic guilt!

But even in the first grade, Kelley told me, he remembers thinking that religion “was a load of shit.” I envisioned a tiny kid saying “This is a load of shit!”

He grew up in a working class suburb of Detroit. His father was the head of maintenance in the local public school system, his mother a cook at the Ford Motor Company cafeteria. Kelley first knew he wanted to be an artist at age 13. He went directly from high school to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, then to CalArts. This trajectory suggested to me that he might have come from a supportive family that embraced his becoming an artist. He laughed for a long time, as if in slow motion, even a little maniacally. Then he stopped abruptly and corrected me. “No, my family did not support me in my interest in the arts. My parents were both really against it. My father basically disowned me.”

Kelley described his getaway plan back then. “Because otherwise I was going to go crazy. I was going to die. I actually had a nervous breakdown. I had no option, I had to leave my town. I would have been working in a local auto parts store for the rest of my life.” He paused, with those faraway eyes again, and added as an important afterthought: “I chose art, not to become successful, because you couldn’t make a living from being an artist at that time. It was a profession I chose specifically in order to be a failure.” This is a poignant statement, considering the nature of the art world today. Artists in the past truly were rebels and iconoclasts, not career-driven puppets.

In his early days, before Cal- Arts, Kelley delved into what was around him, incorporating his life into his art. “I was interested in hippie anarchist culture—in Detroit and Ann Arbor, that meant the White Panther Party. They put on concerts and poetry readings; they wrote manifestos about how bad capitalism was. I read John Sinclair’s writings, and I said to myself, these people are like me! I’m not crazy!” He explored the avant-garde and was deeply influenced by Dada. “The psychedelic underground was just an extension of the historical avant-garde. And I decided that I should be an artist—either that or a writer. I was particularly inspired by the writings of William Burroughs.

“When I was in high school, a group of students formed a recycling center. There was no organized recycling at that time. Working at that center, I discovered that there was a world of magazines about culture. I ripped articles out of these, and I basically taught myself about contemporary art. When I went to college, I was much more knowledgeable about it than the other students.” Smashing cans and breaking glass… and reading Dada! Mike Kelley learned about contemporary art in a dumpster, basically.

In junior high, Kelley switched from parochial to public school and acquired two art teachers. “One of my high school art teachers was a real macho guy. His paintings looked like Francis Bacon’s. The second art teacher was a closeted gay man; he had to be closeted, I don’t think an openly gay man would have been allowed to teach in the public school system at that time. He taught the craft classes,” which Kelley says he wasn’t into. But he took Kelley to exhibits and “This man was my replacement father. I won a statewide student arts award and had to go to a dinner ceremony in another city. This man went with me instead of my parents. I recall that everyone laughed when I introduced him as my teacher, because you were supposed to have brought your parents.”

It seemed to all come together right there, all the strands of his rambling and transgressive career gathered in the story of his Midwestern upbringing: the Catholic-school trauma, his teenage White Panther experience, and the tutelage of his latent- homosexual high school crafts teacher who took him to art exhibits. Roll this all into one ball, and you have the artist Mike Kelley!

CALARTS

Mike Kelley might not be a household name, like his contemporaries Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. It would also be difficult to lump him in with that crowd aesthetically. For one thing, Kelley was doing performance art in the ’70s, which was way more subversive than the fine arts scene at that time. He performed with underground rock musicians. His work was unconventional, unmarketable and uncategorical. Kelley stayed in LA, when his above-mentioned peers went to New York to pursue conventional art careers.

Kelley had and continues to have a name around town—from mentor to comrade—and being from Los Angeles is definitely a factor in Kelley’s sensibility—along with Detroit, always Detroit.

A lot of Kelley’s work draws from personal history, and one as rich as his would seem to provide endless material. He shrugged his shoulders when I remarked upon this but was willing to see where I was going. I asked him if he was from a dysfunctional family.

“All nuclear families are dysfunctional,” he replied. “That’s my belief.” Then he paused. “My family wasn’t dysfunctional in the sense I was beaten or abused, but my mother was a complete control freak. She wanted to control everybody’s life, and it caused a lot of psychic damage. I’d say that my mother was a phallic mother, and my father was just in the background.”

Kelley was the baby of four children in a family of six and describes himself as “the troublemaker. In my family, art was considered to be what communists and homosexuals did.”

So your family didn’t understand you at all? “No, no. I was a Martian.” Kelley repeats this with a combination of nonchalance and conviction. “A Martian, a commie and a fag.”

I pointed out that that sounded pretty damn dysfunctional, maybe even abusive. He neither agreed nor disagreed.

So Kelley got the hell outta Dodge as soon as he could. He went straight to Ann Arbor “because that’s where all the freaks were. When I decided to go to graduate school, the only two schools I applied to were CalArts and the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Kelley decided on CalArts mainly because Alan Kaprow was on the faculty. “But when I got there, he was gone,” he said. “CalArts was really focused on New York. Students went to New York City as soon as they graduated; instead, I was driving into Los Angeles and checking it out and discovering a really interesting art scene. I met artists my age, especially coming out of Otis, people like Bruce Yonemoto and Jeffrey Vallance. I met Chris Burden, Alexis Smith and artists of that generation as well.”

The Los Angeles art scene was much younger then, and more intimate. “There were very, very few galleries and no contemporary art museum. But there were alternative spaces, and as soon as I graduated, I became involved with LACE. I was on the committees for many years programming shows and events.”

STUFFED ANIMALS

My first real encounter with Kelley’s work was at Rosamund Felsen gallery on La Brea back in the late ’80s. The piece was a tattered worn blanket with grimy stuffed animals placed in the corners. Above it were black-and-white snapshots of people smearing chocolate (one hoped), on the same blanket, using the stuffed animal as props.

