It's important to exhibit your mistakes. Man is not perfect. Neither are his creations.
Dieter Roth 1

The catalogue you have before you accompanies an exhibition by the artist Mike Kelley. It covers the most significant aspects of the work produced over the last ten years by this North American artist. The aim of the present publication is to document in monograph form what is conventionally known as a "retrospective" exhibition. The museum is once again here fulfilling one of its essential and controversial functions: the construction of a historical account of events, the writing of points of past time, giving these a concrete meaning and a clearly defined direction; what is selected is that which supposedly stands out, while the remainder is, by exclusion, irrevocably consigned to oblivion. The very first museum was already subject to this obsession: the ideé fixe of wanting to order the world, to organize the experience of the community on the basis of taxonomic systems, to impose a regulating nominalism on images and things, in an attempt to convert them into and identify them as signs. Despite the passage of the centuries and the exposure of all of the scenarios and stages of our history, human beings are still subject to a persistent need to bring together and classify, a desire to possess the experience of the other, to assume the daring ingenuity of the creator. The process of institutionalization of culture implied by the museum phenomenon converts the creative impulse into cultural model, transforms it into heritage and patrimony.

A key characteristic of modern Western culture has been precisely the attempt at throwing his mechanism into crisis. This is one of the issues with which Kelley critically engages in this show. To walk into an exhibition is not the same thing as to drag oneself over its threshold. Kelley's discourse is ideologically in tune with that of those creative artists who have put forward serious doubts as to whether the results of the enlightened nominalist enterprise may in fact facilitate the acquisition of some kind of definitive or universal knowledge of the origins, the form of development and the ultimate ends of human activity. It is some time now since the notions of eternal beauty and universal truth entered into permanent crisis. This type of research , focused more on the limits than the overall extension, has revealed a number of factors of determining significance for the fuller understanding of the kind of relations that exist between discourse and power, between politics and language. We know enough to recognize that the only narratives which carve out a place for themselves in the historical archives of the great discourses are those capable of opening up cracks in the stable edifice of meaning that each cultural community needs in order to affirm and differentiate itself. In my opinion, Kelley's work meets these requirements.

One way of expressing oneself, that is both modern and traditional at the same time, consists in idealizing what is successful, elaborating and ritualizing the representation of perfection, conceived of as harmony, while attributing an exceptional status to the notion of purity, in the belief that this can be made visible by means of art. Another and very different line of action and knowledge is to opt for the re-creation and exhibition of narrative frame different from the previous one, in which priority is given to the notion of wrongness or impropriety, such as the Swiss artist Dieter Roth has sustained on numerous occasions: positioning oneself on the side or irregularity and making the fullest possible use of insufficiency and inadequacy. From my point of view, this second approach to the procedures of art, deconstructive, more effective and more realistic, would be the one associated with the discourse of Mike Kelley, an artist whose recourse to extremely diverse materials and ways of working manifests an ongoing interest in error and the politics and morality this generates. As Howard N. Fox has noted, the notion of error developed by Kelley is a secularized interpretation of the Judaeo-Christian concept of original sin: "The driving antagonism between ideality and its opposite is, moreover, a precise reflection of the fundamental Judaeo-Christian schism between the sacred and the profane, between the spirit and the flesh, between the ideal and the mundane. It produces the tainted self-awareness and guilty conscience that comprises Kelley's diverse artistic expression. The state of imperfection, of something fundamentally wrong, which is the ignition point for all of Kelley's work, is also the product of that antagonism. The imperfectness throughout Kelley's oeuvre reflects not merely the reality of things as they are in the world but rather revels in and laments the loss of an ideal".2

