Emily Harding, our favourite exhibition goer, is back for another exhibition discussion. Along with art writer and curator Joana P. R. Neves, they visit beloved and prematurely deceased American contemporary artist Mike Kelley’s survey exhibition at Tate Modern. Is this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition an accurate experience of his work? What part did his upbringing and irreverent personality play in his work and in his disappearance (Kelley died by suicide)?
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Why was anarchist and punk teenage and later iconoclastic artist fixated on entertainment and youth cultural markers? What role did CalArts play in his artistic career and, by the same token, what is, exactly, the history of CalArts? Did you know it was connected to Walt Disney? From here, the connection between fiction, entertainment, film and life was, it seems, fated. Does this retrospective exhibition, titled “Ghost and Spirit”, connect all these dots?
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For more information: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/mike-kelley-ghost-and-spirit
For more about Mike Kelley: https://mikekelleyfoundation.org/grants/overview
Music: Sarturn
Did the episode stir Art Wonderment memories? Share them via text or voice message.
Created & Hosted by Dr. Joana P. R. Neves, art curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary art field. Artistic director of Drawing Now Paris since 2018, she has worked across the industry, from the art market to education. She co-launched the art residency and project space Worlding in 2020. Exhibitionistas’ first year offered exhibition discussions with guest co-host Emily Harding; organically, it grew into a more experimental show exploring art topics, stories and interviews complemented by Joana’s publication Art Thinkosaurus on Substack. She champions ‘Art Wonderment’s’ embrace of complexity against the lure of ready-made opinions. A polyglot, she grew up in Lisbon, studied and lived in Paris, to finally settle in London with her artist husband, four children and two cats.
Find us:
On Instagram – @exhibitionistas_podcast
On Substack (NEWSLETTER: sign up!): Art Thinkosaurus > Exhibitionistas Files
Online: www.exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Do you want to be a guest on Art Etiquette? Reach out: joana@exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Copyright: Joana P. R. Neves, 2024.
00:00:10
Hello and welcome back to Exhibitionist.
00:00:12
Is Emily here? So glad you could make it today.
00:00:15
And I'm so glad to be here. It's really nice to plug back in
00:00:20
to these conversations with Joanna and yourselves, and this
00:00:23
one is no exception. So today we're looking at Mike
00:00:27
Kelly. He's an American artist who
00:00:31
really broke a lot of molds and had a really fascinating career.
00:00:37
There is no lack of opinions in this episode, so do be warned.
00:00:42
There's some feelings about Mike Kelly and I think some
00:00:47
interesting perspectives to share.
00:00:49
So I hope that you enjoy the episode.
00:00:51
Thanks so much for listening. Oh, and I wanted to mention, if
00:00:55
you haven't noticed already, you might have seen that we have a
00:00:58
Patreon account. Check it out in the show notes.
00:01:01
Thank you so much. We have folks signing up already
00:01:04
and I can't tell you how much it means to us that you are signing
00:01:10
up to Patreon giving us a few quid.
00:01:12
It just means the world to us. So if you want to check that out
00:01:15
in the show notes, please do so. Enjoy the episode.
00:01:31
Welcome back to Exhibition Estas.
00:01:33
This is the podcast where we go to contemporary art exhibitions
00:01:37
and have a good chat about them. Do you like the ideas and
00:01:41
idiosyncrasies of contemporary art?
00:01:43
Great, you are in the right place if you're a regular
00:01:47
listener. Thank you for coming back.
00:01:48
It's so nice to have you here. And if you're new around here,
00:01:52
I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition goer.
00:01:55
I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, an art curator and writer, and as Emily
00:02:00
said, we visit solo exhibitions so that you have to also that
00:02:05
you visit them vicariously through us.
00:02:07
Just a quick reminder to go to our Instagram account for
00:02:10
visuals. If you're not familiar with the
00:02:12
artist or the exhibition, it might make the episode even.
00:02:16
More enjoyable. Yeah, Agreed.
00:02:19
Agreed. And you put some great stuff up
00:02:21
there, Joanna, you are the maestro of the of the social
00:02:25
media account. And there's, I mean, I have to
00:02:27
say, I love like kind of wandering through the exhibition
00:02:30
again on Instagram. It's really nice.
00:02:33
What is the artist we're exploring this time?
00:02:35
Emily in this. Episode It's a biggie.
00:02:38
It's a biggie. So this week we're examining
00:02:40
Mike Kelly. He's an American artist whose
00:02:42
work involved drawing video, sound objects, textile, banners,
00:02:46
collage, video, photography and music.
00:02:49
Kind of sound, really. It's kind of expansion of the
00:02:53
word, maybe. But we're exploring his work
00:02:56
through the lens of his exhibition Ghost and Spirit.
00:03:00
That's on view at the Tate Modern until the 9th of March
00:03:02
2025. S Kelly was born just outside
00:03:05
Detroit, A fellow Midwesterner just like myself, which I like.
00:03:08
Yeah. Yeah.
00:03:10
And so he was born just outside of Detroit in 1954 to a white
00:03:15
working class Roman Catholic family.
00:03:18
His father was a janitor in the public school system, and his
00:03:21
mom was a cook for the executive board room at the Ford Motor
00:03:26
Company. So Detroit, I mean, those of you
00:03:30
some might know was Motor City and you know, kind of those big,
00:03:34
you know, car companies having a job like that, I'm sure that
00:03:38
held a little bit of status. I mean, it's still working
00:03:40
class, but that would have been a very good job to get for sure.
00:03:45
So there isn't a ton of information about his formative
00:03:49
years. I mean, when I was at the Tait
00:03:51
Modern in the bookshop, I was like, what else do you got?
00:03:55
And, you know, kind of what they had, it was really limited to
00:03:59
the exhibition catalogue. So this could likely be by
00:04:04
design, as he often played into myths about himself.
00:04:07
You know, this kind of myth making is not that uncommon
00:04:10
among artists. Jack White, Meg White, they were
00:04:13
wilfully ambiguous. I know we got back there to a
00:04:17
Jack White reference. I know.
00:04:19
It's yes. It's been too long.
00:04:21
It's been too. Long, too long.
00:04:23
We promised. We promised our listeners that
00:04:25
Chuck White would make an appearance ever so often, and
00:04:28
you know, we've been neglecting him.
00:04:30
Yeah. Hello, Jack.
00:04:31
You're listening, I'm sure. Yeah.
00:04:34
So, I mean, so they were wilfully ambiguous about their
00:04:36
relationship for years. I mean, I remember reading,
00:04:39
Yeah, about Bob Dylan kind of manufacturing.
00:04:42
Oh yes. Right, like about his
00:04:45
autobiography and stuff like that.
00:04:47
So and I mean, look, you know, this happens all the time.
00:04:51
So that's that's not that scandalous really, but.
00:04:55
I have found a few things. I mean, from from his childhood
00:04:59
and teenage years. So if you listen to interviews
00:05:02
once in a while, he will make a reference.
00:05:04
So apparently he described himself as being a bookworm.
00:05:08
And when the interviewer asked him, so, oh, did your parents
00:05:12
encourage you know, your your interest in culture and in
00:05:16
books. He had this kind of abrasive
00:05:20
answer, you know, like that was seen as something not to do.
00:05:26
And so to annoy his dad, he said he was, you know, weird and
00:05:32
doing interested in weird stuff. He took up embroidery, for
00:05:35
example, or sewing, you know. So there must have been a part
00:05:39
of him that really rebelled against the very typical
00:05:43
American family periods, you know, And he did have that
00:05:48
rebellious streak in him, but that threw him.
00:05:53
There was a nerdy rebellious streak there since the
00:05:56
beginning, apparently. And that makes sense.
00:05:59
I mean, you know, the 50s in America were a very special
00:06:03
time. You know, it's like those cookie
00:06:05
cutter houses. The suburbs were just exploding,
00:06:08
you know, kind of having this formulaic life, you know, it's
00:06:11
really held in high esteem and you're right on the cusp of the
00:06:16
counterculture of the 60s that is going to be exploding and
00:06:19
exploding in. Detroit In Detroit, yeah.
00:06:22
And huge, huge scene for the counterculture, which, you know,
00:06:25
we'll certainly get to. But so you're right.
00:06:28
Nevertheless, the history and autobiography emerge in all 40
00:06:33
years of his artwork that he produced.
00:06:35
You can see that his identities of being a white male of Irish
00:06:40
heritage, middle, well kind of working class I guess more than
00:06:43
middle class, raised Roman Catholic, all of these.
00:06:48
Right. But the new Tory leader just
00:06:50
said that you can become working class if you're middle class if
00:06:54
you work at McDonald's, so. What?
00:06:57
Did you not hear that I? Didn't hear this.
00:06:59
No, I saw this whiz by on Instagram, this real boy.
00:07:02
She's like, well, I was born middle class, you know?
00:07:05
But I worked at McDonald's at 16, so I became working class.
00:07:13
Oh my. God.
00:07:15
Sometimes. Oh my God, no clue.
00:07:19
No clue, woman. Anyway, that's a whole other
00:07:22
rant, isn't? It and this was someone on
00:07:24
Instagram replying and saying well I am working class but I do
00:07:28
buy my stuff at Sephora so I guess technically I'm middle
00:07:30
class now. Yeah, exactly.
00:07:33
Yeah, but I did a shop at Waitrose, so I guess I'm.
00:07:36
Coming, she said. Waitrose.
00:07:37
Sorry, it's not Sephora. I don't know why my mind went to
00:07:39
Sephora. Yeah, it's probably a lipstick.
00:07:42
Yeah, it's my lipstick. Yeah, I have lipstick on today,
00:07:45
people, and it's throwing us off.
00:07:46
I just. Want to It's throwing us off.
00:07:49
But yeah, so so that his working class heritage had a huge
00:07:54
influence. And so these were through lines,
00:07:56
through his work that often married ideas of ritual.
