Monday, March 05, 2012
On Mike Kelley's "The Uncanny" (uncut)
¶ 3/05/2012
As
a special tribute to Mike Kelley, who last month checked out way ahead
of schedule, we're posting the full, unedited version of John W.'s
review of Kelley's 'Uncanny' exhibition in Vienna from 2004. (2017 update added at end!)
The Uncanny Exhibition of Mike Kelley
I. The Main Exhibit
"The
Uncanny", Mike Kelley's exhibition at MUMOK, is utterly brilliant, with
something to delight everyone from John Waters to Walter Benjamin.
Sizewise, it would fill a floor of the Whitney and then some, and
offers a motley and maniacally assembled collection of statues,
ventriloquist's dummies, mannequins, reliquaries, anatomical models and
so on. In part it's intended to suggest the "Wunderkammer", or
"cabinets of wonder", which originated in the Renaissance and were
popular through the end of the 19th century.
The
exhibition, whose themes come from Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny,
is actually a "re-configuration and extension" of a show that Kelley
assembled in Arnhem (the Netherlands) in 1993, but with one crucial
difference which I'll explain below. This new version appeared at the
Tate Liverpool earlier this year and now — since Kelley reportedly
conceived the exhibition during several past visits here — it has "come
home" to Vienna. Also, as a complement to the exhibition, the movie
theater up the street from me is presenting a series of films selected
by Kelley — basics like "Frankenstein", "Freaks", "Eraserhead", "Dead
Ringers", and the like.
Roughly
half of "The Uncanny" comprises works by contemporary artists, with the
other half constituting objects found and collected by Kelley. The
press materials claim that he himself is not actually credited as an
artist for any of these objects, although in view of the way that
they've been assembled and displayed, this is a slippery point. A few
years ago Luc Sante mentioned to me that once in an interview he had
posited a link between "postmodernism" and "shopping" — with DJ'ing and
curating being prime examples — and much of this exhibit appears to be
the result of Kelley's gleeful and canny shopping sprees at various flea
markets and thrift shops.
My
previous exposure to Mike Kelley's work was rather limited, e.g. the
cover to Sonic Youth's "Dirty" and a few isolated pieces. As a result, I
assumed that one aspect of "the uncanny" being explored here was sexual
ambiguity: specifically, the way that, in childhood, certain otherwise
ordinary objects can be (mis)taken to have a sexual meaning and even
cause sexual arousal. I suspect that, if one were to take a group of
first- and second-graders on a tour of the exhibition (and NOT
fifth-graders, who by then know what the game is about and would titter
and hoot at many of the displays) and then quiz them 10 or 20 years
later, a significant portion of them will in the meantime have developed
tastes for amputees, rubber raincoats, and anatomically correct male
mannequins.
On
the day after the opening there was a podium discussion with the
artist. At the Q&A session that followed, I asked the artist
whether the ambiguity of strangeness-vs.-sexual-content was intentional.
He denied that the exhibit had anything to do with childhood
sexuality. (And incidentally, when another member of the audience then
asked about the significance behind the couple dozen rubber squeeze toys
on display in a glass case, he explained that he simply happened to
collect them as noisemakers for his band, Destroy All Monsters, and that
they are "outside what I consider appropriate to the rest of the
show".)
Still, there are certainly many childhood Sexual Tales of Terror to be seen:
For
the guys, there's the installation by Kristian Burford, whose point of
departure is that old horror story from sleepaway camp: "During the
later period of Christopher's residence at boarding school he learnt
that if the hand of a sleeping boy were to be submerged in tepid water,
the boy would be made to wet his bed. This has provided him with the
subject for a short video," which is shown on a TV set "in a chamber
that once served as his mother's sewing room." Inside the tent-like
room, itself suggesting a canopy bed, a full-size and decently endowed
male mannequin lies with the tips of his fingers dangling into a bowl of
water. It's hard to say whether he is in modified fetal position or a
state of erotic languor — after all, he's on his mother's spare bed.
The artist manages to turn the museumgoer's voyeurism back on itself,
since in order to view the lushly furnished piece, it's necessary to
peek through holes in the surrounding drapes.
