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Foul Perfection

Essays and Criticism by Mike Kelley
Edited by John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
Cambridge, MA 02142-1493 USA
ISBN -262-61178-3
$24.95 original paperback, 238 pp.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher, Saginaw Valley
State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.


mosher@svsu.edu

Writings by Mike Kelley (b. 1954) are being collected as he nears the half-century mark; a second volume in this series will collect his statements and manifestos, a third his performance scripts.  Kelley learned to play the art game early.  School art involvement in blue-collar Detroit suburb was a realm of prankishness, once cynically winning a patriotic poster contest in collaboration with another disinterested boy stoner by concocting an ugly rendition of George Washington as Marvel Comics villain under a non-sequitor motto.  He was mentored in the University of Michigan by surrealist Jerome Kamrowski, and by John Baldessari at the California Institute of Arts.  His work has encompassed drawing, painting (sometimes by commissioned billboard painters), performance (including noise rock), video, and more.  Too many remember him best for his early 1980s sculptural installatons inovolving macrame stuffed animals, the most debased readymades readily found in thrift stores and garage sales.  One yarn creature, as well as his highschool portrait, appeared on the cover of a CD by his friends Sonic Youth.

Following his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art at age 40, Kelley
turned attention to a process he called in a 2000 radio interview "historicizing myself".  One exploration of his past took the part of reconstructing the schools he attended in his life as architectural models designed only by memory.  He re-examined and reissued the work he did as an undergraduate with his cronies as Destroy All Monsters.  Raiding his old shoeboxes full of cassette tapes, he oversaw the issue of a three-CD collection http://www.mikekelley.com/compound.html and other past collaborative projects.

In "Foul Perfection", Kelly composes essays on a variety of engaging subjects that have influenced or moved him, the artist as ethusiast.  A piece from the 1980s examine the lingering effect of H.P. Lovecraft's American gothic horror novels on both movie set design and noise bands. Another is an appreciation of strippers at the Ivar Theater, with a sensual and clinical description of the women there.  He gives credit to the Ivar to inspire him to use a ramp in his performance with Sonic Youth "Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile" at the Artists' Space in New York in 1986.  Sometimes a figurative artist, Kelley is attentive to the body and has turned his attention to diverse appearances in art.  He writes on caricature, citing E.H. Gombrich and Adolf Loos, novelist J.G. Ballard, goofy 1950s cartoonist Basil Wolverton and then contemporary sculptors.  He compares infantilism in an odd movie by Hollywood director Ted Post and Harvey Comics' Baby Huey, an immense and obese cartoon duckling.

In an essay on the uncanny in figurative art, Kelley's examining eye ranges over the verist or hyperrealistic sculptures of Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea, puppets, the monster-movie memorabilia of collector Forrest J. Ackerman, plus letters to a sex advice column in Penthouse magazine.  He locates their relevance to an understanding of Robert Graham's athletes and Edgar Degas' sculpted ballerina.  Kelley ties Hans Bellmer's doll (which may have helped drive Bellmer's companion Unica Zurn to suicide), inflatable sex dolls and the famous psychology experiement by Dr. Albert Bandura of adults modeling doll-beating behavior that was picked up by children. Kelley perceptively and wittily questions the experiment's very purpose, asking if it primarily "allowed adults the pleasure of beating statues (using the tried and true excuse that it helps children in some way)?".  To the recognitions these signposts of the uncanny evoke he might have added the work of his friend, college housemate and Monster Jim Shaw, whose cultural referents to American boyhood of men our age in installations like  "My Mirage" at the UC Berkeley Museum elicit feelings of amazement, identification and awe.

Musings upon style and identity in the Glam Rock of his highschool and college days, "Cross-Gender/Cross-Genre" plumbs psychedelic era (mid-sixties to mid-seventies) work, including that of Jack Smith, whose "Flaming Creatures" was shut down by police when shown at University of Michigan four years before Kelley matriculated there.  John Waters, photographer Eleanor Antin and the rock acts New York Dolls and David Bowie are all cited.  One might add to this list the costumed performances of Pat Oleszko, like Kelley also springing from Michigan and active in his student days there.  For a showing Kelley organized, he writes of Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart" (1939), a surrealist recutting of adventure potboiler "East of Borneo" much in the manner of Craig Baldwin www.othercinema.com recutting found movies for political effect today.  Cornell's film is paired with a Mexican horror film "Caltika the Immortal Monster" whose weird image sticks in Kelley's memory (as this reviewer will never forget those killer shrews...)

Kelley has little new to say on Survival Research Laboratories or Marcel Broodthaers--editor Welchman should have excised these minor musings--and provides some readable but unmemorable journalistic commentary on artists David Askevold, Douglas Huebler and John Miller.  Examining the work of Paul Thek's grisly, poignant "Death of a Hippie" and Cody Hyun Choi's paintings in the pink antacid solution Pepto-Bismol, Kelley is inspired and insightful, producing intelligent and erudite writing.  He is expecially engaged by Öyvind Fahlström, a 1960s painter whose work was crowded, cartoony and political.  The first two adjectives might be applied to work by Kelley, who has acknowleged the influence of over-the-top revolutionary rhetoric of the Michgan's White Panther Partyin his teenage years.  When Kelley's Punk aesthetic is attracted (often with a frisson of revulsion), stimulated, excited and confronted by curiosities, then the artist in the writer connects with artworks and imagery in novel, thoughtful and exciting ways.

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Updated 1st November 2003


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