00:08:01
So his identity was married with ideas of ritual.
00:08:06
He had lots of work that revolves around high school
00:08:09
because of the ritual. And obviously Roman Catholic,
00:08:12
you know, kind of stuff played into that his, you know, ideas
00:08:16
of memory and and popular culture, but kind of really
00:08:20
subculture and counterculture as well played in with these
00:08:25
identities that he had, you know, of himself.
00:08:28
He played, he played in that thin line between culture and
00:08:33
reality, which I think it's really, really important for
00:08:37
now. Culture as reality, Yeah, I
00:08:40
guess. Yeah, I think that's right.
00:08:42
Yeah, I think that's a much better way to put it because
00:08:44
what we see and consume and how we put ourselves in that and
00:08:50
then how we reflect that back to the culture.
00:08:52
Yeah. Is a, is a, is a huge thing in
00:08:55
his work. But and these were the times
00:08:57
where culture came through television, yeah, where that we
00:09:01
don't have now. So everyone was watching the
00:09:03
same thing. And you can see how Kelly was
00:09:06
very aware of that opium of the people, which is not no longer
00:09:12
religion. And he says so himself.
00:09:14
It's entertainment. And so he was very aware of this
00:09:18
idea of entertainment that kind of gets to you, like you're
00:09:22
saying, goes under your skin, comes out somehow and is really
00:09:27
part of you. And therefore the
00:09:29
counterculture. It's something that we have a
00:09:32
hard time explaining the young guns now because it's it really
00:09:37
is a sort of a parallel balance where you kind of try to know at
00:09:43
this prevalent big empire of entertainment through television
00:09:49
and radio back in the day. Yeah, we don't have those
00:09:52
monocultural moments anymore, but yeah, so Detroit is a huge
00:09:56
Music City. And, you know, when D is sort of
00:09:59
coming of age, I mean, it still is, obviously, but it was giving
00:10:03
birth to monumental acts at the time.
00:10:06
I mean the Stooges raw, unadulterated.
00:10:10
One of my favorites so I love them.
00:10:13
Yes, yes, yes, NC 5. Piggy Pop.
00:10:16
Yeah, totally. I mean, so it's super
00:10:18
countercultural influences are going on at the time.
00:10:22
I get the sense that Kelly was cool enough and in touch enough
00:10:25
to, you know, feel it and experience it.
00:10:28
So so here's Kelly. He's a long haired teen.
00:10:31
He's marinated in religion and also this counterculture.
00:10:35
So what does he do? He starts a noise band aptly
00:10:38
call Destroy All Monsters. You love that.
00:10:41
That's such like a teenage, you know, like, you know, kind of
00:10:44
thing. But the band was a mix of punk,
00:10:47
psychedelic and Hard Rock. And importantly for Kelly, there
00:10:51
was a real performance art aspect to the band.
00:10:55
So he was there, he was one of the founding members.
00:10:58
He was there for I think the first three years with them.
00:11:01
And you can listen to some of their stuff online and I
00:11:04
guarantee you it is not going to be an easy listening experience.
00:11:07
I mean, I, I floated around some of it and it was like I couldn't
00:11:10
quite hang there for that long. But you know, you appreciate the
00:11:15
the energy. It was a performative
00:11:17
experience. You had to be there live.
00:11:20
I agree it's not. Really something, I mean, for me
00:11:23
personally, some of these punk bands are hard to listen to on
00:11:29
your iPhone. I mean, that's not what they're
00:11:32
for. Yeah, totally.
00:11:34
Performance art obviously is in the exhibition which we'll talk
00:11:37
about. And I think that some
00:11:40
exhibitions like the Marina Abramovic 1, you know, they
00:11:44
bring that performance alive in a very unique way.
00:11:47
And and you know, not all of them do, but so a little.
00:11:53
Foreshadowing, please? Maybe.
00:11:56
Yeah. Maybe that was a bit of a
00:11:58
tidbit. So Kelly went to the University
00:12:03
of Michigan and in 1976 enrolled in the MFA program at Cal Arts.
00:12:10
And a couple of things kind of struck me about his education.
00:12:14
First, the University of Michigan's like a 40 minute
00:12:16
drive from his family home. And he's like, he just seems
00:12:21
like such a rebellious character.
00:12:23
And and granted, he's, you know, he's not moving far from
00:12:27
Detroit, which is certainly a centre that had a cultural
00:12:31
centre that had a lot to offer him.
00:12:33
So in that sense, you could say that he's not moving far from
00:12:36
Detroit And that was really, you know, kind of his gravitational
00:12:39
pull. But also, you know, I kind of
00:12:41
had this image of people at that time of really just chucking
00:12:44
themselves out into the world. And, you know, if you're from
00:12:47
the Midwest, you go to the coasts, right?
00:12:49
It's like that's. Oh, I see.
00:12:51
Yeah, that's interesting that you say that, because I have no
00:12:53
idea how the culture was. Yeah.
00:12:55
And he stays there. He stays split near the family
00:12:59
home. Yeah.
00:12:59
Yeah, yeah. But and then and then and then
00:13:03
also it's like, you know, kind of reflecting on on Mike Kelly
00:13:07
and, you know, obviously seeing the exhibition, the fact that he
00:13:10
entered an MFA program, I think that's it feels like a really
00:13:14
establishment move, you know, from someone who is in a noise
00:13:18
band, you know, I mean, and that's that I find that really
00:13:22
interesting. I mean, you can't imagine Iggy
00:13:24
Pop going to Juilliard. I think you're hitting the nail
00:13:27
on the head there because that's, I think for me is a real
00:13:32
contradiction in this artist whereby he's very rebellious and
00:13:38
at the same time he's very, very cultured and he's interested in
00:13:42
the culture and the highbrow culture.
00:13:45
He puts himself out there and, and he becomes part of sort of
00:13:49
the establishment of contemporary art, you know, in
00:13:52
the 80s and 90s and and and so forth.
00:13:55
So yeah, yeah, that's that's really him, I think.
00:13:58
And yeah, and I mean, you know, it's not even that it's, you
00:14:01
know, a bad choice by any stretch.
00:14:04
It just struck me as kind of counterintuitive from what I
00:14:07
know about him. And obviously I there's a lot
00:14:09
for me to learn, but I mean, and they're good ones, you know, I
00:14:12
mean, so the Cal Art scene in the 70s, you got the body art
00:14:17
and feminist practice in part thanks to Julie Chicago, Judy
00:14:21
Chicago, rather God lover. If you haven't listened to that
00:14:24
episode, go back and check it out.
00:14:26
She had an incredible exhibition at the Serpentine in London not
00:14:31
so long ago that we made an episode about.
00:14:34
So, so both, you know, this body art and this feminist practice,
00:14:40
we're offering a counterbalance to sort of formal painting and
00:14:45
sculpture at the time. So you can see his attraction to
00:14:47
that from that standpoint. So I want to play a little
00:14:52
music. Oh cool.
00:14:54
Great. Because I think that this is how
00:14:58
I encountered Kelly. But I think a lot of our
00:15:01
listeners too, who are from our generation.
00:15:04
So this is dirty by Sonic Youth. I could never forget you.
00:15:23
Sing it, girl. Listen, I love this and I
00:15:30
remember discovering this album and then Goo and thinking how
00:15:35
perfect the covers were. Oh, for sure.
00:15:39
You know, not knowing at all it was my Kelly and how incredible
00:15:43
the music was. The texts were amazing.
00:15:46
Don't touch my breasts. I just want to go to my desk.
00:15:49
Brilliant, you know, sung in the monotone and scratchy voice of
00:15:55
Kim Gordon, at least some of the songs and the cover, you know,
00:15:59
an orange plushie that has seen better days.
00:16:02
You know, that looks like an alien for Dirty, right?
00:16:05
And then the drawing of a cool couple fleeing.
00:16:08
That was in fact I found out recently David and Maura Smith
00:16:12
who reported the most killers to the police, which is a second
00:16:15
reference in this podcast of this horrendous thing for the
00:16:19
album Goo. So these were made by Mike
00:16:21
Kelly. Just like the Black Flag Famous
00:16:25
3 chunky black line symbol was drawn by Raymond Pettibone.
00:16:30
It was Kelly. Hey.
00:16:32
Yeah, so the Black Flag is a reference to an anarchist
00:16:36
sympathies of the band and Kelly at the time as well, it seems
00:16:39
so, so. OK, so this is the 90s Nineteen
00:16:43
92 Dirty the album came out. It's a long way from 1976 when
00:16:50
he landed in Cal Arts after having studied with a lot of as
00:16:55
per his description, post war Greenbergian formalist teachers
00:17:01
that he was not super fond of Greenbergian.
00:17:04
What's Greenbergian? Oh, you don't remember Emily.
00:17:07
We talked about Greenberg in the Guston episode.
00:17:12
He was a very, very revered critic who defined, you know,
00:17:18
the painting movement that was inspired by what they call
00:17:23
European art in America. That gave birth to the abstract
00:17:29
expressionists movement and theorized painting as being an
00:17:34
autonomous space that was about painting itself very much into
00:17:41
abstraction. And that was kind of the
00:17:44
inheritance of this generation, but also the dread because it
00:17:49
was becoming, as we saw with Gustin, lots of painters were
00:17:53
kind of coming out of it, you know, kind of stretching out of
00:17:56
this very dogmatic way of creating art.
00:18:01
But the art schools are always kind of in a sudden delay.
00:18:04
So they inherit these dogmatisms quite, if you, you know, quite
00:18:08
often and still today, and then impose them on the students.
00:18:11
So the story was very different at Cal Arts, which was a very
00:18:15
strange and different school. I don't know.
00:18:17
I didn't know this, so I'm going to put this out there.
