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.