Mike Kelley

1. Mike Kelley • Currently lives and works in L.A. • Born in 1954, raised in Wayne, MI, a suburb of Detroit. • Earned BFA from the University of Michigan • Was a member of the Ann Arbor, MI, “anti-rock” group Destroy All Monsters, including members of the Stooges and MC5. • Moved to L.A. in 1978, earned his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. • At CalArts he studied under many influential artists, including John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler. • Kelley has collaborated extensively with artist Paul McCarthy. Together they have created several video works and large scale installations. Kelley in the Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. Installation, a collaboration with Paul McCarthy, 1998.

2. Images from the Kelley/McCarthy installation Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Centre and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone

3. Kelley has worked in many mediums, including performance, sculpture, installation, and video. • He is best known for his earlier work involving stuffed animals. Though he originally intended for these works to comment on the commodity culture of the 1980’s, many people read the works as addressing the subject of child abuse. • Kelley responded to this public reading of his work by making abuse and abjection central themes in his art. • He has since also worked with themes such as the grotesque, the sublime, and the uncanny. “His work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values and systems of authority, and attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education. He also comments on and undermines the legitimacy of the concept of victim or trauma culture, which posits that almost all behavior results from some form of repressed abuse.” Excerpt from Kelley’s biography on the Art:21 website:Kelley on art:21

4. The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave • The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave installation was made as a part of a larger project started by Kelley in 1985 titled Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. • The installation was first displayed as a site-specific work in the anchorage space below the Brooklyn Bridge. • Two of Kelley’s primary concerns at the start of the project were to work with the possessive form (I. e. Plato’s, Rothko’s, Lincoln’s) and to “investigate color correlations between Rothko’s somber hues and the tones associated with the Christian tradition of Lent.” • Kelley first displayed the installation as a freestanding structure in 1997.

5. The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave • Upon approaching the installation, viewers are confronted with several large black and white paintings involving subject matters such as Lincoln’s assassination and the crucifixion of Jesus. • One of the largest of these paintings, titled Exploring, concerns the activity of exploring caves. Below the painting is an 18 inch high gap through which the viewer is invited, or commanded rather, to enter the installation. • The painting reads: “When spelunking sometimes you have to stoop…sometimes you have to go on all fours…sometimes even crawl…CRAWL WORM!!”

6. The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s Cave • Once inside, the viewer is confronted with the several components that make up the” cave” : an artificial fireplace in the center; electric “candles”; faux-brick paneling; large, solid colored canvases lining the walls; two large, painted bed sheets hanging at either end of the cave. • There are 3 series of canvases lining the walls. Each series consists of 4 solid-colored canvases painted in white, yellow, red, and brown. • For each series of canvases, Kelley uses a different naming scheme to title the paintings: Four Bodily Fluids (sperm, urine, blood, feces); The Four Races (Caucasian, Oriental, Indian, Negroid); the commercially-given names of the paint colors used (Chablis, Sapsucker, Rock Coral, Irish Setter).

7. The sheet hanging at the front end of the cave is cut down the middle and painted with red down the length of the cut, resembling a giant vagina. - At the far end of the “cave” hangs a painted, white bed sheet, also cut down the center. - The painting on the left side of the sheet is an imprint of Kelley’s own body, and is titled Body Print (Self-Portrait as the Shroud of Turin).- The painting on the right side is titled Rothko’s Bloodstain (Artist’s Conception), and largely resembles a Rorschach test.

8. Back on the outside of the installation, one may view several paintings that may give further insight into Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. • Two of the more notable of these paintings are Sic Semper Tyrannis and The Little Side Cave #1. • Sic Semper Tyrannis is a triptych depicting “Lincoln’s assassination bloodstain,” a portrait of Lincoln with his eyes covered by pennies depicting his own profile, and an outline of the state of Virginia. • The Little Side Cave #1 depicts Jesus after the crucifixion on the left. On the right, an entrance to a cave. The painting reads at the top: “Are you Lincoln? Or are you Jesus? Santa Claus? Bearded one, don’t be so old-fashioned. Hanging down over the collar - now he is the modernized Lincoln. The twisted cross - the old rugged cross has been twisted into the old rugged landscape, each wound, each scar has been mapped - follow me down. • At the bottom: “‘Oh what glances I send you now I am one spirit with you and you one body with me and one soul. You treasure of the side, you mad little thing, I devour you like food and drink to fulfilment, am mad with love, out of my mind.’ (Count Nicholas von Zinzendurf)”