00:18:19
So Cal Arts was Walt Disney's dream project, and it's Walt
00:18:24
Disney, the Walt Disney of Mickey Mouse.
00:18:27
Yes. That was his dream project.
00:18:30
Dream project. That was he had a dream project
00:18:32
of Disneyland and of Cal Arts. Exactly, and apparently Cal Arts
00:18:39
was like AV dream project. He wanted to create a school
00:18:44
with working artists where you could learn your crafts in a
00:18:50
cross disciplinary way and where teaching would be an all
00:18:55
immersive operation with artists were actually creating and being
00:19:00
paid for their craft. From what I understood, there's
00:19:04
a lot of urban myths about Calarts at the time, so I'm not
00:19:07
going to perpetuate those. But it was a weird thing that
00:19:14
was created by Walt Disney and his brother Roy.
00:19:19
So in 1961 they merged the Schwinnard Art Institute and the
00:19:24
Los Angeles Conservatory of Music.
00:19:27
And in 1970, Calart opened its doors in Santa Clarita Valley.
00:19:33
So this is quite incredible and it's and explains why Judy
00:19:37
Chicago, when she got there, she was like, I want to do women's
00:19:40
studies, you know, for the first time ever in any university.
00:19:43
And they were like, sure, let's do this.
00:19:45
They were open to all novelties. She was an artist.
00:19:50
She was showing her work and she had a voice and she could go
00:19:53
there and, and do so. So I'm just going to read the
00:19:57
last paragraph of the Callots About Us page.
00:20:02
In the half century since then, successive generations of
00:20:05
innovators from Calarts have set the leading edge of contemporary
00:20:10
artistic practice, from conceptualism, feminist art and
00:20:14
design, video and Computer Music in the Institute's early years
00:20:19
to the Disney Renaissance, Pixar Revolution, and SpongeBob.
00:20:23
From interdisciplinary performance and digital design
00:20:27
to the latest directions in music, AI and interactive media,
00:20:31
hybrid arts, whatever that means, and immersive
00:20:34
experiences. So they still have that, or they
00:20:38
want to claim that edge for themselves.
00:20:40
So if listeners, any of you out there have been to Call Arts
00:20:43
recently right back, I'm really curious to know your about your
00:20:47
experiences. Wow, I had no idea.
00:20:50
It's crazy, right? So in 1976, the feminist studies
00:20:54
were ripe as well as a sort of Viennese type of performance of,
00:21:01
you know, with an embodied violent, bloody actions that the
00:21:05
public perhaps not only witnessed but endured as it
00:21:08
were. And meanwhile the women's
00:21:11
building was thriving and became a space to experiment away from
00:21:15
the male oriented performance of the time.
00:21:19
You know, Vito Akanshi was a teacher there.
00:21:21
So, you know, he very much brought the performance aspect
00:21:24
to it. So this is something I took from
00:21:27
an interview that is in the catalogue that they did for the
00:21:32
catalogue of the exhibition with Suzanne Lacey, who was one of
00:21:36
Judy Chicago's students, and he became a very established
00:21:39
performance artist. And the interview is very
00:21:42
interesting. I'm not going to disclose it
00:21:44
right away, but it's really interesting what she says about,
00:21:47
you know, Kelly in particular. So this was no longer the 60s
00:21:52
where women were told to stay at home more systematically, which
00:21:55
is exactly what she says. It was a period of liberation
00:21:58
for quite a few people, not only in terms of gender, so not only
00:22:02
the women, but also in terms of ethnicity.
00:22:04
So we're coming to grips with lots of questions that still
00:22:08
haunt us today in the United States.
00:22:11
That's not mentioned. The unmentionable.
00:22:14
Yes. Yeah, anyway, so Kelly arrived
00:22:21
also at a time where formalism and painting were being disputed
00:22:25
by his teachers, so very happy to free himself from that green
00:22:30
Bergen formalism. He had John Baldessari as a
00:22:34
teacher, for example. He was very close to him.
00:22:37
So Baldessari famously cremated his paintings and baked them
00:22:41
into cookies. And although that sounds funny.
00:22:45
Oh my God. You can imagine what it means.
00:22:49
He burned years of his practice. He grouped all his paintings
00:22:53
together, burnt them all, made cookies out of them, put them in
00:22:58
a jar and and show them. This was in 1970 and in 1971 he
00:23:04
also wrote I will not make more boring art.
00:23:09
And I think he made his students write that on the wall as a sort
00:23:13
of a workshopping kind of thing going on.
00:23:16
So he proceeded to make text and photography based work and to be
00:23:19
incredibly successful at that. There was another artist who I
00:23:25
adore, I really like. I mean, part of my thesis is on
00:23:28
him. Douglas Hubler.
00:23:31
He was at the time working on his shift towards more
00:23:35
conceptual arts. And he famously said, quote, the
00:23:39
world is full of objects, more or less interesting.
00:23:43
I do not wish to add any more. I prefer simply to state the
00:23:48
existence of things in terms of time and place, UN quote.
00:23:53
So this was very important at the time.
00:23:57
So use photography, drawing and text to extend the image through
00:24:01
human imagination. Such as a work from 1970, which
00:24:06
is a single straight vertical line on the center of the paper.
00:24:10
So this was sometimes in catalogues, sometimes in
00:24:13
exhibitions. So central vertical straight
00:24:17
line in the centre of the paper with a sentence below saying
00:24:21
quote the line above is rotating on its axis at the speed of 1
00:24:27
revolution a day UN quote. So this was the context as well
00:24:32
where Lucy Leopard had published her Seminole book like this is
00:24:37
was really, really important book at the time called the
00:24:41
dematerialization of the Art object from 1966 to 1972, thus
00:24:48
commencing a irritating trend of exhibition, weird exhibition
00:24:54
timelines, which is really irritating to me.
00:24:56
But mine, this was the timeline she was writing about and it had
00:25:00
a huge impact on on the conception of art as an
00:25:03
immaterial thing. So if the culture at Cal Arts
00:25:07
was subversive, so welcome thing for Mike Kelly to come to, it
00:25:11
was still reductive in terms of what the art object could be.
00:25:15
So it was another kind of dogmatism for Kelly, with the
00:25:19
exception of performance arts, which was dear to Kelly and
00:25:23
which he seemed to have absorbed through anarchy and punk.
00:25:28
So Deira, his his teachers were to him.
00:25:31
He seemed to be unconvinced by the conceptual nature of their
00:25:36
teaching. So still, again, he was in a
00:25:39
context where he wasn't that happy with a second kind of
00:25:44
dogmatism that was deemed incredibly groundbreaking in the
00:25:48
art world still today. You know, I told you about the
00:25:51
performance drawing. You know, there's still,
00:25:54
there's, there's a, there's a, there's an acceptance that you
00:25:57
can take the public to, but conceptual arts will probably
00:26:02
for a long time still be too much this idea that the art
00:26:06
object doesn't have to exist, as Solowitz said.
00:26:09
So Solowitz sold his wool drawings as diagrams.
00:26:12
So you specifically bought 2 pieces of paper.
00:26:15
One was a diagram for the installation of the the wall
00:26:18
drawing. He did many, many wool drawings
00:26:22
that you could make yourself so the owner of the drawing could
00:26:26
make the drawing themselves. So it was.
00:26:30
And then so you have the diagram and you have the certificate
00:26:33
with the title, with the, the dates, the materials that needed
00:26:38
to be used. So when you, you know, spent a
00:26:42
lot of money, let's say on a piece of work, all you had was a
00:26:48
binder with two 2 sheets of paper.
00:26:50
So that that's difficult to accept.
00:26:53
But it was, I must say, not to demonize conceptual art.
00:26:57
One of the movements that most that had the most impact on me
00:27:00
because I came to art through literature.
00:27:04
Literature was my first love, and poetry, experimental poetry.
00:27:08
And then seeing that and being in a country where you didn't
00:27:11
have access to a lot of arts that you read about, conceptual
00:27:16
art can travel really well. You can make it yourself.
00:27:18
You can make a solar width in your own room.
00:27:21
And by the way, in Portugal we have a solar width in the
00:27:23
restaurant that I'm not going to name, and they don't have the
00:27:26
certificate for it. And it's a conundrum.
00:27:29
Is it a solo wit? So each time we have dinner
00:27:31
there, there's these conversations and there's a
00:27:34
colleague of mine who says it is not a solo wit.
00:27:37
It doesn't have a certificate. So it is not it is not one.
00:27:40
I mean, yeah, it's just Yoko Ono keeps popping into my mind.
00:27:44
And yes, she started all this space one of the people.
00:27:47
The space that Mike Kelly's exhibition is in is the exact
00:27:52
space that Yoko Ono's exhibition was in in the Tate Modern.
00:27:57
And there's just so the Venn diagram has a very substantial
00:28:02
chunky middle of overlap there, doesn't it?
00:28:04
After the break, we can look at how this incredible recipe
00:28:10
cooked up, what is Mike Kelly and is, you know, demonstrated
00:28:15
throughout the exhibition because he explodes onto the
00:28:18
scene. Like he takes all of it and just
00:28:22
does his very own thing with the interpretations of of all that
00:28:28
he's experienced at Calarts and before.
00:28:30
He's already doing it. I mean, you know, I don't want
00:28:32
to say that he isn't already doing it before he even gets to
00:28:36
Cal Arts. He is for sure is.
00:28:38
For sure, but. But he comes out of Cal Arts
00:28:41
with, you know, a lot of these ideas that are just bursting
00:28:46
forth from his own, from his own art.
00:28:49
So more on that after break. OK, so we're back to the
00:29:01
cacophony of Mike Kelly's exhibition, which is curated by
00:29:05
Catherine Wood, Director of Program, Fiantan Moran, Curator
00:29:09
of International Art, and Beatrice Garcia Velasco,
00:29:13
Assistant Curator of International Art at the Tate.
