Cacophonous, confusing, rammed with videos, audio works, sculptures, architectural models, photographs, drawings and handwritten statements, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is a full-on speed trip through the American artist’s life, reaching right back into his Catholic, working-class childhood in Detroit. The show swerves by the artist’s teenage troubles, his time in bands and then college in Ann Arbor and at CalArts, and on through his full-tilt career right up to his sudden, grim and horrible death by his own hand, at the age of 57, in January 2012. At the end of that year, an extensive survey of the artist’s work (which had been several years in preparation) opened at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. The mid-career survey became a sudden full stop. But Kelley’s influence continues, and he feels as current now as at the time of his death.
Ghost and Spirit opens with a white-draped apparition with a monkey-like head peaking round the darkened entrance to the show, and ends with a video of a firework dripping flames from a bridge at night, where, according to urban Detroit legend, a spirit is invoked if the bridge is firebombed. Teen-flick myth though it is, the flames dripping through the dark evoke something more than kerosene.
Found high-school yearbook photographs generate entire bodies of works, plays and videos, restaged scenes, installations and texts. There’s people in Kiss face-paint larking around, horror-movie shrieking and mayhem projected on screens above our heads, and stuff everywhere as we make our way around. The screaming, the wailing, the muttering and the desperate cries, the uncanny, doomy voices and tales of alien abduction echoing from inside a lumpy tin-foil asteroid – the din of it all is a kind of exorcism. We swing past the banners saying “F*ck You” and “Pants Shitter and Proud”, and whatever it is that’s hidden under a bulge in a kiddy’s crocheted blanket.
Down on the floor are a number of little arrangements of everyday objects lain out on small mats, which might be part of a children’s game or, equally, evidence of some humiliating ritual devised by an adult. Even a display of the paraphernalia used in a 1970s student performance appears to have some arcane and furtive purpose. There’s no safe place in Kelley’s art, no innocence to return to.
This curatorial excess is all very much in the spirit of Kelley’s own installation style. If Ghost and Spirit is excessive, it is still not excessive enough. Kelley was enormously prolific, and so much is missing here. But still, everything would be too much. Along the way we discover Kelley’s hatred of indoor pot plants. We meet skulls and bleeding hearts and drawings of garbage, and an eviscerated corpse, including the guts, made entirely from soft toys.
We visit acid guru Timothy Leary’s family counseling centre (really, it is just a bunch of colour photographs of couples and kids doing happy family things beside the paddling pool) and we take a tour of photographs portraying familiar sights around Detroit and its suburbs. Here’s the mental hospital, there are the remains of a bonfire. Here’s a hamburger joint and there’s the wrecked interior of a shack. Grandma’s house (all boarded up), objects in local museums and a horrible 1950s sculpture in the mall: all these places and things meant something to Kelley and the photos are haunted by memories we can’t share. The word familiar seems important.
Kelley’s work is full of detours. In fact, it is all circumnavigation and rummaging around and acts of reconstruction and deconstruction. He made large scale models of his own childhood home and tried to reconstruct the city of Kandor on the planet Krypton, where Superman was born. Kelley’s models, videos and light-box depictions of Kandor, shrunken by the evil Brainiac and encased in bell jars, are based entirely on the drawings of the city depicted by various illustrators in Superman comic books. Kelley said he didn’t much care for Superman but his origin story, and the idea of the home you can never return to, appealed to him.
Kelley also made models and plans of his own high school, based on his memory, and paid particular attention to the details he couldn’t remember, as if these blank spots signalled events he had somehow repressed. Another tabletop rat-maze maquette depicts a basement at CalArts, where he studied, a sub-level divided into empty room after empty room. The parts he couldn’t recall are lined with pink crystals. Why pink? “Regardless of meaningless, exterior coloration, it’s all pink inside,” Kelley wrote. Yrrrghhh. There’s a sealed plain metal room built into the plywood model, towering over one end of it, which, we are told, is fitted with shelving units holding various phallic objects “Referencing UFO abduction stories in which aliens probe humans with similar devices”.
Kelley plays with popular culture and the abject, his deft, dramatic sense (how much to conceal, how much to reveal) and knowing how far to go – then going further – and his painful evocations of his own past add up to something more than the autobiographical. His art may be quintessentially American, but is also about what is shared more generally. He could make bed-sheet ghosts and cotton-wool ectoplasm genuinely frightening, not least because they invoke dark and sinister traits. “A ghost is someone who disappears,” he wrote. “An empty concept. A spirit is a memory … is what remains.” It is impossible to read Kelley’s work without sensing the persistence of that spirit.
