These works were done while I was a student in the Art School at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where I attended the Undergraduate program during the years 1972 to 1976. I was twenty to twenty-two years old at the time I made them and I have not looked at them or thought about them in many years. However, I recently pulled these works out of storage because of a project I am currently working on, the general title of which is Missing Time (1974-1995). This project grew out of my interest in a debate raging in the United States over the issue of Repressed Memory Syndrome which, simply stated, is the notion that memories of traumatic experiences can be completely and unconsciously blocked and made inaccessible to the conscious mind.

In recent years a large therapeutic industry has grown up which takes a given that childhood sexual abuse in the cause of this syndrome. These therapists also believe that these repressed memories can be recalled through therapy and that remembering them can help cure patients of a variety of symptoms the most serious of wich is Multiple Personality Disorder. Many of the therapists who champion the idea of Repressed Memory Syndrome believe that all memories dredged up during therapy are true. This is where the kernel of the debate lies, with one camp defending the idea that in almost all cases recalled memories of childhood sexual abuse are historically true while another camp argues that in many cases these memories are fantasies or are even implanted in the patient by unwitting therapists. And now the debate has extended beyond psychotherapeutic circles into the much larger arenas of the legal system and law enforcement. Recent changes in the law have done away with the statue of limitations of some instances. Now it is possible for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to bring charges against their abuser long after the event took place if they can prove that they only recently reacquired the memory of that crime through therapy.

There have been some startling cases where family members of supposed victims have been convicted and imprisoned for sex abuse crimes that took place decades ago. These are cases where there was absolutely no physical evidence and the case was decided solely on the convincing testimony of the victim recounting their newly-remembered memories of abuse. The arguments against the supporters of Repressed Memory Syndrome, wich is referred to by its detractors as False Memory Syndrome, question the verifiability of memory and threaten to shake the foundation of the legal system. If current research reveals memory as unstable and prone to fictionalization, how can testimony of recalled events have any weight in court or police investigations?

This is where I, as an artist, become interested in the debate. Now the whole drama of the the law and the system of justice becomes the territory of aesthetics. Life at its most "real", that is, where it interfaces with the hands of power, with that which controls you, must then also lie in the domain of art, of fiction.

This is what first drew me to reexamine my old paintings. (This and the fact that much of my viewing audience seeks to make sense of my work by psychoanalyzing it, and often by postulating that I must have suffered some sort of childhood abuse. In general they don't postulate institutional abuse as a cause for the strangeness of my artistic output.) My presumption was that my recent aesthetic production must in some way be affected by my art training, even though I consciously rebelled against this training and saw no particular connection formally between my recent work and my student work. The "symptoms" of my recent work must be the by-product of elements of my training that I repressed. And, the repression proves, this training must have been traumatic- it must have been a form of abuse. I chose to confront my old works, to consciously relearn the rules under which I produced them, in order to perhaps understand my abuse and to more consciously deal with it in future art works. I did this by painting on top of the old paintings. Not, however, in any openly confrontational way. The point was not to change the meaning of the original works but to make them stronger in their own terms. I wanted to regain as much of the original mind set of the period as I could, to mentally return to that time. It was an exercise in self-discovery. In the current exhibition these painted-on works are shown alongside untouched works. I hope you can't tell the difference. My desire is that they be of uniform quality.

Anyway, I suppose I should give you some actual background concerning the milieu that produced these works. The University of Michigan was primarily a painting school. Painting was openly acknowledged as the most serious of the fine arts and the painting faculty was the largest in the school. Most of the main teachers had been teaching there for many years and were part of that large generation of artists produced after World War Two by the "GI Bill". In fact, some of them had been there so long that I discovered later in conversations with both Ed Emschwiller and Douglas Huebler that we had all some of the same teachers despite our vast differences in age. It is not uncommon in Midwestern university art departments to find this kind of longevity of faculty. The situation was not much different in the UCLA art department when I taught there in the late Eighties.

Surprisingly, most of the painting teachers were not followers of the New York School. Even though they were the same age as their Abstract Expressionist brethren teaching in other university programs around the country, my teachers seemed to have been primarily schooled in the European manner. Most of them were not touchy-feely but were staunch formalists who studied under Hans Hofmann in America or under various Modernist masters in Europe. My training was quite academic with generous doses of color theory, life and still life drawing and painting, and even exercises in such archaic techniques as egg tempera painting and hand calligraphy. The typical student painting was a gestural abstract formalist composition in the Hans Hofmann manner. That was "serious" painting. Painting arguments were still caught up in questions of composition and had not really gotten past the shock offered by Pop Art and Color Field Painting -the horrible realization that composition could be as easy as centralized iconic placement or all-over monochrome dispersion. Thus, some of the most influential painters were gestural Pop painters. Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers found favor with both faculty and students alike: with faculty because they were gestural and compositional, and with students because they included Pop representational elements.