It may be that the exhibition is one of the social phenomena that best reflects the advance of materialism in the Western world over the last few decades. It is yet another of the many consequences of the progressive reduction to the status of spectacle being suffered by culture, culture being understood here as exchange value or as the practice of accumulation and archiving; everything and all of us is condemned to be put on show in the end-of-century media universe, to be involuntarily dispossessed of what identifies us as practitioners of difference and makes us feel part of a vital process that stretches back into the past. So it is that nowadays we speak not so much of art as of exposé art, of that which might represent a proposition that is valued as an expression within the field of the communication and the culture to which it belongs, to the context which defines and determines it; at the same time, the conviction that art only takes on meaning in a specific cultural framework provides the conditions for an analysis of all that its social presence gives rise to. It thus stimulates the cultural debate concerning speculative dialectical operations that make it possible to pair off notions such as affirmation versus declassification, invention versus restoration, exaggeration versus reduction. These are all questions with which Kelley also, as we shall see, engages. One of the outstanding features that distinguishes Kelley's career as an artist is precisely his great dive and tenacity in staying clear of "museification", mummification. As Elisabeth Sussman indicates in her contribution to the present publication, the major retrospective of Kelley's work held in 1993 at the Whitney Museum of American Art enabled him to discover that, finding himself under the obligation of retrospection, of having to reconstruct his past creatively for that show, he was becoming the victim of his own false memory. This circumstance encouraged him to develop the projects of the last few years; projects which, amply and for the first time brought together here, are presented in this exhibition in relation to memory, to lost time, to education and repression.

Of particular note in Kelley's career is the series of successive closures which he has periodically brought about over the course of the last two decades, organizing projects that at a certain moment he comes to regard as concluded. In this it is possible to detect the artist's vehement desire, from his time as a student onwards, to avoid becoming a victim of that - inevitably interested - museum ordering to which I referred at the beginning. Up till now he has been notably successful in addressing this issue: on the one hand, constantly nourishing his discourse with marginal aesthetic references and expressive contagions, undervalued or inadequate in the dominant discourse of the moment. He took an early interest in the most political and eccentric of pop artists, Öyvind Fahlström, and in the atypical unclassifiable Paul Thek. Indicative of his concern to set himself apart from the tendencies dictated by fashionable taste are, for example, his active participation in the Californian underground music scene since the seventies, or his refusal to live in the art "capital" of North America, New York; there is also his critical introspection and reflection of the last few years, studiously working on a series of remake paintings and drawings -such as The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy On The Winter) (1995), the set entitled Missing Time. Works on Paper 1974-1976 Reconsidered, presented the same year- or his old and problematic relations, aesthetic, ideological, psychological and emotional, with abstract expressionism since his student years. On the other hand, he has made use of different expressive techniques, which he changes as the occasion requires, always being reluctant to adopt any single formula or manner of working in the knowledge that this might easily go against him and condemn his inclination towards the anarchic to the prison of stylistic rhetoric. He did so by rebelling against the abstract expressionism that was then dominant at the University of Michigan where he began studying art, taking advantage of a hybrid figuration that allowed him to bring together in the same pictorial destiny iconographic elements derived from various different sign systems; or by becoming involved in performance by way of alternative music and then abandoning this precisely when it began to gain public recognition; or by giving up producing works using fluffy toys when he became known internationally as an artist on the strength of these; or by going back to playing in a music group and carrying out a number of collaborative projects at the time when international recognition and respect had irreversibly converted him into a prominent "figure", all of which accentuate the most "individualistic" aspects of his work.

Kelley is perfectly aware that the artist is not free. Over the course of time he has involved himself in weaving together in a variety of projects catalogues of intense ideological concerns in which he puts forward variations on the type of associative relationship between crime and creativity, between punishment and exoneration. This exhibition brings together pieces produced since 1985 that offer insights of great value in clarifying the keys to his work. In these, there is always something wrong, some element that is not right, that fails to work or to satisfy: "what I am after is the quality of being less than because, instead of heroizing , it reveals the idiosyncrasies of the individual as errors in relation to the ideal."3 This "less" of Kelley's asks to be equated not with the reductivist and austerely restrained lessness proclaimed by the advocates of modern rationalism, but with the strangeness and dissatisfaction that are provoked by whatever fails to gel as a heterogeneous whole, disappointing our expectations. It is a "less" that is close to the "precedence" of language that Walter Benjamin was concerned with in his analysis of Breton's surrealist literary experiments.

