Mike Kelley
17 October 1999 - 16 January 2000
Curator : Yves Aupetitallot
MAGASIN - Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble - produces and
presents the first significant personal exhibition of Mike Kelley in France.
This show is exclusively constitued by new works.
Mike Kelley represents one of today's most essential and subversive
personalities of the contemporary art scene. In the 1970s, while he was a student
at the CalArts, Mike Kelley multiplied forms of artistic expression through
varied experiences : dance, theatre, cinema, music.... Still today, Kelley constantly
shreds conservative notions of high and low art, designing album covers for
bands like Sonic Youth for instance.
Mike Kelley's new work for the MAGASIN is an architecturally scaled sculpture
measuring roughly sixty by twenty-five feet.
Tentatively titled Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit
Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, the sculpture is a large steel cage-like
room with an overhead observation ramp. This room contains sculptural elements
derived from the playroom structures used in Harry Harlow's famous experiments
with primate affection done in the 1960s.
These structures have been enlarged to human scale and arranged in such a way
as to evoke the abstract sets designed in the 1950s by Isamu Noguchi for the
American choreographer Martha Graham.
A video tape documentation of a new dance piece, done in collaboration with
choreographer Anita Pace and performed on this set, will be incorporated into
the sculpture as a life-size video projection. This choreographic work utilizes
movements related to Graham's mythological dance pieces, as well as movements
derived from characteristic monkey behavior observed in Harlow's experiments,
and "cathartic" violent behavior evocative of the films made by psychologist
Albert Bandura as part of his experiments with the effect of televised violence
on preschool children.
Viewers interact with the sculpture in a number of ways; the cage can be entered
allowing access to two parental "surrogates" and a tether ball game
that may be played with. This interior action may be viewed from the overhead
observation ramp, or from outside of the structure through a large one-way Plexiglas
window.
Kelley will also present Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction "Chinatown
Wishing Well" built by Mike Kelley after "Miniature Reproduction 'Seven
Star Cavern' Built by Prof. H.K. Lu") a large new sculpture in two parts.
The sculpture is a recreation of a local landmark in China Town, Los Angeles:
a 'wishing well' which depicts a fanciful, biomorphic landscape replete with
grottos, Asian and Western statuary, and various receptacles for tossed coins.
A large ramshackle cyclone fence decorated to resemble a Chinese gate surrounds
the 9ft high and 15 ft wide fountain to protect it.
The history of this landmark is unclear, but close inspection of the mass reveals
that the fountain has been maintained and added to for many years by numerous
people. As recently as the 1960s the sculpture was well tended and lush with
greenery, now it has been abandoned, and resembles a large clinker.
Kelley has built an almost perfect replica of the original tourist attraction
and will exhibit the rock-like structure and fence as separate sculptural components.
The theme of the exhibition is articulated further in related photo and painting
works presenting the biomorphic or "formless" aspect of the fountain
sculpture, and its enclosure as objects of different categories. In an accompanying
photowork, Kelley performs a similar operation on a Danish postcard depicting
a pre-Christian megalith that has been converted into a monument through the
inscription of a memorial text and addition of a surrounding gate.
Kelley has digitally manipulated and removed the later additions leaving only
the megalith, and in the accompanying photograph he has removed the megalith
leaving only the additions. In another photowork, this separation of framing
structures is likened to the similarly disconnected relationship between image
and coloration in early tinted photo postcards depicting such "formless"
structures as cave interiors and rock formations.
Kelley digitally manipulates two photographs of coral in an aquarium to mimic
the seemingly random application of coloration in these kinds of photographs.
These works are part of an ongoing exploration of the conventions of representing
the "formless" in prosaic structures like the rock shaped buildings
in Victorian zoos and amusement parks, and camouflaged duck blinds.
Biography
Mike Kelley, born 1954 in Detroit. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Checklist
Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and
Manipulatory Responses, 1999
Mixed media, 18 x 8 meters
Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction "Chinatown Wishing Well"
built by Mike Kelley after "Miniature Reproduction 'Seven Star Cavern'
Built by Prof H.K. Lu"), 1999
Mixed media, 348 x 574 x 531 cm(fence) - 287 x 485 x 409 cm (fountain)
Color and Form, 1999
2 color photographs , 124 x 213 cm (each)
Pre and Post, 1999
2 color photographs, 124 x 142 cm (each)
Duck blind (Grassy Island, Detroit River), 1999
color photograph, 111 x 163 cm
Abandoned Faux Rock Building (Bob Lo Island, Detroit River), 1998
color photograph, 111 x 163 cm
Collage (with photograph of the Belle Isle Aquarium, Detroit River),
1999
Mixed media with color photograph
dimension: 30 x 51 inches (photo) - 39 x 72 x 30 inches (table)
Dystopian Horizontal to Vertical Shift, 1999
Mixed media, 213 x 165 x 40 cm
Aerodynamic Vertical to Horizontal Shift, 1999
Mixed media, 185 x 106 x 160 cm