Fantasy birdhouses, monkey islands, U.F.O. abductions, poltergeist possessions, hillbillies, rockers, goths, stuffed animals, graffitied history books and colorful banners with humorous phrases (most of which can’t be printed in this newspaper): The work of the Detroit-born multimedia artist Mike Kelley has something for everyone.
At Tate Modern, in London, “Ghost and Spirit,” the first British retrospective of Kelley’s work (on through March 9, 2025,) shows how he mirrored America back to itself, like a twisted fun house maze filled with deranged, anarchic duplications.
“My interest in popular forms wasn’t to glorify them, because I really dislike them in most cases,” he said of his work, which draws on references as varied as Pop Art, Roman Catholic ritual, folk traditions, mainstream television and tabloid newspapers. “All you can really do now,” he said, “is work with the dominant culture, flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it.”
Hung chronologically, Tate Modern’s extensive exhibition begins with Kelley’s time at the California Institute of the Arts, a school known for its experimental and political approaches, during the late 1970s. Early photographs, sculptures and works on paper show the artist, recently transplanted from Michigan, where he had been involved in the underground music scene, experimenting with concepts of identity and authorship in what would become a characteristic deadpan-weirdo style.
A 1982 series called “Personality Crisis” has three large paintings of Kelley’s name in different fonts, stacked above each other like an adolescent doodling — sort of. The first variation is in looping cursive; variation two, in angular death metal font; and the third, subtitled “Death Trail of a Flea,” shows the artist’s signature, the ultimate stamp of authenticity, dissolved in an erratic curlicue trail — at once an insect’s dying gasp and a nod to the automatic writing of the Surrealists.
“The Poltergeist” (1979) hangs nearby, a series of drawings and photographs alongside a hallucinatory text that describes the phantom figure: “The Poltergeist is a resident of the subconscious and is freed in fever – – B r a i n F e v e r – – born like a vision in a fevered state.” In four black-and-white photographs, Kelley poses as an artist-medium, eyes rolled back so that their whites gleam eerily, thick strands of cotton floating around his head and streaming from his nose like a visiting spirit taking hold — though there is no promise that it will speak any kind of truth.
Kelley’s aesthetic can be chaotic and uncontainable, and therein lies much of its pleasure. But it makes his work difficult to curate. Its mediums are varied and unwieldy; it defies categorization, rebels against neatness; the selection of Kelly’s biggest hits varies from person to person. Notwithstanding this, the Tate Modern curators — Catherine Wood, Fiontán Moran, and Beatriz Garcia-Velasco — have done an excellent job of orchestrating his vast range.
A large area is dedicated to Kelly’s stuffed animal works, which are perhaps his best known: Grubby and worn from use, the plush toys are sewn together in bizarre configurations, or joined en masse to form a quilt. These childish relics are ripe for sentimental fantasy — where are these rainbow-hued wiener dogs, joined in a line, on their way to? — that we, the viewers, invent ourselves.
Another space holds the sprawling “Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction,” which he worked on from 2000 up until his death in 2012. Videos, sculptures and installations show present-day U.S. high school students recreating images from yearbooks past: goths, nerds, drama queens and hicks come to life, like phantasms of enduring American stereotypes.
Amid the noise, I found myself drawn to Kelley’s more modest and tender works, in which a kind of dreamy escapism is at once sad and romantic. In a large painting of the cosmos, dense with clusters of stars and called “The Fabric of Life” (1985), careful block letters at the top of the canvas spell out a melancholy message: “The fabric of life, to show appreciation for being allowed to be the one little mistake.”
In “The Banana Man” (1983) — a video about a character from a children’s TV show that Kelley heard about, but never saw — features a protagonist who is tragic, ugly and flawed, cries like a baby, and worries about abandonment. (No other artist captures just how lonely and gross childhood can be.)
Another video has an actor dressed as Superman reciting selections from the work of Sylvia Plath: “I felt myself melting and becoming a tiny black dot,” he quotes from “The Bell Jar,” the American writer’s autobiographical novel about a teenage mental breakdown, “like a hole in the floor.” In the work of Kelley, who (like Plath) left us too soon, we go down there, but come up with fistfuls of stars.
“Down down down,” he said, of the creative process and its challenges: “You want the glint. You want a spot of color. You want art.” A relief to see, in this exhibition, the world reflected as ugly, beautiful, dumb and funny as it really is.
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