Kelley's work brings into focus with great precision the contradictions within the capitalist and consumerist scenario: in Western urban society there is a figurative exteriority with a colourist visual appearance that is spectacular, seductive and optimistic, which puts itself forward as orderly, harmonious and stable. However, this frequently corresponds to an existential interiority of the subject that is conceptually imprecise, emotionally fragile and psychologically oppressive. To put it in Foucauldian terms, with the disappearance at the end of the nineteenth century of the great spectacle of physical punishment and exclusion from the penal process of the theatrical apparatus of suffering, what is dominant in societies such as ours is punitive sobriety. "The expiation that inflicts damage on the body must be succeeded by a punishment that acts profoundly on the heart, the thought, the will, the disposition."4 The penal process now operates without making itself visible, imperceptible, yet punishing with the utmost rigour any transgression of the bounds of homogeneity. The lines of confrontation have been radicalized.In the realm of art teaching itself, severe and highly interested orders of discourse are imposed. The student is left with two possibilities when it comes to dealing seriously with this issue: to respect these orders and back down, or to expose their interested partiality by calling them into question on the basis of critical discourse that is at variance with them. In Kelley's case it might be said that this concern with the line of fracture between moral certainty and doubt manifests in the exploration of the representative role of objects within a given social system, understanding these as meanings that materialize ideology and as tools employed in symbolic negotiations. He questions himself about the common myths -those of adolescents and those of adults- in the culture in which he grew up and which shaped his personal identity. The most chromatically attractive moments in this catalogue, the reproductions of the works on show, constitute a dense conglomerate of images and objects, of elaborated forms and spaces that are the product of the manipulation of variety of elements of "serious" artistic culture and of popular and media culture: large-format cartoon-strip sketches in which invented images and texts are combined with appropriated images and texts, as in Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, (1985-1996); domestic handicrafts that make use of fluffy toys to articulate psychoanalytical narratives, as in the 1991 work Craft Morphology Flow Chart ; low-budget science-fiction films as the inspiration for the construction of sculptural artefacts such as Silver Ball (1994) or Channel #1, #2, #3, (1994), capable of emitting strange "spirit" voices from the beyond or of showing us brilliant flashes of light from some unknown source; small-town school magazines from which he produces juxtapositions of photographs of boys playing in drag and articles with a fascist tone; drawings of psychoanalysed children who have been victims of some kind of sexual abuse. What we have then is an attempt to infiltrate into "serious" art cultural material thrown up by everyday life, creating "an interface between culture as a standard of excellence and culture as a descriptive category." 5 As the artist himself affirms, the making of "low" art is a response to "low" times, which cheapened aspirations and debased metaphysical expectations. This would amount to something like the parodying of a recycled and unwieldy idea of transcendence that we would all at last be able to buy thanks to TV mail order shopping. To do this it is necessary to upset the established orders, to cheapen the happily "noble" and dignify the "lost"; or, to put it another way, to potentiate the interstitial value that resides in the midst of cultural conventions; to produce a caricature of the work of art, of the canon or the stereotype set up by the age in order to preserve stability; to design, in short, the inappropriate. This is a work centred around the dysfunction of the American dream, which presents itself to us today as a powerful critique of established taste and justifies itself as legitimate heir of that caustically critical anthropology put forward by European Situationism, of the social design of the Independent Group in Britain or the cultural nervousness of the transatlantic Fluxus.

Conscious of the "exhibition" effect that affects the communication of the meaning of any representation, Kelley meticulously prepares his objects and situations so that the spectators' relationship with these produces the sensation of coming face to face with a collection of organized images and objects utilizing a language that is common, accessible and popular, extremely visually attractive, which seductively ask to be "occupied". The result announces the existence of a piece of precision machinery painstankingly constructed by the aritst. A mechanism so skillfully elaborated invites us to assume without further ado what we are seeing must have meaning. Nevertheless, Kelley subverts this first impulse, this first inducement to a reading provoked by the efficacy of the mechanism, employing the same methodology as one of his favourite artists, Öyvind Fahlström, mentioned above. The idea is to produce "the thrill of tension and resolution, of having both conflict and non-conflict (as opposed to 'freeform', where in principle everything is equal)."6 In this way he builds up a kind of shapeless discursive solid architecture. Through his work he emphasizes some dislocations of the canonizing form of the dominant discourse, choosing to seek to strip the artistic fact of any formal wrapping that might tend to immobilize the thought. At once anticanonical and anticlassical, as I have said, he draws his intellectual sustenance from what is contained in the residual deposits, disqualified or squalid, of the general archive of the history of the contemporary North American image that is most representative of the particular aesthetic world of the middle classes: provincial handicrafts, juvenile high-school mythology, esoteric culture, science-fiction, objects and images so commonplace and so penetrating that they pass unnoticed: "people ignore them, and they never even see them. They are surrounded by them all the time. I try to decontextualize them enough to make things that are literally invisible visible. Like an office joke."7 The disturbing mechanisms that are characteristic of Kelley's work operate by subverting ideological orders or systems. A good example of his interest in fuelling the paradox in work, stripping it of the attributes it supposedly ought to have (stylistically accredited forms or artistically accepted concepts endorsed by the common canon) can be seen in such irregular and suspiciously unusual constructions as the installation Plato's Cave... (1985-1996), referred to above, of which we are presenting here a new version produced specially for this show, the recent Educational Complex (1995), or installation projects such as the 1987 From My Institution to Yours or Mike Kelley's Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Rooms) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1992). In all of these, the objective of Kelley's critical formulation leads him into a confrontation with architecture understood as the expression of the authoritarian geometry that sustains social thought and social order.

