Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
3 October 2024 – 9 March 2025
This exhaustive survey of Mike Kelley (1954-2021) is frightening, intriguing, loud, funny and very American. It’s packed with his sculptures, videos, models, photographs, and multi-disciplinary artworks. The show cleverly reflects Kelley’s Catholic, blue-collar upbringing and his exploration of ritual and identity. The exhibition revolves around an unrealised performance script exploring the idea of the ghost disappearing while the spirit lingers. Kelley certainly haunts the space.
There are so many themes and directions explored here in so many different ways it’s impossible to pin Kelley down, which really is his point; he’s constantly puncturing, disrupting, debunking and making us look, see and understand things differently. I found a sadness pervades the show, an air of emptiness, the discarded found objects, the soiled toys, which is unsurprising as Kelley was also dealing with his own demons and sadly took his own life.
Entering the exhibition you encounter a slightly formal Mike Kelley, which becomes less so further into the galleries. As part of The Poltergeist, 1979, a collaboration with David Askevold, Kelley poses with cotton wool ‘ectoplasm’ mimicking early 20th-century spiritualists photographs, an examination of ‘truths’. He debunked the expectation that the artist must be a ‘master’ of a particular medium using diverse found materials creating conceptual rather than formal art. In Banana Man, 1983, Video, Kelley originated and plays a TV character reflecting on class, gender, race and identity.
More Love Hours, Found handmade stuffed toy animals and afghans on canvas with dried corn: wax candles on wood and metal base, 1987, (The Wages of Sin exhibition copy 2019).
Ahh…Youth! photographs 1991. A series of eight prints, seven stuffed animals and the eighth is Kelley himself. Sonic Youth album cover, ‘Dirty’, 1992. Kelley was involved with art bands and experimental music throughout his life.
Kandors series 1999-2011, Models of Superman’s mythical lost home, each housed in bell jars, based on the Superman illustrators’ drawings.
High school, Educational Complex 1995. There are models and plans of his own high school and a large-scale maquette of CalArts. A work concerning the repression of memory as a result of the educational system’s oppressive structure.
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions 2000-2011. Later installation encompassing video, props, costumes, photographs, music and drawings, ‘a total work of art’. High school American stereotypes writ large and torn apart. Found high-school yearbook photographs were the basis for this series of works.
The audio and scale of the various exhibits gradually builds as you progress through the show, I exited both lifted and disturbed by the cacophony of sound and the extraordinary range of imagery.