00:29:17
And as soon as you arrive at the entrance of the exhibition
00:29:22
space, there's already quite a lot going on.
00:29:25
There's a very loud dark pink colour on the wall.
00:29:29
The text is written in white with my Kelly and big letters
00:29:34
and the the name of the exhibition is Ghost and Spirit.
00:29:39
And there's a little text that by my Kelly, which looks a bit
00:29:44
like a sort of a poem that they took out from his writings.
00:29:47
And it says a ghost is someone who disappears, an empty
00:29:51
concept. A spirit is a memory.
00:29:55
Think the spirit of something. It's not there, but it is is
00:30:00
what remains. It has a lingering influence.
00:30:05
I am a ghost. I have disappeared.
00:30:08
I've disappeared but survive in others.
00:30:10
Others are reflections there for the purpose of proving my
00:30:14
existence. What do you make of this, Emily?
00:30:18
Knowing that Kelly died by suicide at the age of 57.
00:30:22
You know, in terms of who he was at it as an artist.
00:30:25
It reminds me actually, if I can read something I just was
00:30:30
reminded of in the catalogue, I think it kind of speaks to this
00:30:34
point. So this is a quote from the
00:30:36
exhibition catalogue. This is a quote from Mike Kelly.
00:30:39
I didn't feel connected in any way to my family, to my country
00:30:42
or to reality for that matter. The world seemed to me a media
00:30:46
facade, an all history of fiction, a pack of lies.
00:30:49
I was experiencing, I think, what has come to be known as the
00:30:54
postmodern condition, a form of alienation quite different from
00:30:59
post war existentialism because it lacks any historical sense
00:31:03
and there's no notion of a truth that has been lost.
00:31:07
I mean, yeah, right. It's like he does.
00:31:10
He feels himself not a part of history, not a part of culture,
00:31:16
just very ghost like. I mean, it really hammers home
00:31:23
to me you know what you've just read and why this exhibition is
00:31:28
so aptly named. You can see that it was a
00:31:31
preoccupation of the artist, this idea of haunting culture
00:31:35
being haunted by culture, but also the artist as someone who
00:31:39
has the duty to be a haunting presence within that culture and
00:31:46
through that culture, as if everything anyway is going to
00:31:51
die. Everything you value now is
00:31:54
going to die. And one of my questions, as I
00:31:58
was going to see the exhibition, was how did this all?
00:32:03
How is this all perceived now, this culture, this, you know, I
00:32:06
was thinking of Sonic Youth. I was thinking of Stooges.
00:32:10
How is this all perceived now, especially by the younger
00:32:13
generation? And as I got in, I thought this
00:32:16
is an exhibition for my 18 year old son, Buffalo New for sure.
00:32:21
And you know, of course his, he's studying game art at ual.
00:32:25
And this very good course. I'm, I'm really in awe of them
00:32:30
because they did take them to the Tate and they did take them
00:32:33
to see the My Kelly exhibition. And it's interesting because
00:32:37
apparently they all reacted really negatively.
00:32:40
It didn't. He connected a lot.
00:32:42
He loved, you know, the I can maybe talk about it later, what
00:32:47
he loved and what he didn't connect to.
00:32:48
But it was interesting to listen to him and to see that one of
00:32:52
the things that he really, really loved was a dark humor.
00:32:56
Yeah, but there's a lot of it. And there's a lot of it.
00:32:59
And it's something of that age, isn't it?
00:33:02
I mean, you are so brave and you are so abrasive when you're in
00:33:06
your teens, not even yet in your 20s.
00:33:10
And everything is so distant still.
00:33:12
You know, the responsibilities the And that's exactly the
00:33:17
first, the theme of especially the first maybe probably all the
00:33:22
exhibition is about adolescence or around adolescence, but the
00:33:25
first room really very specifically talks about
00:33:28
adolescence, which is kind of like a liminal state between
00:33:31
childhood and and your first adult years.
00:33:35
So, so just to kind of step back for a second, so the exhibition,
00:33:39
so it's, it's held in the Tate Modern in the same rooms that
00:33:42
Yoko Ono had her exhibition for many months.
00:33:46
So I guess that's about kind of give or take 5-6 rooms.
00:33:51
It really brings you through his art, his trajectory more or less
00:33:57
chronologically. Cacophony is exactly the right
00:34:00
word here. The video is from different
00:34:03
rooms and the audio from that, and you hear other sort of
00:34:07
overlaid audio. Some his music is available in
00:34:11
different bits. And the the second to last room
00:34:15
is just an insane feast for the senses.
00:34:19
I'm going to say Feast for the senses, just for lack of a
00:34:22
better term. The first work that you see as
00:34:25
you enter the exhibition is, I think is one of my favourites.
00:34:29
It's called Personality Crisis and it's from 1982 and it's, as
00:34:36
someone describes in the catalogue aptly, it is that
00:34:41
moment in your life when you're a teen.
00:34:44
Well, for us, I think it's the passport when you have to, or
00:34:47
your identity card and you have to find your signature.
00:34:50
And I remember being told and telling my children afterwards,
00:34:54
you have to stick to this signature all throughout, you
00:34:57
know, because this is your identity.
00:35:00
And that's what allows the borders and people who work at
00:35:05
the border to identify you and, and the panic where you go like,
00:35:09
OK, I have to choose something. And you have 3 drawings that are
00:35:13
signatures. So you see Mike Kelly, you see
00:35:15
his name written in very different ways.
00:35:18
One of them is completely undone.
00:35:20
And I, I love that work because as someone very aptly says in
00:35:24
the catalog, I'm finally getting to it.
00:35:27
It they're huge. Usually when you, when you try
00:35:30
to perform, let's say a signature, it's something very
00:35:34
small and it's something that will be your mark.
00:35:38
And here it's planned out, it's augmented, it's quite big.
00:35:43
And it's next to another work, which is often quoted when it
00:35:48
comes to Mike Kelly, which is Mike Kelly as the poltergeist.
00:35:53
So him exploring the idea of the poltergeist and it's the
00:35:57
central, it's several drawings and the central one a little bit
00:36:02
like a church. You have like the different
00:36:05
areas and then you have the altar.
00:36:07
And then you have him photographed with cotton wool
00:36:11
coming out of his nose and his eyes rolling back into his brain
00:36:16
as if he was having a sort of an exorcism done to him, performed
00:36:21
to him, or if he as if he was being taken over by some malefic
00:36:27
power. But it's just cotton wool.
00:36:30
And he on the right, the, if I remember correctly, on the left
00:36:35
side, he talks about adolescence and about the use of the word
00:36:40
dreamy and how interesting that is because a dreamy state is
00:36:45
kind of an interstitial state. And then on the other side is
00:36:49
more of a theory of the poltergeist.
00:36:52
Am I correct in saying that? Right.
00:36:55
Yeah. And it's kind of a fun work as
00:36:58
well. And then you turn and you have a
00:37:01
whole room with memorabilia from several performances.
00:37:05
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:37:07
It's, it's just called performance related objects and
00:37:11
it's, you know, kind of from 77 to 79.
00:37:15
And apparently it was assembled in this way by him in 1998.
00:37:21
So there's like a lot of objects, yeah, that that he used
00:37:25
in performance. And I mean, obviously they're a
00:37:28
bit out of context because they're not in the performance
00:37:31
anymore. But you can see there's like
00:37:34
light fixtures on the ground. And I mean, it, it is just jam
00:37:39
packed. Like, there's just so much to
00:37:41
look at, you know, drawings, there's bits of sculpture.
00:37:45
It felt intellectually interesting, but I felt unmoved.
00:37:49
You know, I didn't, I had a hard time connecting with this room
00:37:54
positively or negatively, you know, it.
00:37:57
I just sort of feel like, oh, OK.
00:37:58
So these are things that were important to the artist
00:38:01
throughout his performative career in particular, and his
00:38:05
early career. You know, I mean, I think the
00:38:07
bit that you talked about his signature, I mean, even that to
00:38:10
me, I mean, I think I, I applaud you for sort of thinking about
00:38:14
that. I, I, you know, I mean, I, I, I
00:38:16
just sort of thought, oh, like Mike Kelly, he's, he's doing it
00:38:19
in cursive. He's doing it in these sort of
00:38:21
block letters and then it's deteriorating.
00:38:23
I was kind of like, oh, OK, interesting.
00:38:25
You know, I mean, I got more out of it by what you've just said
00:38:29
then then when I was standing in front of.
00:38:31
It I remember the first thing I thought in that room was, oh, my
00:38:36
gosh, he draws so well. His drawings are incredible.
00:38:39
Yeah, they're very close to Raymond Pettibone.
00:38:42
They were very close friends. You can see some of his
00:38:44
notebooks, but it's true that if you don't read about it, you
00:38:49
don't know what performance particularly they are parts of
00:38:52
they kind of merge into each other and don't quite know
00:38:55
exactly where it stops and where it begins.
00:38:59
And then you go into the second room that is dedicated to his
00:39:02
banners, that there's two rooms with banners.
00:39:05
So the second room and the third room and banana man, banana man,
00:39:10
banana man, he is for us. We are the banana people.
00:39:15
We are the banana women. Exactly.
00:39:17
I didn't think about that. Yeah.
00:39:19
Bless him. Yeah.
00:39:20
Banana man. Yeah.
00:39:22
So in that in in the second room.
00:39:24
I mean, for our listeners, I say this because the banana is on
00:39:28
our thumbnail and it's, yeah, of a banana peel that kind of
00:39:31
symbolizes this, the discomfort that sometimes you have when you
00:39:35
enter the art world. Yeah, and my sister just gifted
00:39:39
you. I am looking at the banana.
00:39:41
Yes, it's in. It's on my mind.