Kelley attended classes in the tradition established by Hans Hofmann at the University of Michigan, experiencing "a sort of half push-pull theory and half automatism", as he himself recalls of his student years. In the academic circles of the United States in the forties, Hans Hofmann had embodied the figure of the modern European master. His direct contact with a number of the key personalities of the avant-garde in the Old Continent potentiated the liberalization and opening up of university art teaching, which had been dominated throughout the thirties and until his arrival on the United States educational scene by the extremley conservative regionalist school. Hofmann came to America armed with the credentials of his active participation in the Paris School. He was thus credited with an involvement in what was then identified in North America as modern art. Although the extent of his influence in the gestation of abstract expressionism is still today by no means clear, we know that his experiments with automatism, a technique he acquired in surrealist circles in Paris, and his work with primitive myths and worlds of submarine images came to have very significant repercussions amongst his colleagues and students, some of whom were in due course to be tutors of Kelley's. Hofmann experimented with automatism, adopting this as a formal principle and upholding "the irrational" as the most elevated quality in art.8

In 1946, in his account of a one-man show presented by Hofmann in a New York gallery, the art critic Robert Coates made use for the first time of the term "abstract expressionism", referring to the Bavarian painter -Hofmann- as one of the essential exponents of what others were calling "the schoolof splashes and daubs". Many of the representatives of the second generation of abstract expressionism studied under Hofmann, and his discourse was still dominant in the University of Michigan at the time when Kelley enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Art. Tutors from that institution such as Gerome Kamrowski, who started teaching in 1946, had learned the watchwords of André Breton and firmly believed in the pertinence of continuing to treat thematically, under the aegis of aesthetics, old ideas with a content of myth such as the fall of the first man, the existence of the philosopher's stone or the figure of the hermaphrodite, concerns inherited from surrealism which were to serve as inspiration for a whole generation of artists which included Roberto Matta, William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock. In 1941, in the context of his researches into surrealist automatism, Baziotes showed Pollock, precisely in Gerome Kamrowski's studio, how to get the paint to drip onto the canvas.9

