How Curating Got A Bad Name, Or How To Ruin An Artist Retrospective: The Pompidou's Spectacular Failures

Mike Kelley,  Ahh... Youth, 1991 (otherwise known as "the cover of Sonic Youth's Dirty")

The Pompidou Center has a long history of curatorial mismanagement, not so much that it has succumbed to celebrity culture the way US art museums are doing right now, but for lack of true scholarly rigor and international vision.
It got a rather late start in 1977 when it opened, compared to most big capitals - though Brussels is lacking a modern and contemporary museum right now - and from the beginning was committed to either showcasing French artists (it opened with a Marcel Duchamp retrospective) which is fair enough as most national museums do represent their country after all; or organizing sprawling, messy  mammoth exhibitions centered around a locale that has been a hotbed of artistic innovations (Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Los Angeles, etc.) or  on some über-vague thematic idea, like "Time" or "Political Art".

The latter type of exhibition was always too complicated and usually crammed to the rafters with objects that were easily missed (I remember marveling at seeing a Copernicus manuscript in 'Le Temps, Vite' that was exiled away in a small vitrine that everybody overlooked, as it wasn't signaled in an obvious manner). The exhibition design or "scénographie' as they like to grandiosely call it in French would usually be so clever you wouldn't understand exactly the subdivisions, the layout and the relationships between concepts and objects*.
The Pompidou catalogs also tend to be stubbornly published in French-only, which can be a saving grace for foreign visitors because they can't wince when they see mistranslations (for example, an article in the Warhol retrospective catalog back in 1990 had "viscous" instead of "vicious" when referring to a Lou Reed lyric, which kinda change things, especially if it's the heading of an article) or wonder at the generally poor proofreading.

 Full disclosure, I worked there as a lowly curatorial assistant back at the end of the last century, and I witnessed piss-poor planning, general chaos, temper tantrums, or important tasks being given over to unpaid interns or temp workers whose contract were renewed (or not) every 2 months or so.
The main reason for this is linked to arcane budgetary rules arbitrated by the French Ministry of Finances and trickling down to cultural institutions,  but you can also blame a very French attitude when it comes to work ethics, a mix of overconfidence in being able to pull things off at the last minute and a blind belief in nationalistic clout.
Ah yes, if you ask MoMA for a loan 2 months before your show opens, of course you gonna get it. Ah yes, Guernica will be lent to my show because of course, I work at the Pompidou, that flagship of French male chauvinism, the centerpiece of French high culture. Ah yes, my group show with a complicated if ill-defined subject will look fantastic because I started working on it only a year prior to the opening and I'll be able to convince the Tate Modern, the Hermitage, MoMa and other large museums to lend me over their foot traffic-attracting masterpieces, never mind we always refuse them our own show-stopping artworks .  You get the drift.

As a rule, the Pompidou shows don't really travel that much internationally, but the Pompidou does "take shows", as we say in the profession, that is hosts an exhibition curated elsewhere by somebody else, usually some retrospective.
 "Take shows" are a good way to split expenses in Europe (in the US it's different, the show travels for a fee on top of the expenses), and everywhere they serve the purpose of saving an institution some resources (say, you have a reduced staff that cannot spend too long on research, or your museum isn't very well-known or has a small collection to leverage so it wouldn't get the loans needed for the exhibition to be as complete as possible) and in some instances they can fill a gap in scheduling (which happens a lot, when you need to postpone an exhibition to raise more money or wait for loans to get back from elsewhere).

Mike Kelley, a detail from one of the Memory Ware pieces.

As you may know if you follow FBC! the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized a Mike Kelley retrospective that opened back in December. That exhibition was planned long in advance, when Kelley was still alive, and will travel to MoMA PS1 in September, and then to MOCA in Los Angeles next year.
But before that, a considerably reduced and incredibly poorly installed version stopped at the Pompidou for the Summer.
Being a Mike Kelley scholar, even though nobody seems to know it (I wrote my dissertation on Kelley and got the Ph.D back in 2003), I thought I should do a quick day trip to Paris to go see the exhibition, if only because I'm planning to write a book on his work, so it's always good to see the work again in person.
Of course I'm incredibly biased because in my opinion (which seemed to be shared by a bunch of other critics and scholars and writers, so I'm not being quixotic here) Kelley is one of the most influential artists of the last 30 years or so.
 Having stated this, you can understand I was expecting his retrospective in its Pompidou incarnation to be quite substantial, on the same scale as it was in Amsterdam, maybe with the addition of local loans (Kelley is well represented in François Pinault's collection, for example). So imagine my disappointment when I arrived at the Pompidou to see that the show wasn't even announced on a banner hanging from the museum's façade. They had one each for Roy Lichtenstein and  Simon Hantaï, a French-based Postwar abstract painter,  both being given the top floor, the most prestigious real estate at the Pompidou, and one other banner for the permanent collection. I'll get back to that a bit later.