The
girls are offered their own Sexual Tale of Terror in the form of Ron
Mueck's hyperrealistic sculpture, "Ghost" (which, among several other
webpages, can be seen at:
www.doffay.com/external_mueck.htm
). It depicts an adolescent girl in a bathing suit, still not yet at
ease with her own beauty. Here's one version of the way the scene plays
out in real life: this month in phys.ed. they're doing the swimming
unit. When the co-ed group files out to the pool, the Nice Guy in class
says to her, "Hey, I never realized before what nice long legs you
have." The girl answers, "No I don't. I hate my legs." He replies,
"That's not true! You have NICE legs." Turning her head and holding
back the tears, she says, "Please don't ever say anything about my legs
again," and immediately resolves to start another diet as soon as she
gets home. The punchline is that Mueck succeeds in turning the viewer's
pathos back on itself: when you see the piece up close, in its full
seven-foot-high scale, the temptation is to say, "Gee, she really _does_
look rather homely after all."
More
horrors can be found in Christo's "3 Nudes on a Bed" (wrapped, of
course, and guaranteed to induce claustrophobia) and Paul McCarthy's
"Garden Dead Men" (castration anxiety — although this is not to overlook
several dozen other items such as mummies, severed heads, limbs without
bodies, and vice versa).
As
for artistic intent: the first 30 or so minutes of the podium
discussion between Kelley and John Welchman (an art professor and critic
who has collaborated with Kelley on books and other documentation)
consisted of a sober and quite recondite examination of the history of
polychromatic figurative sculpture and its recent revival. It's useful
to know that this is the focus of the show, since Kelley is deliberately
concentrating on "what gets repressed from the culture and erased from
art history" (e.g. several centuries' worth of statues found in Roman
Catholic churches). However, the FORM-related criterion in turn goes a
long way to explain the CONTENT of the show, since the renewed interest
in polychromatic figurative sculpture happened to come at a time when
certain topics also emerged: hence, we get none of George Segal's staid
white monochromatic businessmen, but do get Nancy Grossman's bondage
mask.
At
the end of this very erudite public discussion I asked the woman
sitting next to me, who was reporting on the show for the Süddeutsche
Zeitung, whether Kelley and Welchman had been talking about the same
show that I saw. She admitted that she was wondering the same thing
herself, and then asked me why the people who attended the opening
didn't seem to find anything there funny. She was right: I had
observed that about half of the hundreds of people looked on in mild
appreciation, while the other half exhibited a poker-faced cluelessness.
I myself was bursting into belly laughs for days afterwards at not
only the pieces themselves, but the various juxtapositions:
—
In a glass case, we see plastic models of the death masks of Napoleon,
Lincoln, and Beethoven; placed in a privileged position ABOVE them on
the wall, however, is an anonymous "Death Mask of an Executed Robber and
Murderer, circa 1900" (Luc Sante, call your office).
—
The four aforementioned masks are positioned across from a "Portrait of
Dennis Thompson" by Cynthia "Plaster Caster" Albritton, the ultimate
groupie.
—
In the main gallery a typical parish-church statue (read: tacky) of the
Blessed Virgin Mary herself, with outstretched arms, faces a contented
yet inscrutable stuffed baboon.
—
Sitting unobtrusively off in one corner is a robot model of Andy
Warhol: when he was invited to a TV show to plug his book, "The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol", he chose not to appear live and instead
commissioned someone to construct this model, which was also equipped
with a tape recording of him reading excerpts from the book. (And note
that (i) he was thus hearkening back to his Czechoslovakian roots, since
the word "robot" was first coined by Karel Capek in 1923; and (ii) this
same idea would later be taken up by Kraftwerk, who have gone on entire
concert tours by sending robots in place of themselves.)
—
Ironically, in a gallery full of human figures, the only piece
involving human language is a life-size Erector-set-style robot by
Jonathan Borofsky, which continually pronounces the word "chatter" in a
mechanical voice.
—
And towering over the entire main room of the exhibition is
"Übermensch", a sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, which consists of
granite-grey plastic crags, on top of which is precariously perched a
cartoonish life-size figure of Stephen Hawking.
II. The "Harems"
As
I mentioned above, compared with the original 1993 conception, there is
one crucial new addition to this version of the exhibition. At the
very end, after viewing the main room, a passageway, and a smaller
gallery, one enters the chamber containing "The Harems", whose title is a
term taken from classic psychological literature, where it is used to
describe the fetishistic activity of the collector.