Looking back over the works produced during the forties by the leading representatives of North American expressionism -from Masson to Rothko- we are struck by the insistence in so many of their paintings on the depiction of organic beings and humanoid fantasies, many of which, as is indicated in the article reffered to, might easily have been taken from André Masson's famous book Unity of the Cosmos, an illustrated encyclopaedia of mythical beings. These avant-garde artists were champions of paintings as a tactile experience, biomorphic abstraction, mythological speculation, automatism in the surrealist manner and action as autarkic creative expression. It is surely no coincidence that these concerns are also in evidence in Kelley's early work; he, too, was interested in the eschatological theatrical ceremonies of Viennese actionism. Again, he is close to the surrealist sensibility in his interest in the inexplicable, the marvellous and the magical, as well as in a committed social stance that is expressed in his rejection of the prudish, arriviste and complacent social values that are still so prevalent on the contemporary art scene. It is true, of course, that in Kelley's work we find a discrediting of both mundane and "elevated" values, and an intensification of certain aspects of conduct in this world: obsession, desire, erotism. On the other hand, there is in his discourse as a whole that clearly recognizable link between French literary surrealism and painting, the use of the imaginary, psychological penetration accompanied by theoretical declarations or a detached methodology that distances itself from lyrical Romantic subjectivism.10 But in order to legitimate this work as a radical expression of the present time in which it develops, to celebrate its discontinuity with the positions of the past and in this way to give it a solidly contemporary status, it is necessary to allude to its syncretic and polymorphous character. The violence within the schizoid landscape that is presented to us seems to be the poor result of a great and failed project in the interior of its great protagonist, the modern subject, and externally, the crude deformation of a Utopian project. Here the artists highlights the chaotic, the grotesque or the absurd aspects of existence, his eyes on the social world around him, on its rituals and codes. He does not confront the social decadence, the nightmare, to put it metaphorically, turning to dream to marvel at reality and himself. Seventy years after André Breton proclaimed Le premier manifeste du Surréalisme it is extremely difficult to pick up, in the end-of-century urban world of Los Angeles-town where Kelley actually lives-, the aroma given off by that charming old story which Walter Benjamin delicately included in his appraisal of surrealism and Breton relates in that essay of central significance for the movement, concerning the writer Saint-Paul-Roux: each day "at the moment of falling asleep, Saint-Paul-Roux used to have a notice placed on the door of his manor house at Camaret, on which could be read: THE POET IS WORKING."11
The facts have outstripped us; the "sane" irrationality of surrealism has become criminal in Los Angeles, a city that has ended up not only without a centre but with no periphery, "surreality" is out there on the streets every day while the television programmes the gradual distintegration of the exhausted individual self in the new caverns of post-industrial isolation. I would suggest that this work can now permit itself only to parody of irrationalism, the "carnivalization" of automatism. Art has become the caricature of what it might have been. In caricature, deformation is made to serve the creation of ridicule. The procedure employed by Kelley to express this critical observation of the psychodynamics of everyday life is directed towards a double disortation: "the one to make things better (dignifying the popular imaginary and popular myths in characterizing these as serious art objects by conferring on them an artificial and purely apparent dignity), the other to make them worse (concerning itself with revealing the status of the artwork as consumer merchandise)."12

This method of canonical deformation which characterizes some of the most significant positions in contemporary art is complemented in certain cases, such as the one we are dealing with here, by a concern with delving down into memory, dispassionately confronting the map of memories with the representation of the reality available to us now. This involves the effecting of displacements of the stable, in image and word, towards what is earlier in time, unknown, unclassifiable, materialized in images of a non-place. We can take this one step further if we seek to situate this movement in terms of specific co-ordinates in time and space. One of the possible routes leads us to childhood. By means of this kind of conceptual displacement, the artist consciously locates his representation in a place and a time that are deeply ambiguous in cultural terms. He does not set up an image-model, but searches in his memory, in the auto-representation of the recreated past that makes itself present not in order to resuscitate what once took place but to feel anew what is lacking. This recuperation, then, is grounded in the architecture of individual being, by means of which primal moments of key significance in the formative construction of the personality are recalled. This type of premiss limits itself to pointing out a pathway for thought and emotion, refusing to specify or define, contenting itself with putting forward possibilities at the same time as it relativizes the idea of frontier or limit. It is characterized by an accentuation in excess or in deficiency of either concept or form, so that in both cases the very forthrightness of the result gives rise to suspicions in its way of distancing itself too far from the limits of what is conventionally acceptable.They then dispose of that "fluctuating residence of meaning" to which Lyotard has so often referred , providing them with a kind of passport of permanent emigration.

It is necessary to differentiate between the type of work that would seek to represent childhood and that which would involve the active assumption of certain childish behaviours (carelessness, untidiness, dirtiness). Kelley's work would obviously belong to the second category. Good examples of this are his collaborations with video artists such as Raymond Pettibon, parodically deconstructing facets of the mythology associated with the stereotyped reading of the creation of rock music, or Heidi (1992), with Paul McCarthy, which revolves around purity and the eschatology that invariably accompanies it. There is in these a referring back to childhood and an evidencing of the failure of language, the falsity of the success of "adulthood." They represent a perverted scenario in which are premissed emotive states in flight. This not some other place, but both here and there at once. In this exercise in infantilization, the artist once again distances himself from what would be the very "vital praxis" itself of art, to adopt a concept of Peter Bürger's, in all that concerns the procedure, the institution and the reception. An attitude, then, to which one might come to attribute only partially an avant-garde character, because, to follow Bürger again, only an art that distances itself completely from the (deteriorated) vital praxis, even in the content of its work, can constitute the axis on which it will be possible to organize a new vital praxis, a new symbolic landscape and a usable new cartography for the operative intellectual stance of resistance.

