{"id":1473,"date":"2014-03-30T14:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=1473"},"modified":"2014-03-30T14:40:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T21:40:00","slug":"remembering-mike-kelley-and-an-inscrutable-indie-rocker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/03\/remembering-mike-kelley-and-an-inscrutable-indie-rocker.html","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Mike Kelley, and an Inscrutable Indie Rocker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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MONDAY sees the opening of the Mike Kelley retrospective<\/a> at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The museum is only a few miles from where Kelley lives and worked. His work remains stirring and bitterly funny, and there was much good cheer from old friends and admirers excited to finally see so much work in the same place. But the fact that the artist — who killed himself about two years ago, could not attend lent an eerie quality to the whole thing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll post a proper review of the show as soon as I find one; for now, I\u2019ll just say that the show \u2013 in the museum\u2019s cavernous Geffen Contemporary space \u2013 seemed overwhelming to me in both the best and worst sense: \"kelley_feature\"<\/a>It will take something less frenetic than a press preview for me to really assess his painful, funny, oddball body of work. (I was very pleased to bump into, very quickly, former MOCA curator Paul Schimmel, one of Kelley\u2019s most important advocates and closest friends; I\u2019d expected that he was still in exile from the museum, which had forced him out.)<\/p>\n

In the weeks after Kelley\u2019s suicide, I wrote a story<\/a> for Los Angeles magazine, on the artist\u2019s life and death and legacy. I\u2019ve known his work since it was used on the cover of Sonic Youth\u2019s Dirty<\/i> LP in the early \u201890s, but his body of work remains hard for me to describe. He painted, but was not really a painter, he drew, but it\u2019s hard to think of him primarily for that; same with sculpture and filmmaking. (The show included some pieces from his Day is Done project, which has been hard to see on the West Coast.) He was a conceptualist, but one who loved materials and maked them \u2013 even if they were smelly, nasty stuffed animals \u2013 central to what he did. His career circled a number of themes \u2013 sexuality, Catholicism, consumerism, and so on \u2013 but used such a huge range of media it\u2019s hard to think of a typical Kelley piece.<\/p>\n

Speaking to his friends and colleagues, I was amazed at the impact that Kelley had made on people. Despite a history of serious depression and a growing frustration with the winner-tale-all spirit of the 21st<\/sup> century art world, he was no hermit.<\/p>\n

This comes from my story:<\/p>\n

Poet Amy Gerstler first encountered him around 1980, at an opening at the art space LACE, where Kelley was carrying around a volume of German Romantic poetry. \u201cWhen you met him,\u201d she says, \u201cit didn\u2019t matter how much art sense you had. You realized you were in the presence of something really ferocious and incandescent. He was kind of explosively charismatic. He was also scary-smart\u2014he had a lot of energy, nervous energy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m not the only one who finds Kelley\u2019s work maddeningly \u2013 or gloriously \u2013 ambiguous. Also from my piece:<\/p>\n

The artist wasn\u2019t focused on lush materials or technical control: Kelley was a deep-sea diver into the American unconscious, dedicated to what makes us uncomfortable. \u201cHe opened up the psyche of this culture, with its obsessions and insecurities,\u201d says John Welchman, a UC San Diego art professor who has written extensively on Kelley. \u201cMike\u2019s work was very layered. There\u2019s something raw, but also humorous and ironic\u2014and between those two extremes there\u2019s half a dozen other layers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His closest friends saw it coming, but a lot of us were shocked when Kelley died. Filmmaker John Waters, who collects Kelley\u2019s work and knew him as a funny guy who didn\u2019t suffer fools, was startled by the artist\u2019s death. \u201cTo me his work always satirized<\/i> depression,\u201d Waters told me. \u201cAll that stuff about recovered memory, building his childhood home to travel around\u2026 I thought it was something he had when he was younger, that he was commenting on it. I always thought that his humor would save him.\u201d<\/p>\n

More to come on Mike Kelley and this important show.<\/p>\n

ALSO: The ArtsJournal site was hacked a few days ago and went down, so I missed posting some things I’d hoped to. Here is my interview<\/a> with onetime Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, who’s currently touring. Malkmus — back in Portland after a few years in Berlin — remains a master of indirection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”uhn6cUcVr5hepNR0gearR5lZEvN3qK1j”] MONDAY sees the opening of the Mike Kelley retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The museum is only a few miles from where Kelley lives and worked. His work remains stirring and bitterly funny, and there was much good cheer from old friends and admirers excited to finally see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70,40,30,173,198,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-art","7":"category-indie","8":"category-los-angeles","9":"category-moca","10":"category-pavement","11":"category-west-coast","12":"entry","13":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}