A close observer of Mike Kelley's artwork might find the inclusion of "Craft Morphology Flow Chart" (1991) in the MACBA exhibition somewhat ironic. To the extent that it was conceived as both a scientistic coda to his prior stuffed animal works and as a means to draw attention away from the psychological and psychodramatc interpretations that had dominated the reception of that prior body of work --constant dwelling on childhood trauma, abuse, etc. - "Craft Morphology Flow Chart" would appear to contradict the blatant psychologizing of his most recent body of work, grouped under the title "Missing Time" (1974-1995), which all but parades its themes of trauma and abuse. But irony, and particularly the kind of irony one comes to expect from post-retrospective artists, is beside the point here. One has always been best advised, when cued to psychological or psychoanalytical impressions of Kelley's work, to immediately shift one's frame of reference to the psychosocial instead, even when the artist is seemingly in his most confessional mode. Such advise is key to the MACBA exhibition. With respect to the psychosocial dimension of his work, "Craft Morphology Flow Chart" is no less proper to Kelley's psychology than are his recent, more properly retrospective, projects. And they in turn are no less psychosocial in their perspective.

One is left then with an interconnected array of themes that pivot between testimony and myth, news events and fiction, history and memory. For example, the idea of "missing time" that Kelley associates with the memory lapse of child abuse victims, as in the work grouped under that title, cannot be completely distinguished from the "missing time" constantly referred to in the testimony of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens in flying saucers, to which Kelley's earlier "Channel Sculptures" allude. The pivot between the two social contexts in Kelley's work forces one to remember that alien abduction testimony is frequently testimony of sexual abuse, and that the psychology of the two might indeed be related. Likewise, the text and photos of Kelley's newspaper covers, also part of Missing Time, remain equally ambiguous as to precisely what genre or genres they constitute, and must be treated, as it were, as an open book. It is often at the height of fiction that Kelley's observations are most incisive and his psychological frankness most terse. It is just as often that the appearance of order--diagrammatic, historical, psychological, or otherwise--veils disorder and unreason tantamount to total confusion. So we must approach Kelley's "confessions" as we would Rousseau's, as a pack of lies hosting the most problematic of truths.

In "Missing Time", Kelley has come to regard his early art training as indoctrination into a cult of aesthetic liturgy and ritual, as well as a form of institutionalized child abuse from which it is unclear whether he has ever or will ever escape. The central theme of the project is a "return" to every institution of learning he has attended, from his childhood Catholic church to graduate school campus. This entails the assembling of architectural models along with written accounts, apocrypha, photographs, and various other materials. In his original conception, the architectural models would be individually detailed only in those areas that he could adequately recollect or were in one sense or another associated with "traumatic" or otherwise vivid experiences of the institutions. The objective truth or falsity of these constructions, like that of the memories and experiences from which they are derived, is of little importance to the overall project. Once completed, the various models would be organized into a single unifying composition or meta-model on the scale of an utopian city plan--subsequently entitled, "Educational Complex" (1995). In this city plan, however, the topography ultimately being modeled would be memory itself, with all the lapses, dead ends, blurred connections, and distorted scale that befit what a psychologist might refer to as a "character formation." In the overall scheme of "Missing Time", the "Educational Complex" becomes a model constructed by a cult survivor, a model that both testifies to the history of the survivor's trauma and to the mind set that inevitably interprets and rewrites that history according to his ongoing needs, that is, as a victim of past abuse. While Kelley never anticipated that the "Educational Complex" would end up so exactingly rendered, the fact that it did only compounds the problem it took on to begin with, as its orderly appearance seems to resist any inference of the fragmented trauma that was the motivation for its completion.

The cult leader or abuser in question is not merely the faceless institution of Kelley's art education, but the patriarch of the specific method behind his undergraduate instruction in painting: the venerable pedagogue, Hans Hofmann. Of the three European "émigrés" who most influenced American post-war art education--Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy--Hofmann was to become the dominant figure in university painting departments throughout the country. Historically speaking, the Hofmann phenomenon is a complex one, of course, although it can be largely credited to his direct influence on several key generations of New York painters, from the early 1940s into the 1960s, through his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. It was, however, his broad experience as a teacher and extraordinary range as an artist that kept his compositional methods from being overly identified with any singular, partisan aesthetic. Hofmann's own artwork ranged from precise, geometric or architectonic studies to automatist and Abstract Expressionist modes of painting, including a number of small-scale drip paintings that anticipated action painting by more than a decade. As a result, Hofmann's compositional method--known generally as "push-pull"--could be regarded as style-neutral and safely embraceable within the university system, where Kelley first encountered it.

The great attraction of push-pull composition for a young artist, besides its seemingly catholic character--that is, catholic in the sense of broad or liberal in scope--is its commingling of formalist and expressionist means. One lays a bit of paint down on the surface of the canvas--the initial elements could come from anywhere and signify anything--and then responds to it with another and another, stimulus and response, thrust and parry, until the whole feels right or natural. Whatever one "says" in the painting is said in relation to something else on its surface, so expression is always dependent upon formal relationships, the overall set of elements, and the play between them. The push-pull game is both playful and full of rules; even the most automatic of gestures are infiltrated by its formality. And it makes little difference whether actual objects or representational elements are introduced, as they were in the compositions of numerous artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as Alan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, and others; the formal play has the power to level everything to its game.

