Mike Kelley’s ghost looms over the newest exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA like an itch that won’t go away. His is the largest, most imposing presence in the show, though, paradoxically, he’s not physically around anymore.
Through July 28, the recently re-energized Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a sprawling retrospective on the deceased artist, who committed suicide in January 2012. Dead or alive, Kelley is considered one of the most influential artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and he easily tops critics’ lists of important contemporary artists.
“Mike Kelley” features hundreds of works created between the mid-1970s up until his death at age 57. It’s a homecoming of sorts, as Kelley spent the majority of his life and career in Los Angeles.
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam organized this show, and the curator is former Stedelijk director Ann Goldstein. The exhibition traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, then MoMA PS1 in New York, before its final stop in Los Angeles, where MOCA curator Bennett Simpson organized the show.
It’s a massive exhibit, covering all 24,500 square feet of exhibition space at the Geffen Contemporary, which used to be a police car garage. An additional gallery at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location features about 20 Kelley paintings.
In short, “Mike Kelley” is like a carnival. The lights inside have been dimmed, and various video works light up and shout out, demanding the visitor’s attention.
Kelley was an extremely prolific and inventive artist, working in nearly every medium you can think of, and building extravagant sculptures and installations. A multi-component video installation, “Switching Marys” (2004-05), is one of the first projects the visitor sees upon entering the museum. Two women dressed as the Virgin Mary – one holding her hands upward and the other stretching them downward – switch places on two oval video screens. A wooden ladder adorned with a drape and plastic flowers holds the projector in place, while speakers emit weird noises and music.
Though he masked his work in humor and the ridiculous, Kelley frequently addressed social themes such as class, repressive institutions, sexuality, politics and religion. He says he entered the art world through the counter-culture, and one can see a punk aesthetic and attitude infusing much of his work, particularly the early stuff.
Indeed, a few listening stations play some of Kelley’s punky, noise-fueled music, when he was with the band Destroy All Monsters.
Perhaps the most impressive installation is “Pay for Your Pleasure” (1988), a long gallery covered with hand-painted posters of famous philosophers, poets, politicians and artists. Quotes exploring the relationship between art making and criminality accompany each portrait, and an amateurish portrait by a convicted criminal hangs at one end of the gallery. Kelley instructed that a donation box for victims’ rights be placed outside this installation.
“Pay for Your Pleasure” is an intellectually stimulating work, and is also a pleasure to simply walk through, despite the occasionally dark and morbid quotations.
Another large, dark, open space is dedicated to Kelley’s colorful, glowing “Kandor” sculptures. The artist was obsessed with the fictional city of Kandor, the capital of the planet Krypton, from which Superman fled to Earth. Kandor is portrayed in various settings – on pedestals, in a bottle, as a cluster of resin mushrooms and on lenticular screens. One gets a sense of stepping into another world when viewing this section.
Kelley’s tapestries and stuffed animal sculptures are also well represented in this exhibition. He was interested in how seemingly innocent plush toys conveyed other, darker meanings when found in thrift stores and bunched and stitched together.
One of Kelley’s most famous works, “More Love Hours Than Can Ever be Repaid” (1987), hangs on a wall furthest from the museum entrance, along with a replica of “The Wages of Sin” (1987), which originally featured lit candles. Apparently, having open flames in a closed space such as the Geffen Contemporary is a safety hazard. Thus, the unlit replica, created in 2013 by the Mike Kelley Studio, sits by the large, bizarre tapestry of bulky stuffed animal parts.
One small flaw in this exhibit is the placement, or complete omission, of some of the identifying text panels, or didactics. One occasionally has to search far and wide for the titles of artworks, and in the case of at least one installation – featuring a mannequin of Col. Sanders looking onto a glass encased box – there’s no title to be found anywhere. Incidentally, the title is a long one: “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 (The King and Us/The Queens and Me)” from 2010.
Also, one can easily miss some of Kelley’s larger, more outlandish sculptural works, which are upstairs in the Paul Schimmel Gallery and next door in “Building Four.” Missing these, especially “Black Out” (2001) and “Frame and Frame” (1999) would be a shame. Some kind of identifying sign indicating more art upstairs or next door could prove helpful.
But overall, “Mike Kelley” is an outstanding presentation of the artist’s challenging, humorous, irreverent and uncompromising achievements. With his death still fresh in many minds, this retrospective should fill visitors with wonder, sadness and a strange sense of fun.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6026 or rchang@ocregister.com
