Review

Destroy All Monsters & Mike Kelley

First published by Art Monthly, November 2016

Destroy All Monsters: Images, Sounds, Ephemera: A Manifesto,The Horse Hospital London 17 Sept to 15 Oct
Mike Kelley: Framed and Frame, Hauser and Wirth London 23 Sept to 19 Nov

‘What I dislike about about a lot of contemporary artists is that they want to be hipsters. They’re not willing to be fools.’ The words belong to Mike Kelley, and they form a reliably critical-pastoral, albeit uncharacteristically acerbic, epigraph to the American writer Dodie Bellamy’s 2015 collection of prose essays When The Sick Rule The World. Despite my own initial shock and sadness on learning of Kelley’s suicide in 2012, I hadn’t adequately assessed the enormity of his influence, let alone the persistent provocations his words have always presented, until I stumbled across this statement three years on.

Notoriously, Kelley took to writing about his own work as a result of the dissatisfaction he felt with the way it was written about critically by others. His many essays, interviews and exhibition notes – always brimming with knowledge snatched either from the glacial peaks of high modernism or dredged from the foetid gutters of pop trash – are searingly lucid and self-interrogative, posing direct challenges to the critical industries he feared would bungle interpretations of his thoughtful and politically nuanced works, which, despite their frequently garish, folksy or cartoon-like appearance, were often subtly nuanced explorations of abjection, institutional trauma and the miasmatic gulf separating ‘high’ from ‘low’. It was in this gulf that Kelley interrogated the aesthetic as a site of potential repression, and it was the resultant act of looking beneath sanitised exteriors – be they minimalist assemblages, school buildings, college yearbooks or fuzzy children’s toys – to the assumed murkiness beneath that characterised so much of his work. Now that he is no longer with us, the task of addressing his concerns becomes to some extent revitalised as a critical project given the common tendency of legacies to sink into the inoculating mire of historicisation and big-bucks auctioneering. For an artist whose working class background was central to his unique vision, it seems important to reiterate that the structural violence of social hierarchy underscored not only the varied motifs of his seminal works – architectural crawl-spaces (Educational Complex, 1995) and handicrafts (Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991), for example – but complicated and elucidated his geographical and professional migration from the exhausted industrial city of Detroit, through the hallowed halls of the California Institute of the Arts and on to a career as a successful jobbing artist.

Two fantastic shows held in London through October made for a valuable opportunity to assess something of this polarity. Focusing on early collaborative work with the noise band Destroy All Monsters, the Horse Hospital’s immersive exhibition ‘Images, Sounds, Ephemera: A Manifesto of Ignorance’ presented a cacophony of artefacts and film works that pulsed with morbid zombic intent. The metaphor isn’t as silly as it sounds: I’ve seen iterations of this material before, notably at Space gallery (‘Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death’ co-curated by James Hoff) back in 2010, and I’m convinced it moves with the brainless autonomy of a mutant organism generating sprawling collage-scapes wherever it appears. In the dark sub-level of the Bloomsbury gallery-cum-gig space, the amalgamated screenprints, flyers, photo-assemblages and banners produced by Jim Shaw, Carey Loren, Niagra and Kelley seemed more at home than ever. Formed at a house party in 1973 and taking their name from a Japanese Kaiju (monster) movie, Destroy All Monsters channelled the otherworldliness of psychedelia, Sun Ra, George Clinton and B-movies into absurdist records, wobbly videos and a self-published magazine, all inflected with the brash DIY ethos that would later come to characterise punk rock. Loren has carried the torch of the band’s output since its original line-up disbanded in 1976 and he makes for a wonderful interlocutor of the collective’s intentions, highlighting the influence of poet and anti-racist White Panther activist John Sinclair and the turbulent cultural milieu of Detroit in a discussion on the show’s opening night with artist Edwin Pouncey. This influence has been elaborated previously in an exhibition curated by Loren for the same venue, which focused on the Detroit Artist’s Workshop, a collective and gallery co-op founded in the mid 1960s at Wayne State University, which produced books, journals, workshops and ephemera that would set the pace of production for Loren, Kelley and Shaw. This goes some way to explain why the work at the Horse Hospital was literally spilling from the walls in a series of suitably haphazard displays while Loren’s films, a kind of budget home-video approximation of the heady theatre of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith, played on monitors around the room. If the ‘ignorance’ of the show’s title implied a celebratory juvenile lack of awareness of the supposed decorum of fine art and its modes of display, this ramshackle arrangement seemed equally suggestive of the dark, psychic niches of the rampant adolescent imagination: accumulative, obsessive and steeped in the generative mire of trash culture.

Running simultaneously at Hauser and Wirth was a monumental display of Kelley’s Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction ‘Chinatown Wishing Well’ Built by Mike Kelley after ‘Miniature Reproduction “Seven Star Cavern” Built by Prof. H.K. Lu’), 1999. I have been poring over photographs of this huge, biomorphic faux concrete folly for years and to see it displayed so simply in a show devoted to its themes and peculiar backstory really foregrounded the work’s physical and conceptual gravity. The premise is simple enough: Kelley rebuilt a public monument, the provenance of which was debatable but the location of which (Chinatown, LA) continues to raise questions about multicultural integration, the manner in which expressions of diasporic community are permissible within US society, and how such locations become points of refraction where cultures ‘clash and intermix’. While common prejudice might have recently shifted its focus from the migration of the Chinese to a localised border-anxiety focused on Mexico, Kelley’s simple act of removing the wishing well from its gated enclosure and exhibiting both components separately raises issues around the frame, both as a technique of value-attribution and as an isolating, protective barrier. A crawl-space cut into the base of the monument contained a mattress, lubricant and condoms, an elaboration of the artist’s continued interest in the spatialisation of the unconscious in which the recesses of subconscious desire find physical form as overspills in the architectural fabric of his sculptural installations. Of particular interest in this show is an archival display focusing on Kelley’s working method, loose sketches reminiscent of the formless Garbage Drawings, 1988, in which some of his playful research techniques are elaborated. ‘Dumpling method’, one annotation reads, ‘wet concrete dropped into a tub of boiling water.’

Kelley frequently emulated the figure of the janitor, a role his father had performed. It provided a means by which he could demonstrate ‘the matter out of place’ disjunction a working class subject might feel as they passed through the ‘validating’ institutional apparatuses of art school and exhibition. As his work moves into a period of retrospective consideration and market exclusivity, shows such as these increasingly constellate both the psychological and political tensions that were always inherent in his work. The Horse Hospital is a threatened community space, Hauser and Wirth is a blue-chip gallery. Taking Kelley’s lead, we would do well to read such venues as subdivisions of a cultural psyche in which dormant energies might bubble up, joyfully dirtying and necessarily complicating his legacy.