00:39:44
Yeah, yeah. But in that second room, you
00:39:47
know, you, you see in these banners that he's put together,
00:39:52
first of all, it's like the the first, the opening room is white
00:39:56
and it feels very light and bright and there is, you know,
00:39:59
the drawings and the, the, you know, wording etcetera.
00:40:05
And in the second room, it's black, like the walls are black
00:40:08
and it feels much kind of darker and heavier and.
00:40:11
There's the the first banners that you have on the right are
00:40:15
kind of focusing on some of the tropes of his Irish heritage.
00:40:20
So you have like a cloverleaf and you have a devil and skull
00:40:26
and he's kind of really playing on some of the ideas of of his
00:40:30
Irish heritage. And also school banners.
00:40:32
I think that's kind of the idea is to go back again to the to
00:40:37
the school years. There's been a lot of talk about
00:40:40
how sexual some of the works are and how gender defying they are.
00:40:47
And to be honest, I didn't see that at all.
00:40:50
And when you take a closer look into especially the Monkey
00:40:55
Island performance, which is the second part of the first room,
00:40:59
you can see that there's a lot of references to desire,
00:41:02
sexuality. So that performance was about
00:41:05
these theories that were experimented on monkeys about
00:41:09
the relationship, the bonding between the mother and the
00:41:12
child. And it's funny to me that the
00:41:16
projection that he makes becomes immediately quite sexual, which
00:41:21
I find in really bad taste. I mean, not because I'm a mom.
00:41:26
The limits between family life, sexuality, identity and freedom
00:41:33
or liberation are so tenuous and so importantly discussed and and
00:41:40
moved and and interrogated. But I just thought it was very
00:41:46
cartoonish. Yeah.
00:41:48
And, and quite, you know, and, and also I missed the
00:41:51
performance itself. So another thing to say about
00:41:53
Mike Kelly and the Banana Man performance really brings that
00:41:57
home is that and the last film you see when you leave the
00:42:01
space, there's a video of a, of a later, much later performance
00:42:06
is that he was an incredible performer.
00:42:09
That's one of the things I took. He was this nerdy kid with acne
00:42:14
scars, but also quite charismatic and and attractive
00:42:18
and and magnetic. The way he moves is incredible.
00:42:23
There's a moment in the Banana Banana Man video where the he's
00:42:28
discussing a car crash. So to simulate the car crash, he
00:42:33
blows up a balloon. Two bits of the balloon go to
00:42:36
one side and then to the other. And he's discussing what who to
00:42:41
say first in the car crash. So like pretty dark stuff.
00:42:44
But the way he moves and the way he moves his hands is like when
00:42:47
kids reenact things for you and they don't quite have this kind
00:42:53
of rigid way of moving your hands like grown-ups have.
00:42:57
They kind of bend their hands a little bit, which again gives
00:43:00
this impression of maybe being, you know, defying his gender and
00:43:06
defining the way, defying the way a man should behave and
00:43:10
move. As a performance artists, he
00:43:12
seemed to have had a very big charismatic presence and
00:43:16
personality that I found lacking in the exhibition.
00:43:20
Except in that room, Banana Man, where you have the banners,
00:43:24
where you have really funny drawings, a bit petty Bonesque.
00:43:28
And then you have like this, this fascination he had with
00:43:32
faces. Like as soon as you put two
00:43:34
holes and a curved line, you have a face.
00:43:38
And that that influenced so many artists and still does.
00:43:42
He's an artist, artist. Those are very, very funny and
00:43:46
interesting works with a lot of darkness in the background.
00:43:50
But I I found that room to be the most enjoyable.
00:43:53
There's a quote from that room that I think speaks a little bit
00:43:56
to what you're talking about in terms of, you know, kind of how
00:43:59
he moves. But he says an adolescent is a
00:44:02
dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality as far as
00:44:07
I'm concerned. So I mean, you know, an
00:44:10
adolescent is a dysfunctional adult and you can see that
00:44:14
playing out, right? And so, so much of what he does.
00:44:18
But certainly, I guess, you know, in the movements that
00:44:20
you're talking about, kind of the way he's holding his hands
00:44:22
and all that kind of stuff, You know, I, I felt much more
00:44:25
connected to him in that room, obviously, because like, as you
00:44:29
say, you could watch the film and you know, really, you know,
00:44:35
experience as much as is possible in 2D, you know, his
00:44:39
presence and charisma. And, you know, there was this
00:44:41
part of me that was just like banana man.
00:44:43
And he has like the the penis section coming out again.
00:44:48
This sort of sexual. And you know, like you know, it
00:44:53
doesn't. It didn't do much for me.
00:44:55
The next room, yeah, is the one that I loved.
00:44:59
That was my favorite room. So this is the room where you
00:45:04
see the the abandoned toys that stuffies that have been, excuse
00:45:11
me, put into collage. Like there's a very big collage
00:45:15
of it on the right hand wall in front of or sorry, just behind
00:45:18
the kind of melted candle wax structure sculpture rather.
00:45:26
And then there is off to the left there are more stuffed toy
00:45:32
sculptures. Some of them are toys hidden
00:45:35
under blankets on the floor. And you know, there's one that
00:45:40
was there's like sort of they make a giant snake kind of
00:45:43
feature that goes from the wall to the floor.
00:45:46
And then there's also the felt banners, which are sort of like
00:45:50
very much from Christendom, you know, I mean, you can imagine
00:45:54
like the felt banners that they have in in processions.
00:45:59
Yeah, exactly. But they're kind of, you know,
00:46:02
they have his own spin on them with, you know, kind of a
00:46:07
different take. On the there's one that says
00:46:09
fuck you with the the you as an asterisk asterisk.
00:46:15
And then underneath there's a sentence saying now give me a
00:46:17
treat, please. Yeah.
00:46:19
Exactly, exactly. And there's there's which.
00:46:22
Signifies how he stands in relation to adolescence
00:46:28
education, parental education, and the church, I think.
00:46:31
Yeah, exactly. There's one that says pants
00:46:35
shitter and proud. PS Jerk off.
00:46:41
Yeah. And I and I also wear glasses, I
00:46:43
think is what it also said. So that's sort of a black and
00:46:45
white one. But yeah, there's the the, the,
00:46:50
the piece that has all of the stuffed toys in a big collage.
00:46:56
The wool piece, the wall piece, like a rug, crocheted kind of
00:47:02
rectangle or square? Yeah.
00:47:04
Yeah, I think it's yeah, square rectangle, not sure, but it's
00:47:08
called more love hours than can ever be repaid.
00:47:13
And the sin, sorry, the wages of sin.
00:47:17
So. And it's from 1987.
00:47:20
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:47:22
So this is so this is a bit of what how he talks about this
00:47:26
piece. So he says in this piece,
00:47:29
composed of a large number of handmade stuffed animals and
00:47:33
fibre craft items, the toy is seen in the context of a system
00:47:39
of exchange. Each gift given to the child
00:47:42
carries with it the unspoken expectation of repayment.
00:47:46
He goes on. But it's essentially, you know,
00:47:49
this guilt payment from the parents, which is interesting.
00:47:54
You know I mean I. I find it so sad.
00:47:59
I know, I know. Of all the things you can say
00:48:02
about gifts, especially gifts within, you know, this parent
00:48:05
child relationship, that's what you choose to say, Like, oh,
00:48:09
this is a guilt trip for the kids to then have the burden of
00:48:14
the gift, carry it and then have to behave accordingly.
00:48:18
And also, this is a Seminole work.
00:48:21
So this is the moment where it pivots for him and where people
00:48:25
love him. They love the plushies.
00:48:28
So the plushies come from thrift shops.
00:48:30
So these are discarded plushies and they also make up one of the
00:48:36
last works of the of this room, which is called dot dot dot
00:48:42
youth. It has in it one of the the
00:48:47
plushies that became the the the cover of Dirty Sonic Youth's
00:48:52
1992 album. And it's a lot of plushies aside
00:48:55
portraits like taking the plushies seriously, so.
00:48:58
Make a driver like a driver's license.
00:49:00
Like a driver's license. Yeah.
00:49:02
And then you have Mike Kelly's face amongst them, and I think
00:49:06
that's my favorite work. I love that one.
00:49:08
I love. It.
00:49:09
I love it pieces. You know, as ever is the case, I
00:49:11
didn't know really much about Mike Kelly before I came into
00:49:14
this exhibition, and usually what I try to do is not learn
00:49:20
much before I go. I just want to have the
00:49:22
experience, see what I think. And when I went into that room,
00:49:27
you know, before I read anything, I was like, oh wow, so
00:49:30
these are the tools of how I viewed the stuffies is like the
00:49:33
tools of childhood because all the all the stuffies are
00:49:37
knackered, you know, eyes missing, threadbare.
00:49:41
They look like they have been through the mill of childhood,
00:49:45
you know, and then some. And and you know how my initial
00:49:49
instinctual read on that was they have done their job.
00:49:55
Yeah, you know they. Have they've gone through the
00:49:57
emotions? They've borne the brunt of a
00:50:00
child's anger or fear or a need for comfort or obsessive love
00:50:06
or, you know, or, or neglect, maybe, you know, I mean, like
00:50:10
they have, they have done their do duty as stuffies for a child
00:50:17
and and what they can do. And then when I read in the
00:50:20
catalogue, they described the stuffies as and this is a quote
00:50:25
from from the catalogue. Mike Kelly's bears and snakes
00:50:30
and dogs are menacing and seething with resentment.
00:50:34
And that just couldn't be that is just not how I experienced
00:50:39
them. Maybe that was the intention.
00:50:41
This is very interesting because I think one of the issues for me
00:50:44
with Mike Kelly is the discourse.
00:50:48
First Mike Kelly's discourse and then the discourse in general
00:50:51
around the work is so divorced from the experience of the work
00:50:56
for me that it's becomes mind boggling.
00:51:00
So Mike Kelly's one of these adored artists.