"I think an adolescent attitude is the attitude of the humorist, like somebody who knows the rules but doesn't see any reason to be involved in them. The adolescent period interests me the most. Modernism usually valorizes childhood, childishness, or insanity-something that's supposedly pre-adult. But then adult art has to get involved in questions of faith and belief, and I don't have any faith or belief, so I don't want to make adult art. I'd rather make adolescent art."13

Kelley's paintings and drawings from the early seventies were a strange hybrid of styles, the confirmation of his well-known taste for employing elements from the popular imaginary of the time alongside rhetorical resources characteristic of gestural painting. He has been showing these again in exhibitions since 1995, retouched with splashes of monochrome pigment which he incorperates in some of them in such a way that the addition goes unnoticed, confusing what was done at the time with the newley painted over. Kelley resolved this ambiguity between representation and gesture by taking a step forward, giving up painting and beginning, now in California, to produce in 1978 the Birdhouses, a type of pseudo-sculpture that was to allow him to find the mental clarity he needed: "A lot of that had to do with the expectations of Cal Arts: that kind of reductivist conceptualist aesthetic led to the making of blank things. Yet the only things I could think of as 'blank' were crafts. In my suburban working-class background, the most invisible things were crafts." These pieces were therefore born out of a concrete need: the wish to construct something totally strange to oneself, something that would be devoid of all allegorical meaning and be marked by mechanical processing. To avoid falling into the rhetorical trap of emotion, he carried out the constuction of cages mechanically, for example, following the steps detailed in the assembly instructions.14

After his period at university, as Thomas Kellein relates, the "first of Kelley's better-known works and performances, staged in Los Angeles, was titled Poltergeist (1979) and alluded to the making visable of invisible energies. His first exhibition in New York, called Confusion (1982), showed a large number of drawings and pieces of furnitures loomed over by a green frog. The course of his life seems to be based on his rejection of Detroit, the declining automobile city, where he was born in 1954 into a Catholic working-class family and studied until the age of twenty-four at the University of Michigan. He then took a degree at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, but unlike most of his fellow artists did not go on to New York to further his career."15 He soon became a fan of rock music, showing a preference here, too, of course, for the marginal, for bands as peculiar to the time as the hard, loud Iggy and the Stooges or the extravagant Sun Ra Arkestra. The cathartic and ritualistic theatricality of certain music concerts provided Kelley, as Dan Graham has described so well, with the key teaching on which to organize his discourse of action: "Everything of major importance I know about performing I learned from these two concerts: After hearing psychodelic music I became a rock music fan and went to many concerts. Two concerts changed everything for me. One was a concert by Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, and the other was a concert by Iggy and the Stooges at a small biker bar in Wayne, Michigan. The two shows were quite different. Sun Ra's shows at this time were huge, showy and spectacular. The stage was filled with tons of equipment and his 'arkestra', as well as dancers and props. The aesthetic was a mixture of African, exotica, big band, science fiction, Greek chorus and political rally. It was unlike anything I had ever seen.The audience would be excited into a dancing frenzy by throbbing African-style drumming, then Sun Ra -or Mr Mystery, as he would sometimes call himself- would start to fuck with your head, shifting at breakneck..."16

On various occasions attempts have been made to relate Kelley to conceptualism, and in fact part of his university education in California was marked by this line of thought and actuation. However, his relationship with conceptual orthodoxy also enjoys the intelligent and cultivated ambiguity apparent elsewhere: a number of the methodological resources of surrealism served him for the elaboration of an effective method that would allow him to plot a "bastardized" flow of thought, compensative of the strictly conceptualist. In methodological terms this was his way of incorporating a degree of "excess" into the familiar conceptual reductivism. Here again he looked for peripheral references on the margins of artistic culture, attitudes ideologically remote from the centre of the dominant discourse. He approached David Askevold, who was, together with Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, one of his tutors at Cal Arts. Askevold represented one of the disorted and dissonant variants on the edge of the mainstream of North American conceptual art. Kelley's use of an associative and suggestive type of methodology on the fringe of the conceptual that leaves the receiver open has been attributed to his influence. In his opposition to a conclusive and logical discourse, and in his attempt to undermine the authority of this, Askevold has championed a strategy that favours the pre-logical dimension, the realm of the irrational or cacophonic intelligibility. The meaning of the proposition ought to yield itself up to the subjective, the ambiguous and the dislocated in order to potentiate perceptual, physical and temporal slips that baffle any expectations as to the linearity of perception of the work. In Askevold's oeuvre -and we should add here, Kelley's too- subjectivity and objectivity, psychological and parapsychological, documentary and fictional, verbal references and visual references, all serve to afford the spectator a broad margin of interpretation. For Askevold, the interpretation of a thing and that thing itself must be independent if the very process of interpretation is to avoid collapsing into arbitrariness.17

