We Have Scotch'd the Snake — Not Kill'd It
This is a book review. It's 32 years old, by now, and without any possible material inducement to review it, it can only be for personal reasons. This introduction is by way of disclosure, because the risk of disclosure is that of what is, today known as, “over-disclosure.” It is more alike to what the tabloids call a “reveal.” Use of reveal words is a headline trick to lure the reader into reading the full article. It is bait, a "teaser", and a come-on. If you have seen this trick before, you may wish to pass-on to the next headline (or blog post).
The book is about the performance artist Mike Kelley. As I said, I don't wish to over-play my hand, however, I'm certain Mike would understand my approach. Let's get the bad review out of the way, up-front. The book “Mike Kelley, Catholic Tastes” is coldly intellectual. You must bring an appreciation to it, rather than the opposite, which is expect to get something out of it. That said, let it promptly be said the book is a useful overview of Mike's production – up to the date of publication – containing many “hooks” inherent to Mike's style.
Start of personal disclosure: I had a great time last weekend. So great, in fact, that I still can't get it out of my mind -and it's Tuesday. I have a lot of time on my hands. It not that I don't have anything to do with my time. I am an artist with a live-in studio, not to mention the usual distractions. None of it can overcome my thinking, thinking, thinking, (about last weekend). I found it necessary to take a walk. Upon stepping out the door my intentions were confounded. The weather is sublime. This fact is relevant, as we shall see.
The beauty of the day inspired an aphorism: Love is sublime. I don't know if it has been said before (and I don't care), because I thought of it, not anyone I should cite as a point of academic fairness. Much has been said about “the” sublime. It's difficult to define. The cutting edge of Mike's message is that of a heroic stance against institutional banality, the arrogance of canons of excellence, “rage against the machine,” as one of Mike's Rock-star contemporaries puts it. The sublime, for Mike, represents the pinnacle of the institutional system he resents.
I wish to state my position in terms to which even Mike Kelley could relate. The weather, today, is sublime because of the clouds. My first thought was not of the sublime, but to describe the clouds as, in one word, voluptuous. It was then I realized today would be one of my Freudian days. On days such as today, everywhere I look, I see sex symbols. It has the salient effect of putting me in an analytical frame of mind. Of course! The clouds remind me of last weekend. Case closed -for me. It would be unfair to the reader to leave it dangling there.
The immense, billowing cloud looks to me like a cluster of breasts, each wearing a brassiere, or “bra,” which are white, of course, -like clouds. To be very precise, the imaginary bras are of the style fashionable in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s -before the “sexual revolution.” They are robust, full, and firm. I recall hearing, as a youth, a TV advertising slogan for a brand of bra, that it “lifts and separates.” Now, to put the sharpest possible point on it, the baby-boom bra resembled a ballistic missile nosecone in form.
The clouds today are mighty, mother clouds. They always remind me of the mythological gods of ancient Greece. Today, both aspects converge as if by fate. Agreed, I am projecting my own state-of-mind into the natural phenomenon. They are to me not mere clouds. They are sex symbols. The projection of the ego into things is similarly Mike Kelley's creative program. He once stated his belief that all things are associated. It is more than a psychological parlor game. He owes more to the canon of classical taste than he is willing to concede.
All is one, being is non-dual. As I was, today, Mike is ticked by advertising jingles, slogans, popular “truisms” (he actually used the word truism), all the irritating finger-snapping of pop materialism. Mike is not a social critic. He doesn't attack commodity fetishism directly. He expresses his frustration with it. At bottom, it is a geek show which he performs, like watching a bear-baiting event. Mike suffers, no doubt about it. It's my main objection to Mike Kelley's project, that it is hard to watch, without sharing his suffering. He deep-dives into material which no sane artist would touch.
There is art; and there is Kitsch. It is a fact of life that one inescapably follows the other around, as a dependent follows its mama. This, too, is taken into account by the canon of excellence. Mike's creativity is Dionysian, in the Nietzschean sense, as opposed to Apollonian. It's not art. It's not subject to the same criteria as “high” art. It is not “good taste” art. Kitsch has nothing to do with taste. It is an indulgence. One could say Kitsch is anti-taste. Referring to the title of the present book, “Mike Kelley, Catholic Tastes”, he explicitly assumes the role of Antichrist, another one of Nietzsche's topics.