00:51:02
So when I said that we were doing the episode on Mike Kelly,
00:51:04
everyone gasped. Everyone I spoke to was like,
00:51:09
pause, you know? And I didn't know.
00:51:13
Pause for reverence. Exactly.
00:51:15
I didn't know much about Mike Kelly.
00:51:17
And there's three artists that are usually brought up by male,
00:51:22
other male interesting feminists, good people that I
00:51:27
respect when when talking about art, which are Philip Guston,
00:51:32
Bruce Nauman and Mike Kelly. Those are kind of the three that
00:51:35
I noticed that men who are interesting, open, ready for,
00:51:40
you know, gender questioning, etcetera.
00:51:44
They're the the quoted artists. And I get why, but for me, going
00:51:50
through Banana man, which I found at a certain point, the
00:51:53
ability to run with a very sad joke daunting.
00:51:58
And then getting to the plushy room and everything that is said
00:52:01
about it kind of made me think of my my child, my teenage
00:52:06
years. And you know, when, when I
00:52:09
realized that the nerdy kid that I fell in love with was actually
00:52:13
the same as the kid who played football, just with another
00:52:16
countercultural thing going on, more interesting formally to me,
00:52:21
but kind of the same thing, kind of the same macho, kind of the
00:52:26
same sex obsessed, you know, on anistic person, you know, and,
00:52:34
and it kind of made me think that this is not as there's a
00:52:37
lot of desire to be open and to be different and to be a
00:52:41
feminist and to be rebellious and to not, and to go against
00:52:46
the establishment, particularly in this piece.
00:52:50
So the piece was that the thing that Mike Kelly said about the
00:52:53
plushy piece of the mural, the the one that is called More Love
00:52:58
Ours than Can never be repaid in the Wages of Sin of 19/19/87, is
00:53:01
that he hated the fact that people loved it.
00:53:04
And at a certain point he fixated on the fact that a few
00:53:08
people said that that peace was about abuse and that therefore
00:53:11
he had been abused. And it made me think of that
00:53:14
thing where 10 people pay you a compliment and then an 11th
00:53:17
person comes and says you look like shit.
00:53:20
And then you're like focusing on the 11th person and forgetting
00:53:25
everything else that people said about the peace.
00:53:27
And he says so himself about this piece.
00:53:30
So I listened to an interview where he says my art is
00:53:34
reactive. So he reacted about that.
00:53:38
And he said I never did anything.
00:53:40
I was a biographical. If anything, as we've said, he
00:53:44
likes to deconstruct the notion of identity.
00:53:47
There's a really interesting interview in the catalogue with
00:53:49
Suzanne Lacy where she hypothesizes that he was even
00:53:55
against the feminists because at a certain point the feminist
00:53:58
movement was about essentialism, which is like the essence of
00:54:02
female people is this, which now is still a big deal in feminist
00:54:07
movements. You have the non essentialists
00:54:09
and the essential essentialists. And when you say you're a
00:54:13
feminist, usually you add up like but non essentialist
00:54:15
feminist. So I don't define womanhood and
00:54:19
femalehood. I'm more interested in the
00:54:20
cultural construct of femalehood or womanhood.
00:54:25
So he is deconstructing identity.
00:54:29
Suddenly there's this huge biographical read by some people
00:54:33
of his work that he had been abused, and then he starts
00:54:38
building. So the rest of the work that you
00:54:39
see in the exhibition, a lot of it is about this idea that he
00:54:44
suffered trauma. And so he was interested in this
00:54:47
big idea of the time in psychology, which was repressed
00:54:51
memories, and there was this big backlash against it because it
00:54:56
was discovered that psychologists and therapists
00:54:59
were kind of feeding questions that had in it within them
00:55:05
already this grain of suggestion of you have been abused, haven't
00:55:10
you? Because you keep talking about
00:55:13
holes, you know, like this thing of like holes there for vaginas,
00:55:18
there for penetration. Therefore you were abused by
00:55:20
your father. And so there was this massive
00:55:23
over exploration of these things in psychology.
00:55:26
And he thought, OK, OK, so I'm going to do some
00:55:29
autobiographical stuff. I haven't done it yet.
00:55:32
Which again, I'm thinking, well you have because you are talking
00:55:35
about yourself as this countercultural kid who did
00:55:39
performance. You listen to some kind of music
00:55:41
like Irish, you know, lapsed Catholic, etcetera.
00:55:44
But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
00:55:46
So then he goes. So that's the the following
00:55:49
room, which is the a very disconcertingly big room that is
00:55:54
incredibly difficult to curate. And kudos to the curators who
00:55:59
really try because this is the the ceiling is incredibly high.
00:56:04
It's a vast room that has these spaces, and it's difficult.
00:56:10
I mean, the Yoko Ono show was, you know, admirably curated, was
00:56:14
really great because it's not easy to install work in there.
00:56:18
They kind of get lost in the space.
00:56:20
But Kelly does have big insulation work.
00:56:23
So from that period onward, you have his reaction to this, to
00:56:30
people loving this work and his parents misgivings with it.
00:56:38
And so he worked for a long time on reconstructing his childhood
00:56:44
school buildings from memory. And so he realized that he could
00:56:51
not. And so he went and took the, the
00:56:54
the floor plans of those places, had them all kind of glutenated
00:57:00
and then built a massive structure that structure that
00:57:03
couldn't be, it's called something complex and couldn't
00:57:07
be in the show educational complex.
00:57:09
Thank you from 1995. It's in the catalogue and it's
00:57:15
too fragile to be shipped. So you don't have that.
00:57:19
You have yet another work that takes up the whole center of
00:57:22
that space, which is called Sub Level and it's about the
00:57:26
basement at Calarts as sort of like like a hint towards the
00:57:30
idea of the subconscious and the Super ego and what not.
00:57:34
And the places that he can't remember are covered in pink
00:57:39
crystals. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:41
Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:42
Because he loves the color pink, because pink is vaginal, is the
00:57:47
flesh, it's whatever. So.
00:57:50
I enjoyed that too. I mean, I enjoyed looking at it.
00:57:52
You know, I sort of appreciated the the, you know, kind of
00:57:58
having this very plain sort of plywood exterior that's quite
00:58:05
cool with the interior of this beautiful pink crystal.
00:58:10
I love a pink crystal rose quartz, you know.
00:58:14
So I mean, there was there, you know, that was enjoyable to
00:58:17
appreciate. This is a landscape marked not
00:58:20
by memory but by forgetfulness. So he was interested in, yeah,
00:58:25
in the, the, the huge blank spaces.
00:58:28
And again, I mean, that links to what you were saying in terms of
00:58:32
the plushies and, you know, some of the critiques of the holes
00:58:37
and that are left in people's memories and what gets left out
00:58:42
and how that gets expressed ultimately, I guess.
00:58:48
Yeah, I to be honest that that's the part that really moved me
00:58:52
the less in the exhibition. Then there's another piece which
00:58:56
is a big, big, big, big clouds made of tinfoil where he
00:59:02
recorded himself. So it there's sort of a picnic
00:59:07
blanket with with with pad pots and pans I think on this on the
00:59:12
ground, but again, using this sort of reflective silver
00:59:17
element that has they put in cars to protect them from the
00:59:22
sun. And then the tinfoil structure
00:59:26
from which a sound comes, which is him reading about UFO
00:59:31
sightings and UFO conspiracy theories.
00:59:35
Then in the back you have the candor piece, which is a whole
00:59:38
thing that he did like 2 pieces that he did about Superman.
00:59:42
And then there's a really weird piece that is a sort of like a
00:59:49
painting, like something that you put on the wall, rectangular
00:59:53
with these beads and these big collage exactly which is the
01:00:01
text explains. It's an African American
01:00:04
technique for making funeral objects.
01:00:08
And then there's another piece where there's a milk jug.
01:00:13
That you buy in the supermarket without its label, with two eyes
01:00:16
and a mouth, and then there's a sort of a vase covered in the
01:00:20
same beads. And the text says that he's
01:00:25
taking in this African American Croft to produce those objects,
01:00:31
those funereal objects. But of course, you're more drawn
01:00:34
to the :). That is much more pleasurable to
01:00:38
look at then. And of course, I'm this is the
01:00:41
time, beginning of the 20th century where, you know, it's
01:00:45
appreciation and not appropriation.
01:00:47
But again, I found this really bad taste.
01:00:50
I'm like, OK, dark humor for sure.
01:00:54
But at the moment and especially, you know, dragging
01:00:58
that sort of craft that is completely out of context and
01:01:02
saying, oh, you look at that and you're more interested in that.
01:01:05
It's presuming a lot from the spectator and it's presuming.
01:01:10
And I think it's the problem with my Kelly is that he's for
01:01:13
someone who is so wants to be so free and liberated.
01:01:19
He presumes a lot of behaviours from which he draws the form and
01:01:25
the materials of the piece, and then he imposes a certain
01:01:29
behaviour on the spectator, or he presumes that the spectator
01:01:33
is going to have a certain culture and a certain behaviour,
01:01:36
which I found really presumptuous, I guess.
01:01:41
Just to say that we have the the photographs as well.
01:01:45
So there's the photo show. It's called Photo Show portrays
01:01:50
the familiar from 2001. And these are just the black and
01:01:54
white photographs from from familiar places to him in
01:02:00
Detroit. So they're kind.
01:02:02
Of I think I blanked out on those.
01:02:05
That that was actually, I mean, Tommy Moore as someone who
01:02:08
enjoys photography, I I enjoyed them.
01:02:11
I mean, he hasn't, you know, he has an eye, but so he it says in
01:02:16
the the text for the work, he also plays with the meaning of
01:02:19
familiar in an art, in an artwork title, which is
01:02:23
sometimes used to describe a type of uncanny ghost or spirit.