I had never seen anything like it before and it made a huge impression on me. I assumed Kelley was thumbing his nose at the art world, but he rejected that theory. He told me it was the first series of work that made money for him. “I realized it was simply the subject matter. It wasn’t my intention that I hooked into this weird thing about hearth and home. People are so invested in their childhood.”

Kelley was a little perplexed by this back then, because that’s really not what the work was about. “I didn’t make that work for that reason. It surprised me. And that’s what led me to go on to do this work about life-repressed memory syndrome.”

A lot of Kelley’s work invokes psychotherapy, so I had to ask if he’s been in therapy. “I’ve been in therapy, off and on, most of my life. I also studied psychology in school and I read deeply on the subject. I’ve always been very interested in it.”

When I asked if he thought therapy was a scam, he answered without a beat, “Yes. But it’s a scam you need at the time.”

GAGOSIAN

Kelley’s work today sells for as much as a million dollars in auctions. I congratulated him on this apparent mark of success. “I don’t follow auctions, ” Kelley responded. “The galleries do that, I don’t want to know how much my work goes for.”

Granted, Kelley never sees any of that money if it changes hands in secondary market auctions, but the mere fact of the sale should boost the price of one’s current artwork, shouldn’t it? He responded dutifully, “It could, or could not. It might up the value of that particular period of my work. I have works that sell for tremendous amounts of money, and others that I can’t sell at all. I’m not necessarily going to capitalize on an inflated auction sale, that’s what I’m telling you.”

It seemed strange to me that, for such an abrasively uncommercial artist, success had found him. “Now that you’re with Larry Gagosian, you must feel like you’ve made it to the top,” I said.

“That’s a long story,” Kelley replied. “Mark Francis, who works at the Gagosian gallery in London, is a fan of my work. He invited me to mount a show there. This was when I was working on ‘Day Is Done’ [a feature film installation]. I had decided to leave Metro Pictures in New York, after showing there for over 20 years. I was locked into the gallery pecking order, and I realized I was never going to do better in New York if I didn’t switch galleries. At some point I said to Mark, ‘Day Is Done’ is a big show, on the scale of a museum show, it’s a waste to present it in London. I want to show it in the New York gallery. Surprisingly, they agreed to this. It was a real gamble. But luckily it worked out. The show was very successful and radically changed my reception in New York.”

Kelley showed with top LA galleries early on. He started with Mizuno Gallery, Rosamund Felsen, then Patrick Painter. Then Gagosian.

Larry Gagosian is known for his empire of 11 international galleries and a strict business approach to art, therefore it wasn’t surprising to hear Kelley say, “Gagosian Gallery, unlike other galleries I have shown with, is not very familial. I knew most of the artists at Metro Pictures personally. Gagosian is run in a much more businesslike way. Artists come and go.”

Mike Kelley in his outside studio in Highland Park, December 2011, photo by Tyler Hubby

ONE MONTH LATER

When we went to shoot photos of Kelley, he seemed much more upbeat. He even brought along the striped shirt I suggested, similar to the one he wore in a youthful photograph included in Dirty, the Sonic Youth album he designed. That’s when he sprang his Detroit project on me, something he’s been working on for several years.

I reminded him that he said he was going to stop making art.He just mumbled something, then stared into the camera.

It didn’t seem the right time to talk about the project, so I arranged a phone interview. Two weeks later, I asked him, “What’s this Detroit project Mike?”

“I’ve been working on it for years. I wanted to work with a real structure, so I wanted to try to buy my childhood home,” he told me over the phone.

This is something you forgot to tell me? I scream to myself.

The Detroit project, it turns out, may be Kelley’s magnum opus. To explain it as best I can, Kelley returned to the Detroit suburb of his childhood and tried to buy the house where he grew up, in order to create a site-specific work. But the homeowner wasn’t interested, and after exploring other options, Kelley settled for replicating his home (after a fashion).

The structure will be built on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It will be a replica of his home but with a forbidden extension; a basement, two stories deep, each level mimicking the floor plan above, evoking dungeon labyrinths.

All these elements are still on the drawing board. What Kelley has completed so far is a façade of his house—a sort of detachable face, about the size of a mobile home, that can be placed on and off a truck. (The façade is not simply a flat wall, but a three dimensional unit that fits onto the main structure.) The piece is called Mobile Homestead, and two expeditions have already taken place, starting from MOCAD and ending at the Kelley home in Westland, which resulted in two documentary films which will debut at the Whitney Biennial this year.

This had all started as a project that Kelley wanted to do for personal reasons, not for public exhibition. But when Artangel, a London-based arts-funding organization, offered to sponsor the project, along with MOCAD, Kelley made some revisions and compromises and basically found himself doing public art, foregoing the original game plan.

The Detroit project is almost too fraught with psychology and dysfunction. The basements, the tunnels, the mazes—way too Freudian, even for me. But there it is.

Kelley continues to talk about this project as a public piece that was never meant to be public. Kelley left Detroit, but did he really leave it behind? He says the stuffed animals had nothing to do with childhood. (Really?) He says he needs to stop making art for a while, but now he’s working on a huge project that could be one of his most important pieces to date.

I think Kelley’s intended hiatus was just wishful thinking. His work is about personal history, his childhood, his hometown, psychology and dysfunction—things that could easily feel like an emotional burden. But as Kelley told me, being a conceptual artist is about ideas—and how does one shut those down?

The Stedelijk Museum is organizing “MIKE KELLEY: Themes and Variations from 35 Years,” scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in December 2012. After Amsterdam the show is expected to travel to: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, LA; and MoMA PS1, New York.

See Mike Kelley’s work in the Whitney Biennial 2012 opening March 1, 2012. www.whitney.org

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January 3, 2012