As a synopsis, Kitsch, as was the Dionysian revelry epitomized by the Greek play “The Bacchae,” written by Euripides, involves surrender to forces beyond mortal comprehension. King Pentheus, it will be recalled, perished for his disrespect for the God, Dionysus. Pentheus ought to have joined the festivities without being tricked into it, except for the inconvenience that there would have been no premise for the play. The moral of the story is, if you don't want to have fun, don't attend a performance such as made Mike Kelley a household word. Cross-dressing is not required. A capacity for gaiety is.
Undaunted by the weather, I carried on, proceeding to the library. Reading almost always takes my mind off my cares. I had started reading a rumination on Victorian aestheticism on a previous visit. Today, I found it dull. It had not seemed so previously, for the reason I am attempting to articulate: semantics is syntactic. Meaning depends on context. This isn't my idea. It is roundly accepted among structuralists. It applies in this case. That delving into a book didn't “work” this time, was partly because last weekend was not a “care” in the usual sense, rather the opposite. The dull book I had previously committed to reading at a later date was easily sidetracked by my active stream-of-consciousness.
Anyway (I reasoned), I should be writing, not reading. Writing is an effective way to proactively dismiss idealization. I jotted notes in my journal. Again, it didn't “work,” as what I wrote was concerned with last weekend. Forces bundled is force doubled. A new book was needed. I proceeded to examine the titles on the shelf following the Victorian essay on aesthetics. None was satisfactory, and as I was prepared to continue looking all-day, if necessary, for just the right one, I found the Mike Kelley retrospective, cited above. More eye-catching than his visual imagery was his vocabulary of provocative words. As noted before, subverting the advertising industry by “appropriating the means of production” is Mike Kelley's modus operandi.
Most, if not all, of these verbal cues reached-out to my own tendency to attribute psychological meaning to random features, reinforcing my current disposition. As I well know, it is the fallacy of confirmation bias. What I would add is that it is not an easy thing to turn off-and-on. At the same time, everything Mike Kelley expresses is almost the perfect complement (opposite) of my predilection. This has the effect of stopping my stream-of-consciousness directly, head-on. It is like two stags butting heads. I hope my simile is not vanity.
It's a funny book, which speaks well to the Kelley phenomenon. It was published by The Whitney Museum of American Art, which provided Kelley a forum for his creativity, one which lasted from early in November, 1993, until it closed at the end of February, 1994. From thence, the exhibit traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and finally to Moderna Museet, Stockholm. It is lavish praise for an “artist” who has fewer fans than those offended by his “work.” A scholarly monograph, published by The Whitney, seems excessive. It gives the appearance of something going on, here, as they say...
A Whitney Museum “Director” provides the book's Forward. Acknowledgments and Introduction to the book are provided by Elisabeth Sussman, whose role is that of curator. The Contents of the book list no fewer than 15 contributors, all distinguished experts in the field of art. The second-to-last page is a dedication listing 12 executive board members, from the Chairman, the President, and so on down the list. Beneath the list of Museum executives, is a separate list of what appears to be (without diligent research) a roster of foundation notables. That's a lot of endorsements! It is, at least, probable undue support for a beneficiary who received his Bachelor Degree of Fine Art, only 15 years prior.
That's The Mike Kelley Phenomenon, in a nutshell. So much concentration on institutional “support” indicates (to me) the opposite: Mike Kelley is perceived by the defenders of the canon of excellence in art as an existential threat. It is not so much support, as it is the turning of a flank, a battlefield tactic. Another metaphor that comes to mind is quarantine. In this scenario, Mike Kelley is a dangerous germ that must be contained, eliminated if possible, like Small Pox. A practical analogy is to the policy of the United Nations in appointing the most vicious human rights-offending nation – against all common sense – as Head of Human Rights. It is the final solution of pushing the problem to the limit, of deliberate mishap, not by opposing it head-on.