This is not an obituary, or a critical reading of Mike Kelley’s work, but a more personal acknowledgement of what one of his lesser known works meant to me at a particular moment. It uses some of the same words and phrases as an obituary might, but thankfully I couldn’t get it to behave, so…
The first day of school, Autumn 1985. A dormitory town just outside Belfast. A base mood somewhere between the touchy-feely aftermath of Live Aid and the schizophrenic normality of a domestic civil war whose reality we kids weren’t meant to acknowledge. That morning the history text books were being handed out for the year and it seemed everyone but me was grabbing for the newest ones. I wanted one in condition D though (the lowest, most damaged, condition still deemed worthy of the description ‘book’), and I got lucky – receiving a ragged bundle of pages whose authoritative accounts of great events creaked under an impossibly vital biroed graffiti layer of absurdity, droll commentary and scatology. As the class were being given instructions on how to wrap the book in wallpaper to preserve its condition for the year (a rich joke in itself), I was barely listening – instead flicking through this gloriously dumb/smart portfolio of offhand insolence and marvelling at the fact that the voice speaking through these alterations seemed to have no echo in the voices I heard around me and yet somehow seemed much more recognizable and trustworthy than any of them were.
Seven years later I saw Mike Kelley’s “Reconstructed History” as part of his show at the ICA in London and had a shock of recognition – not so much of the form (though it was, indeed, a heavily –’childishly’– vandalized set of historical prints), but of the voice. Shot through this work and the rest of the show and catalogue was this perfect, brittle voice of defiance. It was a voice that flipped the authority of its targets with a hilarious economy of effort, where earnest cross-hatches were countered with quick strokes and crude phrases – though never more than enough. It was very funny of course, though along with the rest of the work in the show it made me think of the title of the then current Alice Donut album – “Revenge fantasies of the impotent”. There was a deeper melancholy there. “Decay is inevitable,” suggested the work – “Spare us the ‘nobility’ bullshit in the meantime…”
I took a lot of consolation from my recognition of Kelley’s voice as a young artist. It helped bridge the gaps between personal experience, punk, art history, pre-internet fanzine culture, critical/psychological/political theory, INFLUENCES, in a way that felt navigable. I gravitated towards other voices that reminded me of that voice – the irreverence of London collective Bank, the vernacular media poetics of Forced Entertainment, my own collaborators in the index co-operative (particularly Nick Crowe) and Kelley’s own contemporaries John Miller and Paul McCarthy – though you’d never necessarily guess all this, to look at most of my work then and since.
Certainly as time went on, I found that the connection with Kelley’s delinquent voice seemed less vivid for me, though the deadpan tautology of works like “An Actor Portrays Boredom and Exhibits His Knick Knack Collection” still resonates with me as one of my favourite know-it-when-I-see-it artistic tactics. I’d also say that, like the British poet laureate of moral disgust, Chris Morris, Kelley is still someone whose 80s and 90s work stands as a litmus test for whether you and I could ever truly be friends. And when I began working with spam e-mails, the most ubiquitous and despised data form of the globalization moment, it was with an indirect debt to Kelley’s treatment of the abject.
Mike Kelley made some extraordinary work, was a thinker of uncredited subtlety and sensitivity, and for better or worse, was a key figure in the reductive concept of “West Coast bad boy” mythology – a label that ultimately did him few favors. At his best he distilled work from the psyche of an infantile American culture and did so with an irreverence and unlikely morality that was easy to miss, what with it rarely being there in the nihilistic posturing of many of those who followed him, or way too heavily present in more heavy-handed political art (the practitioners of which tended to regard Kelley with suspicion, if not distaste).
At the very least, for that first sign from the culture at large that giggling in the dark might have its place, I owe Mike Kelley a debt. And when I heard the news of his premature death a couple of days ago, I wanted to stop for a moment and at least pay my respects, if not that debt. So this short note is a version of bowing my head in my best suit, muttering trite truisms, and looking suitably pensive and sad – with a giant cock and balls chalked on my back and homemade ectoplasm oozing down to fill my shoes…
Graham Parker 