In Kelley's retrospective view of his own early paintings, where pop and vernacular images were often subject to the push and pull, this insistent leveling is where the notion of indoctrination, law, and abuse enters into the picture. Aside from being a compulsion from without, the game is also a self-perpetuating habit, and, like all habits, has within it a certain dimension of seduction. Hence, the patriarch's abuse is tinged with an offer of pleasure--or, at the very least, the displacement of unpleasure which habits by definition afford. The game keeps giving the artist ideas about what to do next and a means to make radical counter-moves "ad infinitum", a means both to produce delight and exert power over meanings. But, in a sense, none of the moves can ever stray too far from the relational enclosure and the obedience implied by it. Everything ends up falling within the system. And that system, along with the artist's or cultist's institutional identity, becomes entwined with his developing selfhood to the point where he can't remember a time when it wasn't there, holding things together as they formally fly apart.

Kelley tries, perhaps futilely, to reckon with this through his "reconsideration" and reworking of student paintings dating from 1974 to 1976--a virtual return to the scene of the crime. Using the "rule system" of the earlier paintings, he responds to them yet again by adding one more gesture, patch, or field of paint, covering elements up, pushing them back, surrounding them. This inverted art therapy, however, is not so much an occasion for psychotherapeutic abreaction than a demonstration that Kelley has by now fully mastered the techniques of his prior work and can function within his aesthetic symptom without the burdens of either compulsion or trauma. Victimhood yields to control and enjoyment, self-analysis to a form of parody and romance. A related series of paintings, entitled "The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy On The Winter)", seems to finalize this process of reconsideration insofar as it becomes the high or classical style of it. "The Thirteen Seasons" also uses the rule system of the earlier paintings, along with their preference for vernacular and pop images--here, images that appear to sample from Kelley's entire career--but it presents that system as a timeless, fully mastered, and resolved modality. This series plays with the theme of perpetual return, using seasonality as its cue. Fittingly, the master finds the ultimate push-pull gesture for his purpose, one that structurally pushes the rules of the whole game. The oval shape of the paintings bends the picture plane into the configuration of a cameo, emphasizing the temporal over the spatial and thus haunting the paintings' theme of timelessness with the cameo's evocation of personal time lost and reminiscence. A six-and-a-half paneled work called "Paintings in Time: December 31"(1994) brings the oval series back into present time, much like the procession of the daily newspaper--and dated accordingly--albeit with the same cover displayed over and over again. Kelley's source for the image is one of his own recent works, which he replicated six and a half times, with the half panel seemingly caused by the interruption of his labor by the exact moment of the work's first exhibition.

It is in the context of the current moral, psychological, and judicial debate in America concerning the question of repressed memories of child abuse--memories which usually surface in individuals of the same age bracket as artists having mid-career retrospectives--that Kelley delves into his own past as a public form of inward retrospection. In a number of recent court cases, judicial acceptance of the psychological theory of Repressed Memory has enabled sexual abuse victims to pursue civil law suits against past abusers that previously could not have gone forward. The tenets of theory, resurrecting Freud's early hypotheses linking sexual hysteria with repressed incest trauma--about which he later expressed grave reservations--account for the long delay in the victim's realization of the abuse as well as the basis of the realization's necessary truthfulness. That is: one may completely forget experiences of childhood sexual trauma though the memories remain intact in the unconscious; these memories can be "recovered," even decades after the events, through psychotherapy; once fully recovered, these memories may be considered to portray events accurately, regardless of the length of time that has elapsed, and thus provide an adequate basis for establishing legal truth.

But, like the "abuse defense" for murder, which has gained firmer legal ground and common acceptance than ever before, Repressed Memory Syndrome has been overdiagnosed and legally overexploited, and a few high-profile cases have recently been reversed on appeal. It would appear that what began as socially progressive legal advocacy for victims of sexual abuse has quickly devolved into yet another swan song of liberalism in America, because the ominous spread of the abuse defense and the growth of victim-culture in general has tainted it by association. The social backlash against the abuse defense is already well underway, and along with it a backlash against accusations of sexual abuse based solely on memories recovered during psychotherapy. The therapy itself has been at the center of the most serious criticism, which basically asserts that so-called recovered memories may not be memories at all, but products of the therapeutic process. The claim of False Memory Syndrome, as it has been termed, is that a fully detailed "memory" of past abuse is not only possible but likely, considering the degree to which the vulnerable subject must submit to the direction and authority of memory recovery therapies and therapists that presume repressed memory to be memory of abuse. That is, false memories of abuse can in the course of therapy be both created and believed once the subject has acquired the conviction--fostered by the therapist--that they must have happened. While this counter-movement promises to bring a measure of criticality back into the public discussion of repressed memory, it also threatens to make it even more difficult to bring legitimate charges against past sexual abusers. And it threatens to shift the whole frame of reference back to a matter of cults and mind control, which, to be sure, was on Kelley's mind from the start.

This is the tangled circuit of memory and invention entered by Kelley's project. By folding together the notions of aesthetic and psychological authority, and dealing with the themes of missing time and timelessness in the matter of his own work and past experience, Kelley offers himself as a kind of experimental guinea pig for testing the current state of psychological investment in art, now that wafty Jungianism, the notion of the primitive unconscious, and critical Oedipalism have all had their day. It is in the context of this recent psychosocial hysteria that Missing Time plays out its push and pull of abuse scenarios and aesthetic terms.

T.M.

(Published from the exhibition catalogue "Mike Kelley",
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1997.
Timothy Martin is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles)