Vampires Need to Get Flu Shots Too (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part Five)

 

 

(This is Part Five in a series of responses to Mike Kelley's retrospective at MOMA PS 1 in New York City, which closes this week.  The show was amazingly thorough, and Mike Kelley was so amazingly prolific, I can't just write one post and move on.)

This one is called "Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #5 (Sick Vampire)," and it's part of an ongoing series Kelley did in which he recreated scenes from yearbooks, corporate newsletters and other ephemeral publications featuring accidental interventions into the conventional world through pagan rituals that seem both ethereal and kind of sad.  A lot of this work got turned into a movie musical he pulled together called Day Is Done.  Also part of the PS 1 gig was a huge pull-away document holder that was home to Kelley's vast archives of those clippings from yearbooks, newspapers, whatever:  vast dossiers of nothingness akin to Joseph Cornell's files of movie-stars.  Hoarding banal yet creepy and illuminating documents seems not only be a part of Kelley's oeuvre but also his soul, and this split-screen image holds that magic still so we can approach and maybe even be kissed or bitten by it.  Drabness eased by a supernatural silliness, I guess, is one of the best ways to describe real life lived as it is lived, and I keep thinking about all the boring conferences, awards presentations, board meetings, just meetings in general that people go to and then also the times they feel they need to collectively let off a little steam or take a break from the everyday while at work and something horrible and beautiful and completely unnoticed happens.  A vampire uses the bathroom, or a guy dressed in drag delivers a birthday cake, etc.  And the world remains the same of course but reality is slightly shaken awake only to slap its fist on the snooze button and go right back to sleep.  Kelley wanted those small moments to be extrapolated into a philosophy without pinpointing the meaning or the reason.  He only gave visual proof to ideas lurking behind the real, and even with that the sullen sinister affect of a half-asleep vampire becomes the ultimate visage, a veneer of evil that isn't evil or even a little bit scary, just kind of what it is.  The magic somehow blossoms from that brave staring down, that joke that is never laughed at but somehow consumed like a drug that gets you through, only sometimes even that does not work.  Vampires need to get flu shots too.

You Are What You Steal (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part Three)

 

(This is Part Three in a series of responses to Mike Kelley's retrospective at MOMA PS 1 in New York City.  The show is amazingly thorough, and Mike Kelley was so amazingly prolific, I can't just write one post and move on.) 

 

"Memory Ware" is a series of "paintings" Mike Kelley did in the early 2000s, using trinkets and other crap in place of splattered paint in a sort of Jackson-Pollock flourish that feels both aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, the exact nexus where Kelley's work foams over into mythology.  These large, voluptuously stupid pieces of art really seem like toss-offs and yet the room they occupy had a heavenly, game-show majesty, a feeling of fever and brute-force and also somehow poetic justice.  These works reference folk art's intense focus on non-focus, as well as nervous doodling numbness, a pile of gaudy activity shored up and frozen, completely meaningless and yet chief among the suite's narrative statements is an exclamation of freedom and embarrassing pride:  Look what the fuck I shoplifted. 

 

These are tabula-rasa trash piles, paragraphs of plastic bracelets and digital wrist-watches and little dumb dolls, the shit that spills out of vending machines after a shooting spree, all of it compiled and composted into a manifesto about what it takes to not be an artist.  The pretend opulence is pre-teen drag-queen, an over-arching innocence spilling out of the hoarded phoniness.  You are what you steal. 

 

Think of kids dumping their bags of Halloween candy on living room floors.

 

Think of Paris Hilton's bedroom after she throws a tantrum.

 

Think of polluted rivers starting to sing Carpenter's songs.

 

Think of a tornado sucking in a Liberace chandelier and spitting out a monument..

 

Think of Mike Kelley painstakingly gluing all that goddamn shit and then framing it all in with tender loving care and knowing that's all there is.

 



Look How Beautiful It Is to Be So Terrifically Small (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part Two)

 

(This is Part Two in a series of responses to Mike Kelley's retrospective at MOMA PS 1 in New York City.  The show is amazingly thorough, and Mike Kelley was so amazingly prolific, I can't just write one post and move on.) 

 

In one suite of classrooms at the MOMA PS 1 (a renovated public school that now showcases MOMA contemporary art), Mike Kelley's Kandor variations and obsessions nest side by side like universes collapsing and blurring together.  The whole sensation is like a lava-lamp blooming into philosophy, glow-in-the-dark sci-fi kitsch wrestled and edited into thesis.  Kandor is the capitol city of Krypton, Superman's home planet, and in comic-book narratives it sits inside a bottle within Superman's Fortress of Solitude, fully populated and filled with intrigue and tragedy.  The architecture of Kandor morphs from comic book to comic book, and it's never been represented fully in any of the Superman movies, so Kelley has full access to a range of representations and shapes and ghosts that haven't really fully entered the pop consciousness outside of a few fan-boy fantasies.  That vacuum between "knowing" Superman through the movies or through a segment about Superman movies on Entertainment Tonight, and "knowing" him in a fevered, pointed, meticulous manner allows Kelley transformative powers.  He's a wizard in those rooms inside PS 1, spinning out Kandors in all shapes and sizes, meditating without meditating on the meanings of each one.  It's like he's trying to disappear into the magic lamps he manufactures, trying to find the dream to fit the fever.  There's an endless variety of glows and glimmers, like Christmas aboard a space-station, or a 1950s kid's chemistry set growing out of itself and into a thought you should not think. 

