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 to reach
And damage is everywhere. In later work he gets into the idea of memory, its repression and formation. A vast structure recreates the basement of his art school, but the rooms he can’t remember are covered in pink crystals. A room of glass bell jars are him obsessing over the story of Kandor; Superman’s home on the planet Krypton, saved from destruction by being shrunken and preserved, but doomed to never be restored. The past is a place that’s constantly longed for, but impossible to reach.
The final big room is an ear-splitting maelstrom of high school scenes, Kelley recreating the extra curricular activities of teens to brutally sinister, dizzying effect.
The gallery does a pretty poor job of presenting any of this clearly, though. The wall texts are a confusing mess that don’t bother to contextualise or explain any of the hows or whys of Kelley’s work, so you just have to figure it all out blind.
Which isn’t that easy, because Kelley was interested in so much, there are countless ideas being explored here. But more than anything, he was interested in rejecting: rejecting society’s expectations, rejecting the past, rejecting what’s acceptable and what’s not, rejecting what you’re told to be. This punk freak spent a lifetime forging his own path, and showing you that you could do the same, if you can handle all the chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma.