Asked by John Waters recently about his dirtiest early memory, Kelley recounted an incident which apparently dates from his teens. He and his gang used to break into buildings. One day they got inside a little electrical supplies store. Next to the front door they found a trap that seemed to give access to the basement. They lifted the trap, and one of Kelley's gang went through first and ended up falling into a septic tank. They were all horrified to see their friend swallowed up by the filth, but they had to help him get out of the tank.18 The artist points out to us here again in words the intellectual direction in which his works move.

Once more we are wandering around the prologue to an exhibition trying to find the way in, and we stop in front of a picture that looks like a monumental cartoon from some comic: the subject looks at the object -Exploring, (1996)- and tries to discover the apparent meaning offered by the representation: "if you go in for speleology, sometimes you have to stop, there are times when you have to go on all fours, even drag yourself along on your belley. Crawl, worm!," the image replies, obliging us to get down on the ground, to betray our gaze and abandon our confidence that we can cultivate our "spirit" by making profitable use of art. In The Trajectory of Light in Plato's Cave (1985-1996) the new version of which is being shown for the first time in this exhibition, the spectator comes up smack against the picture itself. If we want to keep on, to continue the search, we will have to retrace the descending path towards horizontality, towards the ground our species left behind when it learned to stand. To crawl under the picture to get inside Plato's cavern, to penetrate into Rothko's chapel or to view Lincoln's profile. We will have to accept for a moment the superiority of matter, of the body above the spirit and the soul, if we want to find out how this story continues. To kneel, to get down, to mess up and dirty the clothes that we had to work so hard to pay for. To cross the threshold of the exhibition like the hermit who tenaciously pursues the light of allegory.

J.L.S.



(Published from the exhibition catalogue "Mike Kelley",
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1997.
José Lebrero Stals is Head of Exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona)

1. Dieter Roth in "Only Extract the Square Root", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, University of California Press, 1996, p. 302.
2. Howard N. Fox in "Artist in Exile", catalogue Mike Kelley : Catholic Tastes, ed. Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney Museums of American Art, New York, 1993, p. 185.
3. Mike Kelley and Julie Sylvester in "Talking Failure", Parkett n· 31, 1992, p. 101.
4. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris, 1975.
5. Kristine Stiles in "Material Culture and Everyday Life" op. cit. note 1, p. 283.
6. Mike Kelley in "Mythos-Wissenschaft", catalogue for Öyvind Fahlström. Die Installations, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst e. V., Bremen, and Kölnisher Kunstverein, Cologne, Ed. Cantz, Stuttgart, 1995, p. 13 ff.
7. Mike Kelley quoted by Paul Schimmel in op. cit. note 2, p. 211.
8. Gail Levin in "Surrealisten in New York und ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Kunst", catalogue for Bilderstrait, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1992, p.77.
9. Op. cit. note 8 ,p. 78.
10. Paul Ilie, El surrealismo en España, Ed. Taurus, Madrid, 1982, pp. 276-278.
11. "au moment de s'endormir, Saint-Paul-Roux faisait naguère placer sur la porte de son manoir de Camaret, un écriteau sur lequel on pouvait lire: LE POETE TRAVAILLE" André Breton in Les Manifestes du Surréalisme, Ed. Sagittaire, Paris, (1946 ed.), p. 29.
12. "Mike Kelley", Artforum n· 89, New York, p. 93.
13. Interview with Mike Kelley, catalogue for The BiNational: American Art of the late 80s, Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, 1988, p. 116.
14. Interview between John Miller and Mike Kelley, Art Press, 1992, p. 7.
15. Thomas Kellein in "Is Evil Really Evil?", catalogue for Mike Kelley, Kunsthalle Basle, 1995, p. 7.
16. Op. cit. note 14, pp. 54-58.
17. Catalogue for Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1995, p. 63.
18. Interview between John Waters and Mike Kelley, Feb. 1996, downloaded from http://www.voyagerco.com.