01:02:27
So the, the images are of his, his family home, of the skyline
01:02:35
of a statue of, you know, just kind of, you know, of a
01:02:39
restaurant facade. I mean, various scenes around
01:02:46
Detroit basically that were familiar to him growing up.
01:02:49
Normally I'm not sure that people will get that from the
01:02:52
objects themselves. I think that would be for me,
01:02:55
the real issue. And if you need that much text
01:02:58
and that much information, then it seems that Kelly is talking
01:03:03
to a very small number of people.
01:03:06
And there's one work. It's there's two images that are
01:03:10
quite beautiful, very colourful on the other side of the of sub
01:03:17
level. So that big installation of the
01:03:19
sub level of Cal Arts which are called form and content I think
01:03:26
or form, no form and colour which is a play of form and
01:03:30
content, which is this big debate in visual arts of like is
01:03:35
the content more important? Is the form?
01:03:38
Does the form drive the content? Does the content drive the form?
01:03:41
Because one of the pictures is saturated and very precise and
01:03:47
the other one's a bit blurred out and very much like an
01:03:50
abstract painting. And their photographies are
01:03:53
inject prints. And there's another example of
01:03:57
that, but I won't dwell on it too much.
01:03:58
Right next to it, which is sort of a painting, drawing and this
01:04:03
and and this. It's this.
01:04:05
Kelly was so abrasively cultured.
01:04:09
Like he talked a lot about postmodernism,
01:04:12
poststructuralism, all the art that was going on in every
01:04:17
period of his time is very mournful about Jeff Koons and
01:04:22
the like. He really hated it.
01:04:23
He hated being associated with Brit, what he called Brit Pop.
01:04:27
And he describes Brit pop in a very abrasive interview that's
01:04:31
on YouTube called The 105 Minutes with Mike Kelly or 105
01:04:35
Questions with Mike Kelly, where he describes Brit Pop as
01:04:40
basically artists wanted to fuck Kate Moss.
01:04:43
Which brushes over the fact that there's not only male straight
01:04:47
people in the Brit pop movement, but also ladies who are straight
01:04:51
who maybe do not fancy women. So there's there's a lot of
01:04:56
abrasiveness that comes from being so aware of all these
01:05:00
movements that do not trickle down to your general audiences.
01:05:05
And it's interesting. I mean, kind of what you were
01:05:06
saying earlier about him really being the artists, artists, you
01:05:13
know, speaking to some of these big debates within, you know,
01:05:17
contemporary art. I mean, I yeah, that that makes
01:05:21
a lot of sense for why maybe I as not someone who is steeped in
01:05:25
that didn't feel connected to a lot of what was going on.
01:05:30
But I also think there's just that dichotomy.
01:05:33
And this goes back to his formal education, though.
01:05:36
He's a punk rocker of, you know, all of this really basic, you
01:05:42
know, pop culture stuff. You know, I think from his
01:05:45
perspective, I don't know, I couldn't possibly speak from.
01:05:48
But it's like, on the one hand, he's saying, you know, I want to
01:05:52
work through the medium that everybody can connect to because
01:05:56
it is pop culture is what is, you know, so close to every
01:06:01
single person. But yeah, he's like, how how is
01:06:05
he doing that working through that medium and still kind of
01:06:09
connecting it to these very hard idea, high art ideas.
01:06:13
And I mean, for me, I I'm lost in the middle somewhere, you
01:06:17
know? But I see why.
01:06:19
I I see it like a lot of people, as you've said, you know, really
01:06:23
adore his work and that's great. And but yeah, I feel, I feel
01:06:28
definitely lost in the middle there.
01:06:30
I see the low kind of art, quote UN quote, that he is drawing
01:06:34
from. And you are certainly
01:06:37
illuminating some of these, you know, higher ideas in, you know,
01:06:41
art theory. But but yeah, I, I don't see how
01:06:46
I don't, I don't have an entry point really on either of those
01:06:49
spectrums. There's a good example of that,
01:06:52
which is I think maybe a stronger piece for audiences,
01:06:56
which is. So at the end of that big room,
01:06:59
there's the candle piece where he imagines Superman's, yeah,
01:07:05
Superman's hometown exactly in these very colourful bell jaws
01:07:11
that contain the Sissy and the video projections and holograph
01:07:16
hologramic images as well. And then next to it, there's a
01:07:20
1998 video, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's 98 where it's a
01:07:24
video of Superman. So he hired a very muscly man
01:07:28
dressed as Superman who reads Exits of the Bell Jar by Sylvia
01:07:33
Plath. And I think that's more that and
01:07:37
it's, it's it's annoying because again, it's one of those kind of
01:07:42
very clever and very direct performances that he was capable
01:07:45
of. And it's very it's it's like a
01:07:48
side note to the big hand or extravaganza.
01:07:52
That's what that's where he lost my son.
01:07:54
I think he told me, well, you know, the Superman thing doesn't
01:07:57
really interest me. Like I'm not into that kind of
01:08:00
thing. And it's a very obvious bashing
01:08:03
of the alpha male, super powered, strong, potent,
01:08:09
formidable figure that he's kind of like gnawing at because he's
01:08:13
reading an extract of a, of a feminist icon such as Sylvia
01:08:19
Plath and particularly Bell Jar, which is such an incredible
01:08:23
piece of angst and depression and self loathing.
01:08:29
And, and it's the whole journey and and you see Superman being a
01:08:34
really bad actor. So he's really bad at reading.
01:08:38
And I think that would have been more empowering for the
01:08:42
spectator if it had had a more, I guess the the curators were
01:08:48
very respectful of what was considered masterpieces.
01:08:53
And also we mustn't forget that this is a travelling exhibition
01:08:57
that went to the Boz de Comas in Paris, which is the Pinot
01:09:01
collection. And Pinot was one of the first
01:09:03
people to buy his big installations.
01:09:05
So maybe there was an obligation there to show the big
01:09:08
installations. But I think sometimes as a
01:09:12
curator myself, I always like to think, OK, So what would be the
01:09:15
piece that would be a sort of entry point into the the work,
01:09:20
whether you love it or not, whether you connect to it or
01:09:23
not, but at least for you to be more immersed in what it means
01:09:27
to be Mike Kelly and how he was devouring the feminist movement.
01:09:33
I mean, the the plushie piece is a piece that takes up the craft
01:09:39
that was the feminine craft, which was knitting,
01:09:42
embroidering, sewing. It's not, you know, it is there
01:09:47
for a reason. And maybe I would have put those
01:09:49
two pieces in dialogue, be less chronological and also less
01:09:52
chronological. I mean, this is what not.
01:09:54
Yeah, 1998. I mean, and maybe have helped
01:09:58
people kind of get into the grittiness and the need and the
01:10:03
desire 'cause I think with Mike Kelly, what's really beautiful
01:10:07
is this desire to question this wild maleness that he was caged
01:10:13
in. I mean, you are, I mean, if you
01:10:15
talk to men nowadays, we're still having this conversation.
01:10:19
It's, it's not easy, you know, and it's interesting to hear a
01:10:22
man talk about that. So for me, that's an issue
01:10:26
because at that point I was really tired of candor.
01:10:28
I was tired of sub level. You're tired at this point.
01:10:32
Good God, and I feel the same way like that There's this is
01:10:37
the second to last. This is kind of the last big
01:10:39
room. There's still a film at the very
01:10:41
end and kind of a hallway of of some notes and things like that.
01:10:47
But but yeah, so this is the last big room and Oh my God, is
01:10:51
it big and kickoffness to the Max.
01:10:55
So you it's called extracurricular activity.
01:10:59
Projective reconstruction is that.
01:11:03
I think that's it. And I think that's was supposed
01:11:06
to be a big happening that he wanted to produce for 24 hours.
01:11:12
Yep. Which, go ahead, explain it.
01:11:16
You're American. It's your duty.
01:11:18
Oh my. God oh boy, this is a big task.
01:11:21
So basically this is a room that again, the walls are black and
01:11:27
there's lots of low lighting and specific lighting on certain
01:11:31
objects. So it's not sort of a bright
01:11:32
light space. There's video, there's
01:11:35
sculpture, there's movement, there's there's lots of
01:11:39
photography, but basically the room is looking at the that line
01:11:46
between culture and reality and how we see ourselves in it.
01:11:51
I think there's a lot of what he is working with here.
01:11:54
So there's there's a quote from him that says the folk
01:11:57
entertainments I represent are true in the sense that most
01:12:02
people have done or experienced such things themselves during
01:12:04
their lifetime. I don't see them simply as
01:12:07
shallow any more than I see quote false memories as shallow.
01:12:12
They're truly felt experiences. Movies and pop songs are
01:12:16
similarly real on the emotional level.
01:12:19
I'm playing with the equivalence of art and true recollection.
01:12:23
So I mean, it's it's a difficult room to explain.
01:12:26
I mean, there's lots of music, lots of motion, lots of lights
01:12:29
going on. I mean, you know, by the time
01:12:32
you're at this part of it, as we've said, you're a bit tired.
01:12:36
You're a bit like, what? What?
01:12:38
And then you come here and it's like it takes all it took all of
01:12:41
my wherewithal just sort of hang with it.
01:12:44
So it's like there's you walk in and there's like these hanging
01:12:48
screens that have people posed in these sort of Roman Catholic,
01:12:58
you know, Mother Mary kind of poses, I guess.
01:13:02
And they're sort of cycling through and it's people sort of
01:13:06
mimicking that. There's there's a bit in the
01:13:08
corner, which is basically a big piece of red fabric that's like
01:13:13
a curtain and it's twirling around on like some kind of
01:13:18
metal hanger thing. There's a spotlight on it.
01:13:22
And in the spotlight you see the shadow of it looks like a woman
01:13:27
who is a stripper. She's in a state of disrobe.
01:13:31
Or maybe you're looking at some dancing.
01:13:34
Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah, she is dancing.
