John Miller
"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.