In
this room, Mike Kelley has gathered several of his own personal
collections, including horror and monster bubblegum cards (several
series), marbles, soup spoons, shot glasses, business cards, a
half-dozen unbent wire hangers which had been used to break into cars,
and the aforementioned squeeze toys. At the podium discussion, Kelley
explained that "When you grow up in America, you're surrounded by things
like this" and that this aspect might not come across to a European.
Covering
the four walls of the room are the homemade flannel banners used at
Catholic Mass (e.g. "He is arisen!", "Are you ready for Jesus?",
accompanied by appropriate symbols such as chalice, host, lamb, etc.).
The banners not only imply sacred space, as do the various saints'
statues and relics elsewhere in the exhibit, but immediately negate this
sacred aspect through their status as banal "folk art".
Placed
in the four corners of the room are video monitors which play back DVDs
of Kelley's other collections: comic books (from back when they were
still in the 12- and 15-cent price range), postcards (several thousand
of them), pinups (with hardcore porn stills far outnumbered by fashion
shots and cosmetics ads) and, best of all, HIS RECORD COLLECTION.
The
viewer not only gets to see the covers of all 3000-plus LPs of it, but
hears a one-second sample from each one. Entire decades of your life
will pass before your eyes. The added bonus, however, is that in
addition to the historical and autobiographical, there's a hermeneutic
level: when you hear 12 consecutive blasts of James Brown and
Parliament/Funkadelic samples, you're also hearing what amounts to a
cut-up and condensed history of hiphop. Likewise, when 15 snippets of
Donna Summer and/or Giorgio Moroder go by, it becomes a mini-survey of
house and techno.
My
friend Joe Herter, a Friend of Dorothy who, like Kelley, grew up in
Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, insists that "In
life, there are two kinds of people — those who are size queens, and
those who wish they could be size queens!" If that's the case, Mike
Kelley's is not much bigger than mine: he has more James Brown, I have
more Parliament & Funkadelic; he has more Sun Ra on vinyl, I have
more Ornette. Though with that said, props are due: he's got every
record released on JCOA, along with most of Arista Freedom — not to
mention all the 90s metal I never want to hear again (NiN, Ministry),
exotica like Yma Sumac (are 5 really necessary?) and scads of African
folk records from before the days of "world music", when they
constituted a form of anthropological documentation.
I
myself propose the dichotomy that in life there are "list-makers", and
there are those who consider listmaking to be an unfathomable mental
aberration. And the various anti-listmakers and anti-collectionists
will simply fume and froth at "the Harems" (Melissa Pierson, call your
office) or, at best, view it with the condescension that a pathological
condition deserves. Kelley openly states that he considers collecting
to be a form of compulsion, but I suggest that "the Harems" itself
carries additional aspects of the Uncanny:
"The
most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of
individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the
final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them." (Walter
Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library")
"For
what else is [a] collection but a disorder to which habit has
accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
(Ibid.)
I
would go one step further than Benjamin and propose that the
uncanniness of a collection lies in its illusion of TOTALITY. This is
the same principle by which the I Ching posits that there are only 64
possible situations in the universe; the Tarot has it covered with 72
cards. To the mind of the 10-year-old collector, having the entire
American League laid out in front of you is something greater than the
Britannica and the O.E.D. put together.
Moreover,
still another aspect of the Uncanny is that of infinity (for example,
in the realization that in order to collect the entire set,
theoretically you really might have to buy an infinite number of packs
of cards, or at least every single one ever manufactured), and likewise,
of the process by which something is assigned an imputed economic value
(the entire set seems to immediately take on a value at least one order
of magnitude greater than the price of the packs of cards that make it
up). And lastly, there is a kind of stochastic uncanniness here, in the
illusion that assembling (any?) 3000 albums can somehow sum up an
entire musical culture.
While
the mania of the collector, within the context of the exhibition, is
meant to suggest repetition compulsion, I think that Kelley is also
unintentionally drawing on another aspect of the Detroit myth. After
all, to a stoned Surrealist, the assembled array of business cards
suggests an aerial view of finished cars outside a Michigan factory. To
quote Kodwo Eshun quoting Juan Atkins (one of the three Detroit bruthas
responsible for creating techno): "Berry Gordy built the Motown sound
on the same principles as the conveyor belt system of Ford ... Today the
plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the
cars ... I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry
Gordy's music." So all at once, the Detroit auto industry suggests
repetition AND robots AND the noise so beloved by not only the Stooges
and MC5, but Mike Kelley's own noise band, Destroy All Monsters.