01:13:37
So there's that going on. You get images of like stills I
01:13:42
guess maybe from like horror movies or movies.
01:13:45
There's a film, there's a reenactment of a that horror
01:13:49
movie scene where you're almost being killed or you're running
01:13:54
away. Yeah, there's a child and
01:13:56
there's a teenage woman. Yeah.
01:14:00
And there's, there's also just like, you know, there's there's
01:14:03
images of like Dracula or a vampire movie and then the
01:14:09
person dressed up as that person in the movie.
01:14:12
There's, there's reenactments of God.
01:14:16
I think it was from caring, maybe.
01:14:18
I don't know. But it's like high school, you
01:14:21
know, people on a stage and it's from the movie and then you get
01:14:24
it recreated. And so I guess, yeah.
01:14:27
I mean kind of looking at how we see ourselves in the culture.
01:14:33
And it's all based on these school events, plays that you
01:14:41
put on and rituals that you but that allow you to be someone
01:14:47
else and to wear makeup and for men to be women and for women to
01:14:52
be older and to perform these these plays and these to inhabit
01:15:00
these characters that are of the culture, but that are also
01:15:04
caricatures of the culture. And there's this very strange.
01:15:08
So there's a lot of photographs of real yearbook images of
01:15:15
colleges and then the reenactments photographs.
01:15:20
I find it so vampirical. You know, there's something
01:15:24
about it that is kind of sucking the life out of it.
01:15:27
His exercise of never wanting to believe in anything and never
01:15:32
wanting to represent anything other than reacting to something
01:15:37
that already exists means that there's no real position.
01:15:40
I went back after Trump got elected and I thought, OK, am I
01:15:43
going to see this in a different way?
01:15:47
And I felt the need of someone taking a position somehow.
01:15:51
And you can argue that he does take it, obviously, because what
01:15:55
are we doing being here in this life other than reacting to
01:15:59
things that existed, that pre existed and that will exist
01:16:01
beyond us? Sure, of course, that is
01:16:05
arguably something that you can think, but at a certain point,
01:16:09
it comes to you and you're making a decision.
01:16:12
And that became really apparent when I went back to the
01:16:15
exhibition and and it's going back to the last thing I read
01:16:21
about the show was this Suzanne Lacy interview that I really,
01:16:25
really urge you to read if you have the catalogue.
01:16:28
The last thing she says is there are many formal elements in that
01:16:33
kind of early feminist performance work, but it's
01:16:36
critical reception was based on its content.
01:16:39
So going back to the idea of content and form, it's critical
01:16:43
reception was based on its content.
01:16:46
For us, said the feminists, content led to the development
01:16:50
of forms, but these were often unrecognised.
01:16:54
The art world gives credit to the formal innovators, not the
01:16:59
content innovators. My Kelly may have been able,
01:17:03
from an abstracted distance, to deal with the content of gender
01:17:06
and cultural expressionism through craft, but this became
01:17:09
celebrated as a formal innovation.
01:17:12
Now he's the one known for it, not the girls, because he's so
01:17:18
free formally. He loved surrealism.
01:17:21
He wanted to be free. And, you know, there's a Duchamp
01:17:23
quote that I'm going to butcher right now where he said that
01:17:27
whenever he felt that he was getting close to establishing
01:17:30
any form of taste, he would move away from that form and go to
01:17:33
something else. This idea of not clinging to an
01:17:38
aesthetic and to work on what's an aesthetic creation and
01:17:44
pervasiveness meant in the culture that, you know, that
01:17:50
that that was it. But now I need more.
01:17:58
I need something else. I'm not content with it.
01:18:02
And I don't think it's my Kelly's fault.
01:18:04
I think the, I mean, he was a countercultural kid who was
01:18:08
represented by Gagosian, which at the time was the biggest
01:18:13
gallery, one of the first galleries to have galleries all
01:18:17
across the world. Now it's kind of normal, but he
01:18:20
was the first one to have galleries everywhere.
01:18:22
I remember looking, you know, in art present seeing, oh, he's in
01:18:25
New York, he's in Sao Paulo, he's in Hong Kong, he's in how
01:18:28
weird. You know, this is a powerful
01:18:31
gallery that suddenly was showcasing a person who was very
01:18:39
reluctantly someone who saw himself belong to the art world.
01:18:44
And I think going back to that triad of Gustin, Mike Kelly and
01:18:48
Bruce Nelman, those are artists who were very reluctant with the
01:18:52
idea of the art world, it's mechanisms, it's dogmatisms, and
01:18:58
it's money and the people who held the power through money in
01:19:02
it. And but he ended up in the most
01:19:05
powerful gallery. So the discourse around Mike
01:19:08
Kelly for me is full of hurdles and full of loopholes and blind
01:19:14
spots. Yeah, I, I agree.
01:19:17
I mean, I, it does feel like, yeah, maybe if I saw it in a
01:19:22
different era, maybe the era that it came out and maybe I
01:19:26
would feel differently about it. But I think, you know, it just I
01:19:31
enjoyed the ideas and the execution of them did not speak
01:19:37
to me in the way that, you know, I would have hoped, but it still
01:19:41
did. Look, we were having a
01:19:43
fascinating, in my humble opinion, conversation about it,
01:19:48
which is a brilliant thing in and of itself.
01:19:50
The experience of it is the is the rub at the end and it that's
01:19:54
what's ours to take away, you know, and that's what we're
01:19:57
talking about here is our experience of this exhibition.
01:20:02
And you know, something that you you clipped on Instagram on the
01:20:06
exhibitionist's feed recently was a snippet from conversation
01:20:13
with the Talk Art guys. And it was the Jesse Darling
01:20:17
interview. Yeah.
01:20:19
And it was, you know, saying exactly that.
01:20:21
It's like you see a movie, you listen to a song, you know your
01:20:27
experience of it is valid, whether it's good, bad, ugly,
01:20:31
and different. And that that same, that same
01:20:36
authority and that same breadth of experience and ownership
01:20:43
needs to be taken in the art world as well.
01:20:46
And I was so happy that you clipped that because it felt
01:20:49
like something that I really needed to hear.
01:20:52
And I think it was something that I hadn't appreciated fully
01:20:55
that, you know, that that reverence and the the cultural,
01:21:01
you know, kind of aura around certain artists can be
01:21:06
impenetrable at times, you know, and I'm not really in the art
01:21:10
world. So I haven't felt that, you
01:21:12
know, surely as in depth as I imagine, you know, people who
01:21:15
are more versed in the art world do.
01:21:17
But But yeah, it's like this, this experience that we've had
01:21:23
at this exhibition of Mike Kelly's is ours.
01:21:27
And that's what we're that's what we're talking about here.
01:21:30
So maybe I'm hedging my, my ourselves against any
01:21:35
recriminations over. I don't want to, you know,
01:21:37
offend anyone who loves Mike Kelly.
01:21:39
It's he's, he's definitely lovable for sure if you know if
01:21:45
he's speaking your language. Yeah, he was beloved.
01:21:47
I mean, one thing to say about him is that when I started
01:21:51
researching him, I came across a number of articles that were
01:21:57
written about him when people learnt about their his passing
01:22:03
and they're so tender. He was so beloved.
01:22:06
I mean, he must have been a really good friend.
01:22:08
He must have been someone perhaps a bit fragile, perhaps a
01:22:10
bit vulnerable and, and putting himself out there, you know.
01:22:16
So, I mean, this is not, this is our experience, you know, this
01:22:20
is our take on it. We're too so women in their late
01:22:24
40s with a certain, you know, you're American and Portuguese,
01:22:29
European. And this is we have expectations
01:22:33
from exhibitions and artists, and it doesn't mean that when
01:22:38
our expectations aren't met, it immediately, you know, evacuates
01:22:43
the artist from the platform. I was very happy to go to the
01:22:46
and I think I'm going to go back to the exhibition to be honest
01:22:50
with with people, you know, with people from the family, you
01:22:54
know, that haven't seen it yet. I'm really interested in kind of
01:22:58
really taking it all in because it's going to be the last
01:23:02
opportunity I will have to experience his work in such a
01:23:05
massive way. Again, liking, disliking, not
01:23:08
really the point. You know, it's about coming
01:23:10
together and, and trying to to give that space to someone who
01:23:13
worked so hard all their all their, all their lives through
01:23:17
probably intense bouts of depression.
01:23:20
So you know that that's, that's what it's all about.
01:23:23
And this is so enjoyable. Emily, again, I'm so glad you're
01:23:26
back. Well, it's really nice to be
01:23:29
back and and yeah, thank you so much and thank you to Liberte
01:23:33
for such a brilliant episode. And yeah, kind of adding more
01:23:38
color to the to the podcast. That was great.
01:23:41
I loved her, her reminiscence of the Picasso exhibition that
01:23:46
really sort of got her, you know, so interested in
01:23:49
exhibitions and the the unique, the uniqueness of them.
01:23:53
So yeah. So that was great.
01:23:56
But thank you. This is great.
01:23:57
I mean lots more to talk about with Mike Kelly and and more
01:24:03
exhibitions coming up. So thanks so much for everybody
01:24:06
for listening and thank you. Joanna Well, thank you, Emily.
01:24:10
This was indeed again a pleasure.
01:24:13
The next episode is an interview with the great, The one and
01:24:18
only, Steven Elcock. And if you don't have his last
01:24:23
book Elements, you must purchase it right away or borrow it.
01:24:28
Or, you know, however you get your books or however you get
01:24:32
your hands on books, just do it. It's such an enjoyable
01:24:36
experience to leaf through all those images.
01:24:40
We'll be back again after Steven Alcock with more exhibitions for
01:24:45
you. So thank you all and have a
01:24:49
great couple of weeks until we are in your presence again.
01:24:54
All right, take care. See you soon.
01:24:55
See you. Bye.
01:24:57
Bye.