The starting point for much of Mike Kelley's work are historical facts, religious beliefs, cultural phenomena, and psychological dynamics. From the stockpile of collective experience, he digs out a few nuggets which are often the banal conveyors of the traces of those large systems of belief. Kelley transforms ideas into objects, as would a Conceptual artist. He writes and performs texts, that are accompanied by actions, as would a performance artist. Kelley turns Conceptualism into a poetics as he confronts his subject. Because of his underlying skepticism about the "truth" of any of the systems with which he begins, he riffs, invents and elaborates, giving free reign to invention. Most standard explanations of Kelley's work position it as an oeuvre that spans painting, conceptual art, performance and installations that organizes ensambles of sculptural objects, drawings and paintings in environments related to themes. Kelley's work is often accompanied by text, that may be written on drawings or may accompany a span of works or a performance. What is striking about Kelley's progression is that while he has maintained his stance in Conceptualism, he has abandoned its traditional dry physical presence and has continuosly embodied his operations in an astonishing variety of artistic forms, ranging from time based performance and video to "traditional" paint on canvas; from single artefacts to ensembles of objects all of which share a raucous, aggressive and humorous stance. Kelley's oeuvre remains solidly in the camp of the anti-aesthetic; the roots of Kelley's work are in everyday objects, the discarded, kitsch, and the mass media.

But how did Kelley arrive at his aesthetic, which is arguably one of the most influential of his generation of American and European artists? Four projects on display in this exhibition exemplify Kelley's accomplishment and reveal the possibilities for a new reading of his work. In the course of the ten years that Kelley has worked on these projects -from roughly 1986 to 1996- Kelley has turned his scepticism from large mytho-historical concepts, as in the earliest of these four projects, Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, (1985-1996) to a scepticism directed at his own memory and construction of a past, as revealed in the more recent work, Educational Complex (1995). I would argue and I believe that recent art works bear me out, that Kelley's conceptualism has not only evolved in relation to the art of his time but that it has also developed in a reciprocal relationship with the conceptual energies and the poetics of rock and experimental music.

Indeed Kelley's education occurred at a moment in the art world, the 1970s, when the modernist paradigm was breaking apart and when the traditional practice of painting and sculpture seemed to confining for anyone who was as affected by the aftermath of the student revolutions of the 1960s as was Kelley. Kelley had the good fortune to be educated at a moment when he could study at the University of Michigan with Gerome Kamrowsky, a veteran of Abstract Expressionist painting and absorb the goals of intuitive, subjective art that sprang from the "unconscious," and where he could observe the beginnings of feminist art, attend numerous films and concerts.

Not having been absorbed into any official course of study (church or school), music worked its way into Kelley's mind subversively, under the guise of pleasure. Not being an attitude that, like the Catholic church, the family, or even, alas, art, subjects that Kelley targetted and deconstructed in his work, rock lodged itself as a tool rather than a subject, that is until now, when its presence as a phenomenon has finally been acknowledged and allowed to circulate as subject matter in Kelley's recent work. As a teenager, at the University and as a club-goer, Kelley was an avid fan. He attended concerts by Terry Riley and the Sun Ra Arkestra and became aware of the experimental minimalist music of LaMonte Young and the electronic sound of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The idealism of 60s rock'n'roll went against the grain of his own cynical attitudes. Living near Detroit he had been exposed early to its anarchic margins. As a kid, he had been recruited into the network of John Sinclair, a radical political activist who saw rock, along with marijuana, as one of the liberating phenomena of culture and who used the band, the MC-5 (the Motor City 5) as a vehicle for his social program. Rather, it was the proto-punk performer, Iggy Pop, then performing in and around Detroit with the Stooges, whose astonishing aggression, acting-out, and gender swiching, who really appealed to the young Kelley.

Thus the possibilities of what might strictly have to be called music seeped into Kelley's imagination and pervaded his notions of art. That hybrid, which has been labelled art rock, had begun to emerge in the 60s, with the emergence from art school of members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In fact Kelley's first involvement with performance art was at the University of Michigan where he was a member of a noise band known as Destroy All Monsters. In this band, Kelley would perform not with instruments but with all sorts of found objects like vacuum cleaner parts which could make sound while morphing into all sorts of metaphoric uses and meanings.

He arrived at Cal Arts in 1978 at the height of that school's embrace of conceptual art. The teacher who had the most influence on him was David Askevold, a Conceptualist who was fascinated by "unatural" phenomenon, such as the occult. Askevold and Kelley collaborated on Poltergeist (1979) a photo text work about spiritualism, that also involved a performance. But another significant person in Kelley's Cal Arts education was Laurie Anderson.1 By the mid 1970s, Anderson was known for performances for which she was writer, director, actor, composer and choreographer. Her performances, the opposite of the reductive, repetitive, and banal strange narrative texts accompanied by extraordinarily manipulated electronic sound.

