ART-PRESENTATION: Mike Kelley

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley produced a body of deeply innovative work mining American popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions, which he set in relation to relentless self and social examinations, both dark and delirious. Born in Detroit, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his death at the age of 77.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Over his 35 year career, Mike Kelley worked in every conceivable, exploring themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence, and post-punk politics, to which he brought both incisive critique and abundant, self-deprecating humor. Key works by Mike Kelley are on view at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. The multimedia installation “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #27 (Gospel Rocket)” (2004–05) comprises an illuminated movie sign, projected videos of a gospel choir, and a huge black rocket dressed in a lengthened version of the choir’s silky yellow vestments. It is one chapter of Kelley’s ambitious project “Day Is Done”, an expansion of the “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions”, 365 video narratives based on photographs from high school yearbooks. “Day Is Done” is a feature-length musical composed of 32 separate video chapters, included were 25 discrete yet related sculptural installations that incorporated the set pieces and props from the videos. Each section is a live-action recreation of a photograph of an activity”found in a high school yearbook. Over the years Mike Kelley has collected hundreds of such images and arranged them into rough categories. Most of the imagery is immediately recognizable as standard forms of folk entertainment: plays, follies, theme dress-up days, holiday festivities, religious spectacles, hazing rituals, etc. Such activities serve as carnivalesque disruptions of the normal school schedule, mirroring the function of such events in the broader cultural arena. “Gospel Rocket” with its glowing sign announcing a ceremonial rocket launch, attests to Kelley’s interest in the aspects of organized social behavior that merge spectacle, science, and belief. “Lenticular 15” (2007) and “Lenticular 4” (2007), are also on view.  In the late 1990s, Kelley was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, that would focus on the then-upcoming millennial change. The exhibition examined the ways in which people have imagined the future throughout history. Kelley turned to Superman comics, specifically the superhero’s birthplace, Kandor. Though Kandor was assumed to have been destroyed, it was actually shrunk and bottled by the villain Brainiac, then later rescued by Superman, who kept it inside a bell jar in his Fortress of Solitude. Fascinated by the tiny futuristic city, a symbol for Superman’s feelings of alienation, Kelley collected hundreds of different comic-book images of Kandor and produced large-scale glass and resin sculptures that show hybrid versions of the city, merging Bauhaus or Art Deco styles with simple boxy drawings or ambiguous scribbles. The graphically altered images of Kandor were then blown up to the same scale as the sculptures and placed in lenticular light boxes, so that the viewer’s movement could affect the appearance of the city.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 5-28/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com

Photo: Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #27 (Gospel Rocket), 2004–05, Mixed media with video projections, 228.6 × 508 × 563.9 cm, © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All rights reserved/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS)0New York. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen