00:00:10
Hello and welcome back to Exhibitionist.
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Is Emily here? So glad you could make it today.
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And I'm so glad to be here. It's really nice to plug back in
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to these conversations with Joanna and yourselves, and this
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one is no exception. So today we're looking at Mike
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Kelly. He's an American artist who
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really broke a lot of molds and had a really fascinating career.
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There is no lack of opinions in this episode, so do be warned.
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There's some feelings about Mike Kelly and I think some
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interesting perspectives to share.
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So I hope that you enjoy the episode.
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Thanks so much for listening. Oh, and I wanted to mention, if
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you haven't noticed already, you might have seen that we have a
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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.
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Welcome back to Exhibition Estas.
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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?
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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.
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I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, an art curator and writer, and as Emily
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said, we visit solo exhibitions so that you have to also that
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you visit them vicariously through us.
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Just a quick reminder to go to our Instagram account for
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visuals. If you're not familiar with the
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artist or the exhibition, it might make the episode even.
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More enjoyable. Yeah, Agreed.
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Agreed. And you put some great stuff up
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there, Joanna, you are the maestro of the of the social
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media account. And there's, I mean, I have to
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say, I love like kind of wandering through the exhibition
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again on Instagram. It's really nice.
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What is the artist we're exploring this time?
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Emily in this. Episode It's a biggie.
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It's a biggie. So this week we're examining
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Mike Kelly. He's an American artist whose
00:02:42
work involved drawing video, sound objects, textile, banners,
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collage, video, photography and music.
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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.
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That's on view at the Tate Modern until the 9th of March
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2025. S Kelly was born just outside
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Detroit, A fellow Midwesterner just like myself, which I like.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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And so he was born just outside of Detroit in 1954 to a white
00:03:15
working class Roman Catholic family.
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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
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Company. So Detroit, I mean, those of you
00:03:30
some might know was Motor City and you know, kind of those big,
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you know, car companies having a job like that, I'm sure that
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held a little bit of status. I mean, it's still working
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class, but that would have been a very good job to get for sure.
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So there isn't a ton of information about his formative
00:03:49
years. I mean, when I was at the Tait
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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
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design, as he often played into myths about himself.
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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
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Jack White reference. I know.
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It's yes. It's been too long.
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It's been too. Long, too long.
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We promised. We promised our listeners that
00:04:25
Chuck White would make an appearance ever so often, and
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you know, we've been neglecting him.
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Yeah. Hello, Jack.
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You're listening, I'm sure. Yeah.
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So, I mean, so they were wilfully ambiguous about their
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relationship for years. I mean, I remember reading,
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Yeah, about Bob Dylan kind of manufacturing.
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Oh yes. Right, like about his
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autobiography and stuff like that.
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So and I mean, look, you know, this happens all the time.
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So that's that's not that scandalous really, but.
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I have found a few things. I mean, from from his childhood
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and teenage years. So if you listen to interviews
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once in a while, he will make a reference.
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So apparently he described himself as being a bookworm.
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And when the interviewer asked him, so, oh, did your parents
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encourage you know, your your interest in culture and in
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books. He had this kind of abrasive
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answer, you know, like that was seen as something not to do.
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And so to annoy his dad, he said he was, you know, weird and
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doing interested in weird stuff. He took up embroidery, for
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example, or sewing, you know. So there must have been a part
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of him that really rebelled against the very typical
00:05:43
American family periods, you know, And he did have that
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rebellious streak in him, but that threw him.
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There was a nerdy rebellious streak there since the
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beginning, apparently. And that makes sense.
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I mean, you know, the 50s in America were a very special
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time. You know, it's like those cookie
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cutter houses. The suburbs were just exploding,
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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
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counterculture of the 60s that is going to be exploding and
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exploding in. Detroit In Detroit, yeah.
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And huge, huge scene for the counterculture, which, you know,
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we'll certainly get to. But so you're right.
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Nevertheless, the history and autobiography emerge in all 40
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years of his artwork that he produced.
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You can see that his identities of being a white male of Irish
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heritage, middle, well kind of working class I guess more than
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middle class, raised Roman Catholic, all of these.
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Right. But the new Tory leader just
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said that you can become working class if you're middle class if
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you work at McDonald's, so. What?
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Did you not hear that I? Didn't hear this.
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No, I saw this whiz by on Instagram, this real boy.
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She's like, well, I was born middle class, you know?
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But I worked at McDonald's at 16, so I became working class.
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Oh my. God.
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Sometimes. Oh my God, no clue.
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No clue, woman. Anyway, that's a whole other
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rant, isn't? It and this was someone on
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Instagram replying and saying well I am working class but I do
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buy my stuff at Sephora so I guess technically I'm middle
00:07:30
class now. Yeah, exactly.
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Yeah, but I did a shop at Waitrose, so I guess I'm.
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Coming, she said. Waitrose.
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Sorry, it's not Sephora. I don't know why my mind went to
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Sephora. Yeah, it's probably a lipstick.
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Yeah, it's my lipstick. Yeah, I have lipstick on today,
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people, and it's throwing us off.
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I just. Want to It's throwing us off.
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But yeah, so so that his working class heritage had a huge
00:07:54
influence. And so these were through lines,
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through his work that often married ideas of ritual.
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So his identity was married with ideas of ritual.
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He had lots of work that revolves around high school
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because of the ritual. And obviously Roman Catholic,
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you know, kind of stuff played into that his, you know, ideas
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of memory and and popular culture, but kind of really
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subculture and counterculture as well played in with these
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identities that he had, you know, of himself.
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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
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guess. Yeah, I think that's right.
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Yeah, I think that's a much better way to put it because
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what we see and consume and how we put ourselves in that and
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then how we reflect that back to the culture.
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Yeah. Is a, is a, is a huge thing in
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his work. But and these were the times
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where culture came through television, yeah, where that we
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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
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religion. And he says so himself.
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It's entertainment. And so he was very aware of this
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idea of entertainment that kind of gets to you, like you're
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saying, goes under your skin, comes out somehow and is really
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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
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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.
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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.
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I get the sense that Kelly was cool enough and in touch enough
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to, you know, feel it and experience it.
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So so here's Kelly. He's a long haired teen.
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He's marinated in religion and also this counterculture.
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So what does he do? He starts a noise band aptly
00:10:38
call Destroy All Monsters. You love that.
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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.
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So he was there, he was one of the founding members.
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He was there for I think the first three years with them.
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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.
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I mean, I, I floated around some of it and it was like I couldn't
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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.
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And and you know, not all of them do, but so a little.
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Foreshadowing, please? Maybe.
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Yeah. Maybe that was a bit of a
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tidbit. So Kelly went to the University
00:12:03
of Michigan and in 1976 enrolled in the MFA program at Cal Arts.
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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.
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Yeah, that's interesting that you say that, because I have no
00:12:53
idea how the culture was. Yeah.
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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.
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Don't touch my breasts. I just want to go to my desk.
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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.