Much of Keley's early work was performance-based. Each performance revolved a putative theme. Kelley's ornate, abrasive language shaped a loosely structured narrative that he would decry in performance. Not simply readings, Kelley's performance involved the manipulation of props, objects he made that related to the theme of the work. What was often missing was music. However, Kelley was also, during his Cal Arts years, a member of a band called The Poetics. Other members of the group were fellow students, Tony Oursler, Don Krieger, Mitchell Syrop and John Miller. The Poetics were firmly in the camp of art-rock. In the beginning, the band tried to be off the cuff and fun and used props and language humorously, somewhat as Kelley did in his performances. Self-conscious and quotational about rock theatrics. The Poetics was a rock performance group. Eventually, the act became purely musical.

Kelley's cult status as a performance artist was paralleled by his growing fame as an artist who produced work that could be shown in galleries, but the latter - mainly drawings and objects-issued from their relationship to the theme of a performance and often a gallery show had the same title as a performance. His activity in the band diminshed . But the self-conscious attitudinizing of rock theatrics remained a occasional trademark of his performance work.

The first major work where all the strands of Kelley's early interests unite was Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile. 2 This work culminated in 1986. An elaborate and exfoliating set of relationships forms the substructure of this piece which is given order by a nonsensical notion. Kelley built a story around three apparently unrelated historical figures. What unites them in Kelley's conception is that each has a specific noun associated, possessively, with his name. Kelley then created texts, images, banners an installation and a performance in which to free-associate around those possessives, so that chapels, caves, and profiles become linked in a seemingly arbitrary way.

The anarchism of this work is in marked opposition to the seriousness of its core subject: philososphy, art and history. Kelley's scathing attack on these profound subjects comes through most clearly in the performative aspects of the work. These occur in the installation and in the performance. At the installation, the viewer is converted to a punk performer by being forced into a position that rudely demeans the subjects of the work. Kelley orchestrates this conversion in the following way: the heart of the installation is an enclosed cave/chapel structure hung with banners and lit by a cheap, glowing, fake fireplace. To enter this space, the viewer must "perform". The only way to get inside is to crawl, to get down on one's belly and slither on the floor through a narrow space below a painting. The painting bears a text that addresses the spectator as a worm (the lowest order of life that can exist in a cave) and as a spelunker, an explorer of caves. Crawling in and out of this "holy" enclosure debunks any dignity out of the attendance at such shrines, trashing the metaphysics and poetics of patriotism, art appreciation and philosophical speculation.

Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile culminated in 1986 in a performance at Artist's Space in New York. Here Kelley employed the theatrics of rock as appropriate backdrop for the attack on the megalomania of his subject -the social veneration of history, art, patriotism. He adopted the persona of a rock star to spew out the nasty words of his text. As he called out the names of the states - Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, etc.- where caves exist, his tirade was punctuated by slamming, banging sounds and by a wall of guitar sound produced by the band, Sonic Youth, concealed behind a curtain on the stage.3 Riffing wherever word associations would take him, Kelley did a rant on sexual liberation that he linked to freedom (Lincoln freed the slaves), proclaiming that he too was free..., free to play with dolls, free to be himself, (his body was his self), to take his pants off. This whole action is again punctuated by the noise of rock guitars. Kelley's performance (of which I am only able to paraphrase moments) erased the piety of the subject matter, taking the most simplified rock structure-noise- and driving it over the top with verbal harangue that exaggerates and amplifies the rock lyric.

After 1986, Kelley seemed to eliminate the vestiges of performance and the rock aesthetic from his work. He embarked on a body of work titled Half a Man (1987). He did no performances as part of this work and therefore the cult of Kelley as performance artist ended and his ostensible links with rock and music were severed. Kelley also, in fact, moved away from a scrutiny of the mega institutions, such as the church and the past and looked more closely at the institutions that govern the self as it is postulated in Freudian terms. But the vestiges of performance-based work survived in Half a Man in the form of surrogate "actors" (they were stuffed animals). And these actors became the ridiculous embodiment upon which empathy is projected. Thus in this piece, Kelley questions the whole basis of performance as communication.

Half a Man was psychologically based; it addressed gender and identity formation, as it occurs, in the Freudian sense, at childhood. Kelley pushed gender and personality development into his way of working on this project. He dismissed the idea of making sculpture, ironically equating it with masculinity. He perceived that various narratives of childhood were invested in feminized craft forms and in dolls and stuffed animals, made for and owned by children.