9. The Allegory of the Cave, in Plato’s The Republic • The men at the bottom of the cave are prisoners, kept there since their childhood, and are unable to look at anything except the wall in front of them. • Behind the prisoners is a raised shelf. Puppeteers move along the shelf carrying objects. A fire behind the puppeteers casts shadows onto the wall in front of the prisoners. When the puppeteers speak, the prisoners hear the echoes of their speech. • The prisoners are thus limited to only a world of shadows and echoes. What the prisoners may know to be a book is really only a shadow of a book. • “In the context of Plato’s ideal state - a political economy based on the True Idea or Form and it’s corollaries, virtue and justice - the road to truth lies only through the philosopher’s single-minded pursuit of knowledge. Through mathematical reasoning, the trained mind rises from the physical depths of illusion and belief (opinion) until it reaches the highest form of the intelligible world: pure thought or dialectic. For Plato, truth is an activity of mind and speech, relegating the body and writing (and, by extention, poetry and art) to the realms of shadows and images.” ~ Colin Gardner, in Catholic Tastes

10. Rothko Chapel • The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas. • In 1964, the American “color field” painter Mark Rothko was commissioned to create a meditative space filled with his paintings. • Rothko created “site-specific” works to put in the chapel. The paintings are mostly black, but are slightly hued with different colors. • Rothko was given creative license on the design of the building, and clashed with several architects during its making. • Rothko had long suffered from depression, and committed suicide in February of 1970. He did not live to see the chapel’s completion in 1971.

11. Analysis of Kelley’s Plato’s Cave from Colin Gardner • In reference to the electric candles and artificial fireplace: “In addition to Plato’s Cave, we thus conjure images of log fires (Lincoln’s cabin) and prayer candles (Rothko’s Chapel). However, the caster of shadows (false copies) in Kelley’s allegory is itself a simulacrum - so that all representations become Other.” • The Rothko-like solid color paintings: “The banality of these metaphors [Four Bodily Fluids, The Four Races] emphasizes the arbitrary rhetoric of imbuing color with spiritual values, but it also deliberately switches the foundation of the rhetoric from mind to body.” • The painted bed sheets: “By associating Rorschach tests (Freud), religious shrouds (mysticism), post-coital stains, and Yves Klein’s body paintings, Kelley metamorphoses the religious shroud into a sexual symbology, into a discourse of art. In this way, Plato’s shibboleths of the body politic as public mind are displayed as pure spectacle, reduced to the body as politics. For Kelley, all signs of transcendence must be rooted in the libidinal.” • The Sic Semper Tyrannis triptych with Lincoln: “…Lincoln is centered as “Honest Abe”…his eyes covered by pennies, which of course depict his own profile. Lincoln’s death is thus symbolized by his own mystification as currency, as simulacrum. • In reference to the installation as a whole: “One must also note, however, that Kelley’s three subjects also act as a synopsis of the heroic male archetypes (visionary idealism, spiritual transcendence, bourgeois individualism) that dominate Western philosophy, modernist American painting, and American history. By using the simulacrum to strip away the false authority of mystification, this compendium of symbols imbedded in the American psyche is shown to be deconstructable.” • “Kelley’s strategy for overthrowing Platonism is now obvious: spelunking, or cave exploration. By excavating deeper, digging below the bottom of the cave of resemblances and rasing up the buried simulacrum so that it can assert its rights over the icon and copy, the distinction between Essence and Appearance, Model and Copy disappears because the simulacrum negates both. Kelley’s sublime is thus inextricably tied to the dissolution of true and false claimants. Instead, there are only nomadic distributions, libidinal flows: the triumph of the phantasm.”

12. Kelley’s comments on the installation • “My general working methodology in the late 1970’s and ‘80’s was to select, somewhat randomly, a limited number of word or image pairings and them research associated topics. This yielded a vast amount of disconnected information that I would then attempt to organize mythopoetically into what, on the surface at least, resembled a coherent belief system.” ~ In Minor Histories • I wanted to stress the naming process, as in some conceptual art, as a primary aesthetic characteristic, and to find examples of things that, in and of themselves, were uninteresting unless they were singled out with ‘aesthetic’ titles.” ~ Minor Histories • “A lot of the relationships were produced through random methods. The very title of the project Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile is a random grouping, linked only because they are all in the possessive. All of the metaphorical connections in the piece grew out of that loose pairing of possessives. I was trying to produce something that seemed mysterious and arcane, but was just a façade; it is a pseudo-mystical artwork.” ~ In Mike Kelley, edited by John C. Welchman

13. Resources Books • Kelley, Mike. Minor Histories: statements, conversations, proposals. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. • Kelley, Mike. Foul Perfection: essays and criticisms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c2003. • Monk, Philip. Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: collaborative works. Toronto: Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 2000. • Sussman, Elisabeth. Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art : Distributed by H.N. Abrams, c1993. • Welchman, John C. Mike Kelly. London: Phaidon, 2002, c1999. Web http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_71A.html http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kelley/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Kelley_%28artist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_cave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothko_Chapel