Mike Kelley: ‘Ghost and Spirit’
Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed.
He came out of west coast art school CalArts in the 1980s with countless ideas about performance, minimalism and humour. He howls into rickety wooden megaphones, builds impossible birdhouses, advertises himself as a medium with ectoplasm spurting from his nose. He uses cardboard and whoopie cushions, creates an installation about a mythical monkey island. All of it surreally explores dozens of clashing ideas about belief, psychology and behaviour.
It's the project he’d spend the rest of his career pursuing. In the late 1980s he got into the idea of adolescence. He plays with heavy metal imagery in amazing, juvenile banners, he defaces history textbooks, he draws piles of garbage, he recreates images from high school yearbooks, he makes installations out of stuffed toys that are filthy and gross (some of which were used for the cover of Sonic Youth's 'Dirty'). Adolescence is an in-between place where people are still being moulded, still have potential to undo the damage.
The past is a place that’s constantly longed for, but impossible