Half a Man , as an entire project that occupied Kelley for five years, included many perverse and funny groupings of found objects, hand made yarn and rag dolls, abandoned and used stuffed animals, crocheted Afgahns. For instance, Kelley started this serie with a large wall piece, titled More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), a quilt-like assemblage of many stuffed animals, alongside of which stood a votive-like shrine of half-burned candles. This piece addressed the economic exchange between adults and children, where the giving of emotion (measured here by the patient fabrication by an adult of a toy meant as a gift) carried the expectation of being repaid, a burden that the recipient must bear, like it or not. Meant to join the ranks of commodity-critique sculpture that engaged artists of the 1980s such as Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, Kelley's piece addressed these subjects from the low end employing used products and children's toys, rather than incorporating as sculpture glossy advertising or machine-made objects, as had the other sculptors.

Performative elements entered the Half a Man project in the work known as the Arenas (1990). In these, "found" crocheted Afghans were placed on the floor (perhaps a dig at the steel plate "carpets" of Carl Andre) and positioned on top of the Afghans were found cloth dolls and animals: teddy bears, "autograph" hound (dachshunds that children sign their names on) other miscellaneous types of stuffed toys, in various stages of disrepair. Different bizarre enactments (between two animals or with one animal) appeared to be taking place on and sometimes under these mats, or so the viewer ridiculously imagined. In fact, though appearing to be performative and imparting a drama, the Arenas actually only revealed the spectators need for empathy. Kelley went further in cancelling viewers' connections to these mini dramas when he added sound to the Arenas. Kelley did this by taping himself reading texts that were then played on boom boxes placed on the floor next to an arena. The texts always had nothing to do with the purative "subject" of the Arenas action. Rather the texts riffed on such things as different colors or on garbage and critical theory. The texts were meant to be barely understandable: the cacophony created by multiple works being heard in the same space was intentional.

The desire to cancel the performative and the narrative that appeared inherent in these sculptures -and in the subject matter of childhood and gender- resulted in a great and final work that Kelley created as an ending for Half a Man : Craft Morphology Flow Chart
(1991). Here Kelley gathered many examples of the stuffed animals and, as if they were dead bodies in a morgue, laid them out on tables so that they might be subjected to investiation. Indeed the "bodies" of the toys were scientifically scrutinized with matching types grouped together on individual tables and photographs of each "specimen" hung on the walls of the room in which the vast accumulation of tables stood. Thus the life was stamped out of these little actors. They were now entering an afterlife as museum specimens, their role as surrogates of affection and empathy was totally finished.

Not long after the ending of the project, Half a Man , Kelley came to a parallel closure in his career. He too was undergoing museumification as he became the subject of a mid career retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.4 The exhibition, held in 1993, gathered together twenty years of his art. Museum exhibitions force a particular reading of an artist's work. This is particulary true of an artist such as Kelley for whom performance has been such an important aspect of the work. Kelley's whole performance career could be written about in the catalogue and could be represented by a few objects that were relics of performances. All of the passion of this aspect of Kelley's career was reduced to a mere shadow in the "history" that emerged in the exhibition. As a result, Kelley realized that a false history of himself had been recreated and that his own past would emerge as just another fiction.

In the course of preparing for the exhibition, Kelley went relentlessly through his own archives. He granted interviews to this author, the curator of the exhibition. Together we plotted a plausible history of his career. We talked a lot about his early education, mostly trying to ascertain what art had "influenced" him. Never an artist to ignore uncritically any amount of received information,.Kelley spun together the usual art historical narrative, intermixing it with a tale of cultural context and establishing or reinforcing the themes that he had engaged in his art. Because the museum had forced a flasehood by way of its erasure of time based-art and because, inevitably, he had creatively reconstructed his own past as anyone does, he had been the victim of his own "false memory."

Kelley's retrospective occured around the time that a debate was being waged amongst American intellectuals about "alse memory". This term has become fashionable with some psychotherapists who claim that in certain patients, important past events are screened out and never allowed to resurface in the conscious or ununconscious life. The clues that certain non-remembered events have in fact happened are to be found in symptoms. This notion of "false memory" has been attacked as more psychoanalytical mumbo-jimbo, as fiction that affords the psychoterapist the rationale for increased, extended and ultimatley unnecessary treatment. Intrigued by this debate about memory at a time when he was trying to relive his own past, but was in faxt riddled with lapses and inconsistencies.

This work he called Educational Complex. The piece is a large ensemble of white cardboard architectual models clustered closely together on a horizontal tabletop surface. Each model represents a school that Kelley attended, from Catholic day school to Cal Arts; there is also a model of Kelley's childhood home (a postwar house in Wayne, Michigan). There is no geographic "truth" in the way these buildings relate to one another. Rather their proximities relate to the sculptural necessity of how to bring this number of models together in a way that was spatially efficient. Moreover, the models themselves are not exct. As the viewer looks into the models or at their exterior walls, he sees inexplicable holes and changes in elevations or blank walls with no windows. These seemingly rational buildings are reconstructions from memory, and where his memory has failed him, Kelley has just made the architecture "work" by filling the blanks in his memory with spaces, spaces that are often non-functional or inexplicable.

