The Brooklyn Rail

I saw Oppenheimer recently, which reminded me, albeit tendentiously and unevenly, of some of the stakes of nuclear catastrophe and “meltdown.” The more so as I recently used the latter term in the title of a piece on “contingencies of disappearance”—an engagement, or orientation, central to LA artist Mike Kelley’s negotiation with art and the world. I tried to establish that Kelley’s earlier thinking was supplied, even fortified, by both visceral and metaphorical expressions of Cold War era anxiety about nuclear war or large-scale accidental contamination. Prompted by the present roundtable in concert with my current project of collecting essays and articles on Kelley that I have written over (can it be so?) the last three and a half decades, I also realize that I have only somewhat rarely articulated similarly historicizing arguments—at least at macro-social, or even world, scales—as I have tried to tease out different aspects of the artist’s practice.

In an exception that might prove the rule I want to test, I did contend in a talk at a pre-pandemic conference on the psychotropic imaginary that the work of Kelley and his fellow pop-culture-contrarian, Jim Shaw, emerged through the haze of pessimisms, social interrogation, and utopian entropy associated in the US with the energy crisis of the early 1970s and Nixon- and later Reagan-era conservative retrenchments, emblematized by the prosecution and unremitting failure of the “War on Drugs.” Then came the realization that I haven’t done this kind of posing consistently, or at any rate trenchantly, in a good deal of my writing on Kelley—along with the sidecar question: how come?

Why that is, in the context of an artist with a prodigious, and self-proclaimed, capacity for “research”; who harvested images from popular and local cultures with almost gluttonous zeal; who made works, like the book-form Reconstructed History (1989), that were orchestrated by textbook examples (literally in this case) of ideologically-inflected historical productivity; who, almost uniquely among recent artists, didn’t just allude to various ideas and thematic concerns, from Plato and Homer, through Longinus, Burke, Freud and Reich (just a wafer-thin slice of Kelley’s engagements), but read and reread them, making work (Plato’s Cave…; The Sublime; his two exhibitions and associated essays on The Uncanny) that unpack or detonate some of their deepest insights, is a question worth unpacking

One answer is that Kelley’s practice is actually articulated on the very fault-lines between art and history, though mobilized so as to reverse, unstitch or recalibrate standard modes of navigation between them—including many of the relational inferences that underwrite the antinomy between aesthetics and historicization as well as sundry “categorical imperatives,” as Kelley once styled them, tongue-in-cheek after Kant. One measure, albeit “stopgap,” of this engagement is found in Kelley’s unremitting attention to the problematics of reading and seeing, taking-in and giving back, or out. The paintings by young children (who Kelley had actually taught) in We Communicate Only Through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic (1995) are perversely détourned by an adult imaginary arrantly predisposed to psychological models that overcode their purported symbolic reference with incipient sexual and corporeal misdemeanor. Dispositions of form and color are investigated and deployed in another strand of work, but mitigated (or seasoned) by withdrawal from chromatic seduction in Kelley’s most famous sequence of acrylic paintings, the “black and whites”; and by a medley of other means including the corruscating irony of Abuse Report (1995/2007), leveled against the mantras of the “push-pull” compositional regimen associated with Hans Hofman and flaunted as a diktat in Kelley’s art school years.

Another side of all this arrives with Kelley’s thoroughgoing defense of modes of visual production and common making that are not invested in or supported by institutionally sanctioned protocols, “amateur” or common auteur activity that in a conversation we had in 2005 even embraced the apparently rote or nearly invisible modifications associated with pre-digital-era “pan and scan” video editing. In the second part of his career, Kelley came up with a term that homed-in on the stakes of his mobilization of popular visual and sonic cultures along the edges between art and history: “projective reconstruction.” The projective might be aesthetic, fantastical or even the product of relatively anodyne inference; but its spheres of operation give onto the remaking of history, tying its eventuation to the mechanisms by which history is received, processed, and reimagined.

To get to the pith of these engagements, Kelley realized that the historical could not be italicized on its own terms. In fact, when he cycled his interest in nuclear meltdown through a discussion of Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar (1983) by his friend Michael Smith, Kelley contrived, dramatically and facetiously, to close the topic down: “Everyone knows you’re not supposed to like that [subject],” he vented; surely it’s “possible to divorce yourself from that and see it just as a comment on popular games.” He’s backing off, but not down, I think, in an effort to bypass history as cliché and repetition and to get at it by other means.