 

You want to be able to eat parts of these luminescent fruit-cake Metropolises; you want to return to your grandma's living room, the one filled with weird colored little bottles; you want to splash on iridescent perfume that smells like a school-teacher's wrist. 

 

Kelley conjures.  He makes a world for himself here, one that he can't live in, and yet one that he can wish for when no one else is around.  That sense of yearning burns through the very idea of Kandor, a city in a bottle in a fortress of solitude, and you start to imagine the busy streets, the floating smoke, the interiors of plush bars and restaurants, bedrooms and ballrooms and government offices.  At times Kelley perches Kandor bottles bubbling with light and oxygen orbs on makeshift stage backdrops and you can walk around to see what's behind.  In one of these set-ups is a silver wash bucket; behind another a simple brown basket.  It's like you've stumbled backstage, which is probably where Mike Kelley thrived when he was alive, even when he was front and center.  He seems to adore that hushed static intensity of mundane little items stored away.  He seems to try to reach through the phantasmagorical rainbows he makes so he can sit with a janitor on his break and have a smoke.

 

With the Kandor pieces Kelley  merges school-boy myth with a sort of creepy-pervert sweetness that almost seems too beautiful, too precious, to witness, and it is, but Kandor is also a trap, a nightmare of smallness that Kelley knows is a dead end. 

 

And yet look how beautiful it is to be so terrifically small. 



Even a Fire Kisses Itself (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part One)

 

 

So a few days before New Years Day we went on a pilgrimage to New York to see Mike Kelley's vast, terrifyingly beautiful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art's PS 1 space in Queens.  The space is an old school, and there could be no better place to review all of Kelley's oeuvre than that:  a haunted institution gets haunted by a fucked-up phantom-genius.  It is four floors of art made by Kelley over a period of 30 or so years, ranging from drawings and paintings to sculptures, videos and installations.  It's like entering a gigantic ear and finding your way through tunnel after tunnel until you hit the center of the brain.

 

The center of this brain is pictured above.  Titled, "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991/1999)," it's a school-room inside PS 1 cordoned off, with an attendant at the front sitting in a folding chair, allowing two or three people to enter into the space at a time.  The ceremony is papal somehow, as are the plush, dirty, gorgeous satellites of love Kelley created, hanging on pulleys and ropes from the ceiling.  On the walls are huge pine-scented room deodorizers hissing out their smell every few seconds like background singers.  You approach the satellites the way you might approach a loved one who has Alzheimer's and is currently living inside a locked unit in a nursing home.  Carefulness turns into reticence and memories start leaking through your game-face.  These are clouds you used to climb into.  There are mass-graves lifted from the earth.  These are toys you used to talk to suddenly turned away from you forever.  A hellishness and heavenliness combined, and in that Blakean moment you're just stunned.  Completely fucking stunned. 

 

You know exactly why Kelley did this and yet the words don't come to you.  They just drift by like jokes on bumperstickers on shitty cars in shitty towns.  You stopped paying attention a long time ago, and now here you are confronted with the results of that ignorance, that amnesia.  The creatures from all the bedrooms from the 1980s have combined into a holocaust that doesn't even matter anymore, and yet they have fused into a religion that replaces religion.  That's Kelley's lyricism, his curse, and his triumph.  This little locked chamber of dementia, these heavy brains suspended in mid-air, planets once populated by action-figures and loved deceased house-cats, grandmas and gunslingers, basket-cases and unaccountable freaks laughing into pillows. 

 

I'm reading Straw for the Fire, selections from Theodore Roethke's notebooks, a hodgepodge of greatness fit for kings and for morons.  Roethke and Kelley have to be sitting at an Applebee's in Heaven right now, discussing their favorite thrift-stores and ditches.  Straw's greatness comes from its total randomness, and in one section, titled "The Proverbs of Purgatory (1948-1949)," little haiku-like nothings are presented streamlined into a manifesto. 

 

Here are a few that I've pulled that somehow remind me of Kelley's "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites":

 

All interiors call.

 

In a house of louts, I lived too happy.

 

Vision is the end of religion.

 

The angels ask but never answer.

 

Even a fire kisses itself.

 

(This is Part One of an ongoing blog-post series about Kelley's PS 1 retrospective.  I'll be going on and on about many of the other suites of works in the show in upcoming days and weeks.  It's just too much to fathom in one post...)