I actually was given an assignment to create Rauschenberg-style lighter fluid rubbings. Larry Rivers was invited to curate a student exhibition and I was quite happy that he chose some of my works for the show. Though I was not so pleased that he alluded to some of my works as "woman-hating like de Kooning's are", and this seemed a positive quality to him. This upset me since I didn't feel that my works, or de Kooning's for that matter, were woman-hating."

The paintings in this exhibition are a by-product of this Rauschenbergian discussion and I must admit that they are in many ways a reaction against his influence. One thing I didn't like about Rauschenberg, and Pop Art in general, was that subject matter was of so little importance. In Rauschenberg's work I always felt that any other image could be substituded for another and that there was little attention paid to the tension between the various images, the images and the paint handling, or to the possibilities of associational ties between the images. In Rauschenberg, image was equivalent to paint smear. Even if this was the case I felt he could go much further in pushing this tension, the way Warhol did in his Disaster series, the way Öyvind Fahlström did in his more politically-oriented works, the way Jim Nutt did with his use of the lowest and most degraded of advertising material. All of these artists were basically formalist painters in my estimation yet they were able to push the borders of the formal much further than Rauschenberg seemed capable of. He seemed conservative in comparison.

Yet all of these painters I list as preferring over Rauschenberg did something I did not want to do. They gave up the gesture. Even Peter Saul, who had used gestural painting to great effect in his paintings of commodities and political subjects, gave it up in favor of a kind of psychedelic pointillism. I liked the goopy, slightly disgusting surfaces of Abstract Expressionism and I thought such surfaces could be used to great advantages in combination with various kinds of more loaded images, images that didn't lend themselves so easily to abstract equivalency. I started using low advertising images like the Hairy Who group did, and drew from my own knownledge of fringe popular culture: weird second-rate comic books, erotica, adolescent imagery, and my interest in the fringes of the art world and underground culture. For example I included recognizable images of Patty Hearst, the Symbiotic Liberation Army logo, Santo the Mexican masked wrestler, William Burroughs, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Stravinsky, Sun Ra, etc. in my compositions alongside more mundane or ridiculous images and various paint handling techniques to push what considered the limits of equivalency.

Yes, at the same time I was starting to wonder if painting was even the way to go. I became interested through the work of Oldenburg, Thek, Fahlström, Beuys and the Vienna Actionists in installation and performance work. By the time I graduated from the University of Michigan I was already applying the lessons I had learned in my formal painting experiments to the rock band structure.

I had formed a band in 1974 with three other art students called Destroy All Monsters. Named after a B Japanese monster movie, this band combined improvisational techniques, analogous to painterly gesture, with more ironic allusions to various pop music forms. In many ways this band was my painting strategy made flesh. It combined both the compositional and the "natural" improvisational, with camp and black humor elements in a purposely uncomfortable way, one that could definitely be called proto-punk.

My decision to leave Ann Arbor was also a decision to abandon my painterly practice as I knew it. I applied to two master programs. I was turned down by the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. In my meeting with the head of the program he said that my paintings were "too Chicago." I assumed this meant that he wanted the school to lose the stigma of the Chicago Imagist tradition, even thogh I didn't think my work had too much to do with the "Monster School," and graduate to Conceptual Art. Ironically, I was accepted into the masters program at the California Institute of the Arts: the conceptual art school. The rest is another story.

I should name a few teachers at the University of Michigan who were influential. In my early years at the school I worked most closely with Al Mullen who was an abstract formalist painter. He was a very tough and demanding teacher who really pushed me to develop my painting skills. He was a harsh critic, but he was also willing to spend a lot of time, even after school hours, to work with me. Later, I developed a closer relationship with Gerome Kamrowski. Kamrowski was an Automatist painter who had been an active part of the New York Abstract Surrealist scene. He had known and worked with such important figures as Pollock, Baziotes and Matta. Unlike Mullen, he was a laid-back teacher who really only wanted to work with self-motivated students. He didn't care what you did, but was more than willing to give you whatever information he could if you asked for it. Mostly, he was an inspirational artist. The university environment hadn't killed his spirit, unlike most of the other faculty members. He was still a good artist, and his black humor and opnly hostile responses to the tired and academic theories and methods of his fellow teachers were truly inspirational.

I also worked with Jackie Rice, a ceramic sculptor. Though I had no interest in ceramics, Jackie was a great teacher who allowed me to fulfill my sculpture requirements without working with the macho T-beam welders who made up the bulk of the department. I had absolutely no interest in that stuff whatsoever. Jackie was extremely knownledgeable about the West Coast Funk Art movement, folk art, the Chigago Imagist scene, and was the only faculty member who was willing to discuss subcultural aesthetic production. I remember that it caused quit a stir when she started that the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb was an important artist. Most of the faculty was openly hostile to such discussion and were horrified at the concept that Crumb was anything but a dumb hippie cartoonist. Her class was also the only one that raised the issue of gender politics at all. It was through her class that I did all of my experiments with installation work, even though they had nothing to do with ceramics.

M.K.




(Published from the exhibition catalogue
"Mike Kelley Missing Time," Kestner-Gesellschaft,
Hannover, 1995)