"Staying in the game"
Flash Art International, Milan, mars-avril 2000, p.82-83
THIS PAST SUMMER the Magasin, in Grenoble, France, showed John Miller and Jim Isermann, and then in October Mike Kelley and Jim Isermann, three ex-Cal Arts classmates (along with Tony Oursler, James Casebere, and Jim Shaw, among others) now at mid-career (Kelley and Miller were born in 1954, Isermann in 1955). For Miller it was his first retrospective, for Isermann a big, public, site-specific wall work, and for Kelley two large installations in his first major show in France.
In what they call the "rue"- a 900 sq. meter, concrete-floored, unheatable factory space, based on a basilica plan built from an Eiffel kit - Isermann attached large vinyl decals (over 2,000 of them) to the walls, using a huge grid based on six geometrical motifs composed of rectangles with rounded corners set in repeating squares that run through six primary and secondary colors. Isermann, who showed in New York and Europe later than the other two, is best known for his quirky West Coast Scotchplaid abstractions. At Magasin he effectively excited the senses with his sweeping semaphore banner, which is a kind of Sol LeWitt homage, serial in style, but more about packaging style than pure structure.
In the gallery space, Miller, a smart funny guy - maybe too smart (also an erstwhile New York editor of the now-defunct Artscribe) - is a deep reader of postmodern discourse. His art rings with intelligent irony and finely processed theory. But at heart he is a goofer of signs and symbols. Sculptural accumulations of suburban paraphernalia are jammed into or caked over with a fecal brown smudge color - a Lacanian reference to a child's fascination with potty discharge. Miler smears mirrors, covers food, books, and all kinds of stuff with it. He dresses mannequins, Echo and Narcissus, in rectal brown tights and serape. He also paints earthtoned, photo-based, "Sunday" paintings that depict America's low-culture gestalt-old trains, Southwest imagery, a women's shoe salesman. One of his themes, and his best work to my mind, are photographs of people at midday, mostly at lunch, shootin' the bull rather than sitting in it, recovering themselves before replodding in the workaday merde. The photographs are not all that consistent, but their subject is the universal midday intermezzo, where we are most often ourselves.
Another of his themes is game playing. For example, Eat, Play, Divide, from 1993, features mannequins of young ballplayers standing around a minor cum pool. But The Lugubrious Game, made expressly for the show, went furthest. It included all the accouterments of a typical daytime-TV mise en scène, luridly colored, appointed on the cheap, including paintings of a real daytime host, and set up to disorient us and the game itself. This was his comment on contemporary transcendence. Thus, with the exception of his photographs, where Miller brings us life and sidesteps theory's distortion glass, Miller's works set up a depressing portrait of America and Americana.
Following Miller, Kelley displayed an elaborate, made-for-Magasin installation, called Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses. In a big cage with a video projected onto one wall he aped (excuse the pun) the studies that ethologist Harry Harlow performed with monkeys in laboratories, and "not" in nature. Kelley found that the objects Harlow used in his recognition and response studies were esthetically similar to the stage sets Isamu Noguchi designed for choreographer/dancer Martha Graham. This peculiar recognition also reveals a particularly American tendency to blend art with criticism using esthetically radical thematic juxtapositions. So, at the Magasin the result was human, not monkey-scale objects, a cage you can enter or not, and videos of humans either dressed like monkeys or acting like them. Kelley called it a "useless" piece in his elegant explanation at the press warm-up. The work is about esthetics, he said, and by extension how representation is funneled through the same esthetic filter by different (institutional) disciplines.
In a second big work, called Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction "Chinatown Wishing Well" Built by Mike Kelley after "Miniature Reproduction 'Seven Star Cavern' Built by Prof. H.K. Lu"), Kelley copied a big, 1940s Chinese temple that he calls the best public art in downtown L.A. Only he separated the temple - a chunky, concrete, somewhat Buddha-shaped wishing well - from its ornate Chinese red fence/container. The idea was to separate the contents from its frame. He made several other works to flesh out how art, particularly hieratic art, is publically corralled and contained - institutions generally being the advance guard in cultural conditioning and fence building.
Kelley's real interest, however, is ambiguity and how frames color, distort, and recontextualize that which is framed. This is an epic problem, for which words like race, nation, democracy, American, etc., are frames that often encumber and numb those they frame. Kelley throws it all up for our musing - as he always has, making him one of the most interesting of his generation.
All three artists are transported midwesterners - America's breeding ground for celebrities, survivalists, racists, fundamentalists, bad taste, etc. Like Ed Ruscha, another transported midwesterner, they have borrowed a twangy California irony, wit, and anecdote and blended it into their art. Because they are Eighties boomers (at mid-career), their art has an added academic twist that, to me, stems from an inculcated, media-drunk hope borne from of a mistrust of authority. Now after twenty-years of art making, Isermann has succinctly redone Calder, Matisse, and minimalism in plaid (an almost feminist touch). Miller has conflated Lacanian theory with Russ Meyer's soft-porn taste. The result is a mix of laboratory psychology and toilet humor. But Kelley is the magician. His twenty years of drawings, videos, paintings, music, stuffed animals, garage tools, hobby gear, and everyday stuff show how America represents its struggle with extended adolescence, toilet training, anger, and bad upbringing through fragile and dubious cultural packaging. Kelley can also make clunky packing crates look like they contain highbrow ideas along with truly democratic ideals!
All three play a genre of California pop art, where what you see is what you can see "into" and how far the in-sight can go. They sample and replay representation as a kind of tarot card reading of dystopia à la américain. Their "visions" are not elegant or startling. In fact, their works are the familiar made rare: art objects as self-conscious as a dog that has realized it shouldn't have peed on the couch.
We are all, especially if we are American, implicated in this art because we are all directly or indirectly contributors to its iconography and representations. Game Theory, or playing your ambition and wits against your opponents is involved too. Pot limit poker players do this in every game, but there's no history or irony at that table. Irony and history's fickle odds-makers make art a really tough game. Of course the art game is bigger than the sum total of all its champions. So maybe these three are a tad academic. Maybe their art is didactic art. Fact is, all avant-gardists eventually become academics, struggling to hold their position at the table, trying to stay in the game. For my money they play well.
Jeff Rian
Jeff Rian is a critic based in Paris.