For the uninitiated, the Mike Kelley retrospective is a lot to digest. The exhibition, which spans
three decades of work and fills the entire PS1 museum, showcases a dense array of
video, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, and painting. Through an
enormous array of materials and installations, Kelley’s visual language explores a variety of emotions, concerns, themes, and aesthetic styles,
but it is nevertheless Kelley’s voice throughout.
Kelley was born in a suburb of Detroit to a
working class family in 1954. A rebel throughout his life, Kelley pursued an
anti-establishment attitude throughout his youth and adulthood. His college band
at the University of Michigan inspired in him a performative interest, while
the California Institute of the Arts, where he earned his MFA, aligned him with
the conceptual school of thought that was being defined by John Baldessari and Laurie
Anderson. Kelley evinced an open attitude to the possibilities of materials
and forms, engaging the potentials of craft materials and children’s toys.
The multifarious nature of Kelley’s working style
is exemplified throughout the retrospective, which moves the viewer spatially and
conceptually through a timeline of the artist’s work. Moving from the top of
the museum to the basement, the viewer experiences a progression from early to
later work, forming a cohesive understanding of Kelley’s
efforts. Although his work may seem obscure at first, his themes and ideas
slowly blend together, forming a tactile visual field of his concerns: society
and class, behavior and emotion, childhood and adulthood, voyeurism and privacy.
A large collection of drawings on notepad paper explores his
many plans and ideas about life and art: human movements are
diagrammed; depression is explored with doodles and language; and plans for
performances and costumes are plotted. A wry sense of humor is at play here, providing an
intimate look into the sardonic, emotional, off-kilter personality of the artist.
On a large pedestal, a color-coordinated collection of objects
found at the bottom of the Detroit river showcases issues of pollution and
class: entire china dinner sets are on display, hardly damaged except for some
small chinks. Each found item is arranged by color and size, forming a vibrant tableaux of other peoples' trash. A larger-than-life figurative sculpture, composed of found
dinnerware shards, stands defiantly above the porcelain arrangement, like the ruler of this
under-the-sea world of riches.
A darkened room with an large, structured lump is
revealed to be a sort of visitor crawlspace. With the aid of a gallery employee
and a flashlight, guests are invited to crawl into a completely dark
passageway, with absolutely no illumination once inside (iPhone flashlights are
not permitted) until the viewer finally finds a small lit hole, through which can be
seen a small video of a man performing sexual acts.
But these pieces are only a tiny taste of the enormous
exhibition, which changes radically with every room and every floor. The turn
of a corner could send you into a completely different state of mind and visual
delights, with large-scale Krypton globes based on Superman's home planet, or hanging amalgamations of
abandoned stuffed animals, or video installations accompanied by theatre settings and performance props. And there are many lengthy videos throughout the museum.
One could spend an entire day at PS1, meandering through the many corners of
Kelley’s active imagination.
The impact of the show becomes much more
emotionally weighty after Kelley’s suicide in 2012, at the age of 57. But the
retrospective at PS1 is testament to his on-going vitality, and incredible,
although shortened, career. It is a great homage to the artist and his life.
Your review gives a good account of the extent of Kelley’s career. You describe very well what it means for the viewer to evolve into the different spaces of PS1, the different aspect of Kelley’s life. Even though you succeed in exemplifying the many themes that were explored by the artist, I think you don’t insist enough on his use of eclectic materials. For me it is Kelley’s strength and what really comes out of this retrospective: you might talk about what materials bring to the work to be exhaustive in your review.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sara, you're review helps to make sense of a show so large that it's easy to get confused and lost in. I can't help feeling like PS1 maybe over did it with installing almost every piece that Kelley produced. After thinking about the show after viewing it, it really seemed to me that the two most important bodies of work Kelley produced were the stuffed animal pieces, talking about the innocence and sexuality of children and the Kandor series, which seemed to me like an evolved version of the stuffed animal pieces. All of the work in between is significant in terms of Kelley's career as an artist, but I viewed them more as a bridge between the early work and the Kandor series.
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