The noise hits you first – a wailing, shrieking howlround of slasher-movie drama. Footsteps get closer, heartbeats pound faster, girls scream against swirling winds. Ectoplasm streams from the nostrils of the artist, in giant photographs, poltergeists are summoned in spidery drawings. Halloween is just around the corner.
The world of Mike Kelley (1954-2012) is locked in time and place, specifically the late-20th-century US on a twisted trick-or-treat spree. He’s at your door with his poker-faced glee, ripping up Sesame Street with sculptures of soft toys having sex, scrawling captions – “Barf!” “Grunt!” – on photographs of US presidents, appliqueing “F*ck You … Now Give Me a Treat Please” in primary coloured felt on a Sunday school banner.
The US high-school yearbook gets ripped apart in graffitied images, live performances and cacophonous movies. Eighties MTV is parodied in alarming videos. Kelley is flagrant, antagonistic, busily antiheroic in every kind of medium and it is no surprise that he played noise music with successive bands. The most widely reproduced of all his artworks remains the photograph he took of an orange crocheted alien, bashfully smiling and forlorn, used on the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty.
Kelley came from a blue-collar family in suburban Detroit; his lifesize replica of their clapboard home is now permanently parked outside the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Irish American, Roman Catholic – the Virgin Mary appears in effigy throughout this show – he was obsessed with UFOs, subversive comics, telly and art. “I was part of the TV generation. I was pop… The world seemed to me a media facade, a fiction, and a pack of lies. This, I believe, is what has come to be known as the postmodern condition.”
The teen who never grew up was his modus operandi. There is no sense of evolving experience in Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (though there must have been in reality: Kelley took his own life at the age of 57). In the earliest works here, he is playing with his signature like any kid; except that his tryouts are huge, and framed, and in a museum. He draws his bedroom floorplan, with a quasi-existential monologue about whether a houseplant might be trying to influence him or take over his space. There’s even a star traced, inevitably, in his own spunk.
He moves to LA, a city literally made of images. At CalArts, an institution famous for its conceptual art, Kelley builds white-painted birdhouses with titles that have more to do with people than birds. Gothic Birdhouse has a nine-tiered roof. It’s a play on antiseptic American minimalism, a text tells us, accompanying the object in its antiseptic glass case. It is an obvious problem for this show, now on the third stop of its four-museum tour, that it can never recreate the raucous environments in which Kelley’s art was seen and made.
He first found fame with groups of soft toys having sex, being pulled from the backsides of fellow artists, or piling up in abject configurations. Poor little innocents that were stitched and knitted and stuffed by adults, then imposed on children as forced entertainment, they now appear discarded and ruined. But whatever else they are used for (and I never think Kelley has thought this one through: what parent hasn’t tried to find the lost bunny, or replace the teddy bear’s missing glass eye), they supply his breakthrough work, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987).
A huge canvas writhes with stuffed animals, rag dolls and knitted blankets; soiled and damaged and accompanied by a table of multicoloured, guttered and phallic candles. The title is all about adults guilt-tripping kids. But stand away from it, and you can just make out the send-up of another of America’s sweethearts, the gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism.
Kelley put on many performances in LA. Some were never filmed, so you have to make do with the props. But even when they were, it is extraordinarily hard to catch their tone. Here is the yellow sailor suit he wore for the Banana Man (a children’s TV character he never actually saw, but heard described), a cascade of white cloth ejaculating from its crotch. And here is the grainy film itself, with a ropy soundtrack that shifts from shaggy dog stories to a balloon debate (quite literally involving a balloon) about who to save in a car crash.
If you had to be there, then, you’re certainly not there now. One of Kelley’s main works, Educational Complex – a vast architectural model of all the schools he ever attended – is too fragile to show. They have the blueprint at Tate Modern instead, with its obvious jokes about indoctrination rooms and a text about repressed memory. They have his long-running obsession with Kandor, capital city of Superman’s home planet of Krypton, played out in magical cities of coloured glass, sometimes beneath glass domes, or inside capsules swirling with fog, reworked as cartoons, or glowing light box images. Kids will love these imaginary memories of a mythical city. But you’ll somehow have to get them through the next gallery.
Which is where the show really turns into a cacophonous frathouse onslaught, with works from Kelley’s epic multipart Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series (2000-2011). You are right in the howling, deafening nightclub now, with cruddy films sending up after-school activities – the nativity play going wrong, the Halloween entertainment turning bloody, the musical with all the songs rewritten. Art-class shots of girls against diaphanous curtains turn into pole-dancing projections, accompanied by a revolving curtain that flails round and round the gallery.
Pole dancers and screaming pigtailed schoolgirls: there are barely any other representations of women in this show.
In the final film at Tate Modern, a lipsticked skull leers at you out of swirling blackness, while a voice put through primitive distortion rambles on about a satanic trip through the universe (possibly: it’s hard to hear), riffling through your existential psyche. Oceans and continents of bubbles appear to gather on the darkened screen; but you’re not deceived. It is just the artist literally pissing down a drain.
The question that irresistibly presents itself is whether this art is actually more than adolescent. My sense is that Kelley wasn’t interested in deception. When he draws the racist, homophobic Republican senator Jesse Helms with a swastika on his forehead, he means it. When he embroiders “Pants Shitter” on a trade union flag, he means it. What would be the point of all the gross-out if it was just a performance?
And perhaps he thought he was taken too seriously by the blue chip art world at whose repressions he sneered? The catalogue is thick with carefully selected quotations. And the wall texts at Tate Modern do their best to dignify his wild instincts with solemn art history, but Kelley cannot be ironed flat.
There is no theorising “F*ck You” or “Bend Over”. There is no getting away from the confusion, aggravation, boredom and din, no bypassing the wilful crassness. If you want to be in the grungy fug of his clever-boy brain, you will love this show; and, sure enough, Kelley is catnip to fellow artists, male admirers and people who can’t abide the sanctimonious art trade. But he is no Antonin Artaud, or Iggy Pop or Paul McCarthy. The true anarchic freak-out just never arrives.