I
myself experienced two different senses of the uncanny on separate
viewings of "the Harems". One standing case displays a couple dozen
announcement flyers of the sort that can be found in any college-town
coffee shop or laundromat: "Apartment to Share", "Tutoring in
Japanese", "Actor Needed to Play Pier Paolo Pasolini" (yikes). The
first time that I visited the show, I was struck by their collective
uncanny quality, since one has to look very closely to spot any clues as
to time or place (all but 2 or 3 don't list any year whatsoever; only 2
or 3 indicate UCLA as a location). Kelley cited Edward Hopper as an
influence on the exhibition, and the flyers suggest an informational
analogue to the visual aspect of a Hopper painting: life somewhere in
America, in some unspecified decade in some unspecified college town.
On my second visit, however, I took a much closer look and discovered
announcements for EVENTS THAT I HAD ACTUALLY ATTENDED — specifically,
concerts by Sun Ra, James Newton, and Cassandra Wilson at Koncepts
Cultural Gallery in Oakland (and to make it even weirder, I was wearing
one of my Sun Ra T-shirts when I noticed this).
Most
importantly, however, the inclusion of "the Harems" means that there
are two very different ways of reading the exhibition. At the podium
discussion I mentioned to Kelley that, since the visitor generally
reaches "the Harems" only after he/she has seen the entire exhibition,
it seems to be a culmination of the entire thing, and is thereby a
commentary on the processes of valorization and canonization with regard
to the works on display elsewhere in the show. Kelley demurred, and
apparently considers "the Harems" to be almost an afterthought.
Nevertheless, one interpretation is that, in a show which is so
concerned with representations of the human body, this final sanctum of
fetishes and cultural memorabilia amounts to the "brain" of the whole
operation.
III. Final Comments
After
the opening I thought about the notable absence of camp at the
exhibition (with the exception of Cindy Sherman, who is of course camp
by definition). Kelley's reason for this, given at the podium
discussion, is that camp is simply not uncanny. But moreover, I
maintain that a camp item always has quotes around it, whereas with the
show's chockablock arrangement of artworks and non-artworks, EVERYTHING
is in quotes vis-à-vis everything else. And there are no camp-style
inside jokes here, because Kelley genuinely likes all this stuff; we all
do.
And
commendably, aside from the pinups of cosmetic ads, there are no brand
names to be seen anywhere: given the trash-culture orientation of the
show, this is an achievement in itself. Kelley explains, "Mass media
has no psychology -- it's [only] a psychology of money."
Lastly,
there's the issue of where Uncle Sigmund fits in with all of this. For
those of you outside Austria, I need to emphasize that, as I was once
told, "Freud is not taken seriously here — he was FROM here," i.e. he
had to go elsewhere in order to be taken seriously. A couple of years
ago, the Sunday book section of the main Vienna newspaper published an
article about Freud; the lead to the article basically read, "After
nearly a century, Freud's ideas are being seriously contested, while in
Austria they never achieved acceptance in the first place" (i.e. "see?
we were right all along"). His concepts are not common currency here,
and the entire psychotherapeutic culture in the U.S. which derives from
Freud exists in a far different form, if at all (and believe me, living
in Austria while the term "passive-aggressive" is entirely unknown is
like living among a tribe of Eskimos who don't have any words for snow).
Nevertheless,
I imagine that Kelley's exhibition would be utter catnip for a number
of Central European writers who appeared around or just after Freud —
e.g. Rilke, Musil (cf. Törless), Gombrowicz, and especially Bruno Schulz
(cf. his "Treatise on Mannequins"). And meanwhile it's one trashy,
trippy delight for the amateur semiotician in all of us.
--John Wojtowicz
(for the ‘04 Andy’s Robot Mix of this piece, see the link posted below in “Jukebox Reflections (Passing By)"
¶ 3/05/2012
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2017 update: http://ubu.com/sound/sonicyouth.html---scroll down this page to:
"Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile"--full performance, 38 minutes.
Sonic Youth with Mike Kelley, Live at Artist's Space, New York City, December 5,1986, with Molly Cleator and Adam Rudolph. Recorded by C. Parkinson.
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"Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile"--full performance, 38 minutes.
Sonic Youth with Mike Kelley, Live at Artist's Space, New York City, December 5,1986, with Molly Cleator and Adam Rudolph. Recorded by C. Parkinson.
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