Mike Kelley (1) (1954–2012)

The March issue of Texte zur Kunst is dedicated to Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, who died one year ago. During the three decades in which he was active as an artist, the vast majority of criticism written about Kelley – both positive and negative – was produced by members of his own generation. For them, his œuvre constitutes an intervention into what had been the status quo. His examination of culture’s objects, practices, and narratives revealed the contradictions between show more hegemonic culture and socially marginal cultural forms. In doing so, the work constructed a politics embracing difference and thus suggested the potential of living and working on the fringes of, but in relation to, given norms.

In contrast to its initial impact, however, for growing numbers of younger artists and writers, Kelley’s work sets the standard by which others are measured. The authors of this issue know him first and foremost as a representative of the status quo – cultural analyst, subversive, and artist-critic par excellence. This raises the question of the critical potential maintained by Kelley’s work. As several of the texts argue, meaning was often located at the moment of viewer reception and comprised the various psycho-emotional implications of that encounter. As such, the unending operation of Kelley’s œuvre will arguably be the process by which it takes its place in history, by which contemporary cultural production negotiates the work’s continued relevance.

Most of the contributors to this issue are either former students of guest editor John Miller, faculty colleagues of his, or both: from the School of Visual Arts, Yale University, Columbia University, and Barnard College (notably, Miller’s own friendship with Kelley began under the ægis of the California Institute of the Arts). In other words, what has shaped the discourse resulting in this issue is an ineluctable educational complex, which is a primary apparatus for producing and reproducing not only artistic subjectivities but also differentials in social class. In his own work, Kelley facetiously equated the educational apparatus with repressed memory syndrome, i.e., the inability to recall sites of sexual abuse, but this joke clearly served as an allegory for the unconscious component of all ideological formations. It is hard to see beyond the horizon of our cultural formation, yet that is one of the enduring challenges of Kelley’s work. This, too, was the charge faced by the authors of this issue.

Victoria Camblin views the artist’s work through the formal dichotomy of “soft” and “hard” to identify Kelley’s critique of dominant cultural forms by combining them with the often-repressed desires for soft bodies and fluid exchanges. Following a similar logic, Samuel Draxler’s discussion of Kelley’s well-known craft works reveals the slippery boundary between the performances of masculinity and femininity; Kelley, he suggests, depicts both genders simultaneously. Last year, Kelley’s “Mechanical Toy Guts” and Leigh Ledare’s “Alma” (1991/2012, respectively 2012) were exhibited in adjacent rooms. Ledare reflects on the way in which both artists’ works thematized subject formation, given viewers’ recognition of the conventions characterizing their social context. Adam Putnam’s quasi-fictionalized account of a recent meeting with the editors and authors of this issue sets experience on the same level as memory and repression, building a connection to the author’s first encounter with Kelley’s “Educational Complex” (1995).

Both Matt Keegan and Hannah Kahng turn their attention to Kelley’s video works: Keegan focuses on the role most often played by Kelley in his video-based collaborations with other artists – that of a child, a son, a student. Kahng, on the other hand, casts Kelley’s formal language in light of recent TV and filmic conventions. As viewers of Kelley’s work in general, argues Annie Ochmanek, we are confronted with our tendency to assume the work’s inherent entanglement with the artist’s subjectivity, a habit leveraged by Kelley. “Pay for Your Pleasure” (1988), Kelley’s installation comprising portraits of artists and thinkers captioned by quotes regarding violence, addresses the conventional understanding of art as aggression channeled by the artist into creation; Piper Marshall proposes that the work, too, says more about our desires as viewers.

In an attempt to act out the function of writing within Kelley’s artistic practice, Nicolás ­Guagnini calls on the writings Robert Smithson, Asger Jorn, and Kelley himself, creating a dialogue between them. Sam Lewitt describes the very penetrating nature of Kelley’s view on culture; in building a relationship to historical precedents while exercising an ironic sneer, the work, Lewitt explains, is very much indicative of its time. In order to broaden the cultural perspective taken by the present issue of this bilingual magazine, and to represent the German-American composition of the current editorial board, we invited Philipp Kaiser, Jutta Koether, and Martin Prinzhorn – representatives of two generations from three different German-speaking countries – to talk about Kelley’s significance for a European context.

The texts included in this issue engage themes that were central to Kelley’s own artistic practice, thus arguing by extension that room still exists for new and contradictory evaluations of the artist’s work in relation to the frameworks of culture and its history. A tacit assumption pervades all the texts: That it is possible to recognize complex inner workings of a division of culture through the mobilization and analysis of specific examples of its products. However, given the tendency of forms and practices to fade out of use over time, it is Kelley’s analytic methodology, rather than his individual works, which holds critical potential both now and moving forward.

John Beeson / Oona Lochner / John Miller show less

Destroy All Monsters's wild and reckless behavior and performance art comes to life here with flyers, ransom note graphics, correspondence, photos and drawings all beautifully. The collective's Mike Kelley, Niagara and Ron Asheton of the Stooges figure in most of the pics. This publication collects from those six "Destroy All Monster" zines collage, writing, photography and other miscellanea by Kelley, Loren, Niagara and Shaw, and more.

One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954--2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art -- relentless examinations of subjectivity and of society that are both sinister and ecstatic. With a wide range of media, Kelley's work explores themes as varied as post-punk politics, religious systems, social class, and repressed memory. Using architectural models to represent schools he attended, his 1995 show more work, Educational Complex, presents forgotten spaces as frames for private trauma, real or imagined. The work's implications are at once miniature and massive. In this book, John Miller offers an illustrated examination of this milestone work that marked a significant change in Kelley's practice. A "complex" can mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome, or a political apparatus, and Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of inquiry, considering the making of the work, examining it in terms of education and trauma (sexual or otherwise), and investigating how it tests the ideological horizon of art as an institution. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands his political and aesthetic focus, including not only such artifacts as generic forms of architecture but (inspired by the infamous McMartin Preschool case) popular fantasies associated with ritual sex abuse and false memory syndrome. Through this archaeology of the contemporary, Miller argues, Kelley examines the mandate for education and the liberal democratic premises underpinning it. show less

Formed in 1973, the Detroit band Destroy All Monsters was a wild and reckless synthesis of psychedelia, proto-punk, heavy metal, noise and performance art. The collective hailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and consisted of Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Niagara and Jim Shaw (with later members including Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis of the MC5). Later emerging as extremely distinctive individual artists, collectively the group forged new terrain in art, music, performance, theater and show more video. Destroy All Monsters released very little recorded music until Thurston Moore issued a three-CD compilation in 1994, but they published six issues of a now legendary and much sought-after zine, also titled Destroy All Monsters. This publication collects those six zines, released between 1976 and 1979, and also includes parts of a lost seventh issue that never saw publication. The Destroy All Monsters zines comprise a vibrant array of collage, writing, photography and other miscellanea by Kelley, Loren, Niagara and Shaw, and together provide insight into the collective's kaleidoscopic vision of the dystopian values of their time. show less