Rituals, cults, conspiracies: the living memory of Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley took on class, culture, gender and trauma with irreverence and ironic bad taste. He ridiculed authorities and mocked good taste with sculptures, performances and installations that were at times philosophical and at times superficial. It was the “heartbreaking, jaw-dropping beauty” of a filthy, second-hand stuffed toy animal laid on a stained blanket on a pristine gallery floor that led the transgressive film director John Waters to describe Kelley as “the man who made pitiful seem sexy”.

Kelley (1954-2012) was fascinated by family relationships, institutional structures, rituals, cults, conspiracy theories, adolescent humour and the loss of innocence. Above all he was concerned with memory; its repression, fallibility and persistent grip. Shortly before his apparent suicide in 2012, Kelley wrote that people are either ghosts or spirits; ghosts ultimately vanish, while spirits persist. Kelley called himself a ghost, but one decade following his death, exhibitions in Paris and Los Angeles show how his legacy endures.

The exhibition, curated by Tate’s Catherine Wood and Fiontán Moran is a survey of major works from each period of Kelley’s life. It was on show at the Pinault Collection in early 2024 and opens at the Tate Modern this October, before going to the K21 in Düsseldorf and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. “Our exhibition shows Kelley as a provocateur, a performer, and thinker, and how he looks at mainstream culture from marginalised or ‘adolescent’ points of view rooted in his own sense of failure to live up to society’s ideals”, say the curators. “Our exhibition shows Kelley as a provocateur, a performer, and thinker, and how he looks at mainstream culture from marginalised or ‘adolescent’ points of view rooted in his own sense of failure to live up to society’s ideals”, say the curators.

Kelley is a difficult artist to pin down, precisely because his art is defined by reacting to present trends and anticipating those of the future. ‘Ghost and Spirit’ begins by showing how Kelley’s art was shaped by his working class, Catholic upbringing in the suburbs of 1960s-70s Detroit, and his reaction against this in his teenage involvement in the city’s growing  anarchic, proto-punk noise band scene. Works such as The Banana Man (1981-1982), From My Institution to Yours (1987), More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) and Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #27 (2004-2005), show how his practice developed; from early performance pieces created after 1976, when he moved out west to study at the California Institute of the Arts; to the sculptural installations that he created while teaching at Los Angeles’ Art Center between 1992 and 2007.

One of the key works of this late period is the expansive project, Day Is Done (2005), which explores Kelley’s fascination with the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s-90s and the structures, social and physical, of education institutions. In this work, Kelley used real photographs of high school students as the basis for fictive ‘projective reconstructions’ of their repressed memories. He restaged the photographs and created installations of paintings, sculptures, and videos based on the images. Jerry Saltz, reviewing Day Is Done in the Village Voice described it as “Clusterfuck esthetics”: “the practice of mounting sprawling, often infinitely organised, jam-packed carnivalesque installations … as a way to compete with the paranoia and havoc of everyday life.”

According to Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the Pinault Collection, this eclecticism is the defining aspect of Kelley’s legacy: “Kelley showed a complete disregard for any notion of consistent artistic style and actively moved between media, from performance to drawing to textile to video and back again, that often played with a viewer’s expectations. This was a major innovation in an artworld founded upon a ‘signature style’ and very influential in shaping post-modern contemporary art as a cross-disciplinary language.” Wood and Moran note that this aesthetic is now prevalent among contemporary artists: “Mark Leckey to Grace Ndiritu, to Anne Imhof or Pablo Bronstein cite Kelley’s language of words, objects and live performance and his conjuring of communities of temporary belief as significant for their practices.”

In Los Angeles, ‘Nonmemory’ at Hauser & Wirth explores how seven contemporary artists – Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Lauren Halsey and Max Hooper Schneider – are engaging with Kelley’s legacy. The exhibition, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, takes its title from Kelley’s investigations into what he called ‘uncanny spatial memories’. The exhibition focuses on a few of Kelley’s later projects in which he explored the unstable relationship between memory and location, and how people are shaped by the memories that are lost.

In Educational Complex (1995), Kelley created architectural models of every school he had ever attended. He compared his memory of these spaces to floor plans and photographs to discover the lost memories. He then filled the blanks with material to create a more interesting form. Kelley expanded on this in Mobile Homestead (2005-13), for which he constructed, from memory, a life-size replica of his childhood home and mounted it on a moveable flatbed truck – its changing context interfering with the idea of a fixed home and a stable archive.

Kelley’s concern with architecture, education, and memory are reflected in the work of Meriem Bennani, whose film and installation Ponytail (2019) explores the lasting effects of the colonial French lycee school system on the identity of Moroccan students. While, Lauren Halsey’s dat fuss wuz us (2023) resembles Kelley’s Mobile Homestead in its aims to preserve for future generations the culture of South-Central LA through sculptures that incorporate small toys, fibreglass, and cement.

Olivia Erlanger links her interest in the psychology of space to Kelley’s Educational Complex, “a frequent reference for the ways in which architecture and memory are intertwined.” She describes her eye sculptures as, “filled with passageways and portals inside of skewed and distorted walls as a way to visually address the way in which architecture can rupture episodic memory.”

“I see larger research projects of mine like Appliance and Garage existing within the legacy of works such as Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead and Dan Graham’s Alterations to a Suburban Home,” Erlanger says. “These sculptures examine what I like to call the ‘semiotics of suburbia’, in which by examining the infrastructure of suburban enclaves and more specifically the financialisation of the home, you can begin to see how class attitudes are constructed and maintained in America.”

Kelley’s influence on Max Hooper Schneider’s work is unmistakable. Schneider’s accumulations of everyday materials – dog biscuits, cereal, plastic shards and shattered glass – recall Kelley’s ‘memory ware’ sculptures. And Schneider links his concept of “tactical nostalgia – the strategic triggering of memory in order to highlight memory’s fallibilities” directly to Kelley’s concept of non memory. “Tactical nostalgia can be used, in some if not all instances, to problematise the notion of memory altogether making all memory nonmemory.” But, for Schneider, Kelley’s work has had a more lasting, personal impact: “His legacy has helped me to find solace in the eternal state of risk.”