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.
