Mike Kelley, Batman and serial killers: London’s gritty era

I’ve spent the past few days in the company of superheroes, criminals and sordid-looking plush toys. No, I didn’t get locked in the stockroom of Forbidden Planet. London is currently hosting three exhibitions that I’m unofficially billing as the ‘Dark Night Trilogy’. In Covent Garden, you’ll find ‘Batman Unmasked’, an immersive show centred around props and costumes from the caped crusader’s movies. Over in Bankside, Tate Modern has just opened a sprawling Mike Kelley retrospective, ‘Ghost and Spirit’, the late artist’s first UK institutional show in 30 years. Meanwhile, deep under The Vaults in Waterloo, ‘Serial Killer: The Exhibition’ is crammed with crime scene reconstructions, morbid souvenirs and artworks produced by some of the worst people who ever lived. These shows all explore the shadowy side of the American psyche and tread on similar territory: gothic pop culture, mythology and the entertainment industry. Plus, they’re all within walking distance of each other, so I dare you to test your stamina and sanity by seeing all three back-to-back.

You’ll enter the Batman exhibition through a sliding bookcase in Wayne Manor, obviously. Inside are several galleries, all with the kind of lighting you might expect in The Penguin’s ‘Iceberg Lounge’ nightclub. The rooms are kitted out with displays of art-department paraphernalia from films such as Batman Forever, Suicide Squad and The LEGO Batman Movie (literally the tiny Lego Batman mask used in the film). I’m a sucker for a film prop in a cabinet, I always want to break the fourth wall. There it was: the actual bat suit that Robert Pattinson wore for his recent hunk-goth-sadboi portrayal of Bruce Wayne. And Uma Thurman’s iconic Poison Ivy outfit from the much-derided Batman and Robin – the very look every girl I grew up with stole for Halloween at some point.

The mean critic within me wants to say that the Arkham Maze section seemed lame compared to the rest of the show: it had a whiff of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience but with better production values and no Oompa Loompa. But hey, I got some cute pics of my boyfriend in Poison Ivy’s layer and that’s what counts, right? We also got a great pic of us dangling from a Gotham rooftop. One thing this show does not lack is friendly staff and great photo ops. I think more galleries should offer photo stage sets like this. It provides a great souvenir for the visitor, and at £13.50 a pop this could be an excellent revenue stream for institutions facing Arts Council funding cuts.

At Tate Modern, a Mike Kelley banner emblazoned with the words “Pants Shitter & Proud” could be a great background image for your new Hinge profile pic. Just remember to give us two thumbs up and your best smile. Meanwhile, Superman (Batman’s frenemy) makes a subtle cameo appearance in a set of works called the ‘Kandors’ series. These humongous, fluorescent bell jars glow, fizz, and swirl — and need to be seen in real life to fully appreciate their awe factor. In comic lore, the city of Kandor was miniaturised by an evil alien and trapped inside a jar. Kelley was never actually a fan of Superman comics, but he liked this idea. An accompanying video piece entitled Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath does exactly what the titles says (although history has imbued it with a much sadder reading, unavoidable once you learn that Kelley and Plath both took their own lives).

The rest of the show is a rowdy, boisterous extravaganza that culminates with Kelley’s gesamtkunstwerk Day is Done, where old high school yearbook photos are restaged with production values worthy of Hollywood (or was that Gagosian?). Although two of my favourite pieces are much smaller, low-budget affairs where Kelley explores adolescent juvenility. An early artist book called Why I Got into Art features re-photographed nude images of artists such as Carolee Schneemann, the pictures blurred because Kelley had smeared his camera lens in Vaseline, enhancing the ‘softcore qualities’ of his subjects. It evoked a horny art student with no Wi-Fi and nothing to jerk off to apart from a monograph of seminal 70s performance art (we’ve all been there). Meanwhile, Reconstructed History features photos of American monuments crudely defaced with a sharpie. The Abraham Lincoln statue grunts as he takes a dump, the dome of The Capitol building is turned into a massive tit. For most people, drawing a big willy or a pair of boobies on a newspaper image is the only piece of subversive art they will ever unknowingly produce. I think that’s great – I think Kelley did too, and he recognised this and wanted to celebrate it. I love how Kelley took the low, hand-me-down aesthetic of the junk shop and held it up as smart, intelligent art. It’s no surprise that he’s such an enduring influence. Mark Leckey describes his first encounter with Heidi (a 1992 video collaboration between Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy) in an essay for the catalogue: “the use of a dumb puppet show to look at things dialectically or in terms of conflict showed me a way to make art about intellectual ideas that didn’t fall into the trap of academic discourse.”