Thus Kelley demonstrates, that any educational history, study of influences, etc., is a reconstruction that is made to appear to work in a logical manner, by the use of elipses or connections that function only to construct a reasonable whole. By extension of this reasoning, any construction of Kelley's past is a reconstruction. And any omission from past tellings of Kelley's career, when he might have supplied the "data" to his would-be biographer, may be a retelling based on false memory.

Nomerous work of Kelley both survive or refer to this period, such as, to name only a few, the early quick paintings that combine gestural brush strokes and popular imagery, som of the elements of his installation piece, Meditation on a Can of Vernors (1981-1984), that has as an aide-mémoire the beer that is the favorite of anyone growing up in Michigan, the elaborate drawing installation, The John Reed Club (1992) that is based on the cartooning of a college friend named John Reed that fuses a boyhood fantasy with a history of American art assembled from vantage point of the historical American radical, also named John Reed, or the banners derived from the plaintive messages of xeroxed handouts and porters found in college dorms, such as those of Kelley's alma mater.

But erased from the Educational Complex, the totalizing presentation of the inadequacy of memory, was any clue of that which had fuelled the artist on that repressed level, that of pleasure, which is somehow not supposed to matter in that development we call our education. One omission of consequence was the omission of his involvement with rock music and its formative influence in his development.5 On a very superficial level, rock's influence on Mike Kelley can be told in a brief look at the graphics of his drawings. Although underground comics, of which he was also a great consumer, had their effect, it is certainly rock and roll posters -the lettering, the psychodelic effects- that provided a model for Kelley when, after finishing Cal Arts, he stopped painting and began drawinging. Such a drawing as Shock (1982-1983) from his first extensive installation, Monkey Island uses large letters energized by waving lines and psychodelic concentric circles of text as the focal point of the drawing, emphasizing text over image. A slightly later magnificent drawing, Infinite Expansion (1983) a part of Kelley's project The Sublime, is a huge psychodelic black and white piece, made up of increasingly magnified patterns (the wood grain from a giant redwood, an example of the sublime) that invoke hallucinatory responses from the viewer. A late work, such as the 1991 Ageistprop, a poster like drawing of a woman with long fowing locks with typography stencilled over the image, certainly recalls the Art Nouveau-influenced rock record-cover and poster style of the 60s

However, turning now as he has in his most recent work, to his own involvement in rock music as a member of a band, Kelley reworks that history, wich was more underground and unoffical, deconstructing its myths, foregrounding its (mis)interpretations, highlightning its nostalgia, mixing "fact" and fiction. Kelley both divulges his low culture enthusiasms and rips apart any empathy at constructing a "true" history of his past.

Tentatively titled, The Poetics Project, the work is a collaboration between Kelley and his long-ago band partner and fellow artist, Tony Oursler. The Poetic sProject, like the band it is named after, The Poetics, is collaborative. Oursler and Kelley performed in it while at Cal Arts. In separate texts, they will each give their own "interpretations" of the band's history. Invariably, there will be discrepancies between their memories and what they choose to highlight as meaningful about their experience. But, obviously, this is grist to the mill, as it will foreground the unreliability of autobiography, its existence as continuous refabrication.

The Poetics Project will exist as a video installation, a vertical pole onto which are attached at various heights are video monitors that will project image, light and sound into the surrounding space. On each of the monitors will run videos made by each of the artists. In these, they will reconstruct past histories of the band: they will film the locations where the band played in the past, stage interviews with actors playing themselves as youthful band members, pseudo-rock stages documentaries about themselves (known as "rockumentaries"). The music made by the band will form the backbone of the piece. What should emerge from this parody of their past, the truth as manufactured by media, is the level of fantasy that existed for them in their generation's paradigm of liberation, the rock band. Yet for both artists, in spite of the nostalgia related to rock, which must be reconstructed, there is also a legacy of that work, that each wants to address the rock band held formal interests and initiated ideas for sculpture and performance and their interrelatedness.

E.S.

(Published from the exhibition catalogue "Mike Kelley",
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1997.
Elisabeth Sussman is a Curator at Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York)

1. For Laurie Anderson's career, see Janet Kardon Laurie Anderson, Works from 1969 to 1983, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1983.
2. Mike Kelley Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, Venice California, New City Editions, 1986.
3. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, New York, Grove Press, 1996 and Ignacio Julia and Jaime Gonzalo, Sonic Youth: I Dream of Noise, Barcelona, Ruta 66, 1994.
4. E. Sussman, Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993.
5. For other artists' interested in rock see: Brian Wallis, ed. Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, 1965-1990. Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1993. p. 68-142.