Some other artworks that don’t fall into this trap are on display at the Serial Killer exhibition in Waterloo, many of them executed whilst their creators were killing time on death row. A gentle, inoffensive flower sketch by Dorothea Puente (AKA The Death House Landlady) could easily be the work of a recent Royal Drawing School graduate. A colourful composition by Charles Manson is done in the trippy, LSD aesthetic of the hippie movement that spawned him, and whose ‘Peace and Love’ vibe he ultimately destroyed. The most infamous art on display is by John Wayne Gacy, ‘The Killer Clown’. His creepy little clown self-portraits have a crude, super-flat style to them. Dare I say it… I think they’re pretty good. Coincidentally, Mike Kelley featured one of them as part of a 1988 installation piece called Pay For Your Pleasure. Now in the permanent collection of LA’s MOCA, each time this work is exhibited, an artwork by “a violent criminal in (location of exhibition)” is to be included as part of the piece. This project isn’t part of the Tate show, which is a shame – I’d liked to have seen a Ronnie Kray painting exhibited under the same roof as Picasso and Matisse.

Gacy’s section is the most impressive, if ‘impressive’ is the right word: a repulsive ‘Pogo the Clown’ effigy greets visitors at the top of the stairs, which leads into a full recreation of his kitchen. Shout out to the lady who had a rest by casually sitting on Gacy’s floorboards – right next to the open grave full of skeletons. Another visitor tried to compare the size of her handprint to that of Jeffrey Dahmer’s. It’s worth pointing out that 90% of the visitors to this busy show seemed to be women: women by themselves, women with friends, mothers and daughters, one woman even had a newborn baby in a sling. I wonder if they get hen parties at the weekend? The few men that were there were often with a partner, and I felt out of place as a lone male homosexual (which coincidentally fits the profile of several of the serial killers featured). In fact, as you learn from the display boards, most of the victims of these killers were women and gay guys, and I wonder if that’s what draws us to stuff like this, the titillation that it could have been us in a body bag?

‘Serial Killer’ is encyclopedic in scale – I was there for two and a half hours. Anyone who enjoys binging on true crime documentaries needs to get off the couch and see this. Not all the serial killers featured are American (we’re treated to an “autographed” Christmas greeting from Rose West, as well as Dennis Nilsen’s typewriter) but I think the serial killer entertainment industry is very much an American export. A waxwork of Ed Gein (sitting at his sewing machine, furnishing a new lampshade from human skin) would feel at home within Mike Kelley’s cult curatorial project ‘The Uncanny’, or Jeffrey Deitch’s legendary ‘Post Human’ show (currently resurrected and updated over in LA).

Each of these shows is crammed full of objects which have all been imbued with a kind of Midas Touch aura, “the ghost and spirit” that Kelley was so fascinated by. That chic purple suit is special because Joaquin Phoenix wore it in Joker. That guitar in a museum cabinet is worth our attention because it was once strummed by an infamous cult leader. That giant, pink, cuddly snake toy is now an important piece of art because Mike Kelley made it so. One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and all these items have value for particular audiences with very different tastes and demographics. I happened to fit all three; nerdy, morbid, artworld guy. I mulled this over whilst eating lunch in a caff on Lower Marsh. But as I was chewing through my burrito, with its ground-up beef mince, I couldn’t help thinking of all those cannibal killers I had just been reading about, and I nearly vomited into my Tate catalogue.