Kelley's retrospective is located in one of the mezzanine galleries on the right hand side of the building when you come in, and to add insult to injury there is a crapstatic show of younger artists in the other, because nobody at the Pompidou thought that devoting more space to Kelley's work would have been a smarter option.
From then on there was no way this could have ended well, and to confirm my suspicions the show starts on the wrong footing with a didactic proudly announcing that "this is the first Mike Kelley retrospective in France" which is patently untrue as a traveling one organized by Thomas Kellein stopped in Bordeaux in 1992. You can find the reference on Kelley's website, and it's listed in most of his bios, so it's not exactly a secret. I guess people at the Pompidou must think that if it didn't happen in Paris, then it never happened, right?

Unlike in Amsterdam, the exhibition starts chronologically with a few birdhouses from his CalArts MFA show in 1978, then jumps up to some "performance-related objects" and after that it's complete chaos. One slanted wall brings you to 2-dimensional works from Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile (1986) and right behind that wall you then get to a few sculptures and hologram videos from the Kandors (so that would chronologically be the end).
The most real estate is taken up by The Poetics Project, an installation made in collaboration with Tony Oursler for the 1997 Documenta and acquired by the Pompidou. By far not a very significant piece for both artists despite its sprawling footprint, but interesting as a transitional piece for Kelley. It's normal for a museum to showcase its collection so no beef from my part here, but it means that within such a small gallery space a lot more interesting or important pieces are missing, that could have given a much better idea of Kelley's work to the public. Oh but who am I kidding here, there's absolutely no way a visitor could get a good idea of his importance and influence with such a crappy installation.

Behind the Poetics Project, on one side you have a couple of Memory Ware 2-D pieces (an accumulation of buttons, pins, beads and shiny objects glued on a flat panel that command huge prices from unenlightened collectors, a bit of in-your-face-fuck-you from Kelley to the market, if you will, most of them from 2000-onward), one blobby sculpture called Cuttlebone I won't discuss here for lack of time but that is interesting for many reasons (if you want to know why, wait for me to write that book).
On the other side, a few stuffed animal pieces, not too many nor very significant ones, maybe because these are the kind of pieces the curator thought were the most well-known, so no need to show the seminal ones, right?
There are some very minor paper pieces scattered here and there and in the last room you have stuff thrown together for no other reason, seemingly, that the curator had no fucking idea what to do with them.
There's the magnificent Educational Complex maquette (1995) that shares some space with one of the sculpture from Day Is Done, one projection of the Heidi video on a wall, and a couple other videos elsewhere. You get the feeling that someone thought, "oh I'm gonna put all the videos in the same space, because it's the same medium, it must mean something, right? Oh and the maquette and the Day Is Done sculpture are loosely linked with memory and education, let me put this here" while there are 2 panels from Sex To Sexty on another wall.

Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, detail from the Poetics Project, 1997 (an interview between John Cale and Tony Oursler)

This is what I'd call "curating by Wikipedia", taking a few pieces from various periods of Kelley's art career without carefully selecting them, throwing them in a space and not bothering to rigorously link them to explain a bit why they are significant, why they are displayed here in relation to what, etc.
The wall labels and didactics are particularly idiotic in that regard. They wallow in a succession of empty adjectives (he went to the "famous" Cal Arts school,  "from the "astonishing richness of his works on paper" to "his "spectacular mixed-medias works", his "erudite work tinged with irreverence" is laid out in a "striking" visual & sonic path", and OF COURSE it's an "acidic  critical commentary on art and society").
 This may very well be but at no point during the show do any of the didactics explains how Kelley arrives at that. Unlike in Amsterdam, where all the wall labels and didactics were extremely well-written and informative, and where connections between artworks were explained clearly.

I left the show so pissed off by its poor organization, installation and educational components that I didn't even bother to buy the catalog, which I would have normally done to expand my collection of Kelley-related books, and I'm glad I'm didn't because I've been told yesterday by someone who will remain anonymous (because I'm not sure the person would want to be quoted) that a massive catalog produced by the Stedelijk will come out at the end of the Summer just on time for when the show arrives at PS1. Now I recommend you buy that one. Apparently the Pompidou went rogue and decided to publish its own catalog, why I wonder because it could have spared the funds to maybe, maybe expand the exhibition as it stands and make it, oh, I don't know, scholarly? Educational? Intelligent? The Pompidou isn't a contemporary art center destined to be a cutting-edge destination for the happy few, but a national museum that attracts a large international audience that could have benefited from 1) learning more about Mike Kelley, 2) be informed why he was such an influential artist over the last few decades 3) in a way that makes sense for a virgin audience 4) so they'd see his work within a larger art historical context.
Instead, they decided to cut the size of the show in such a way it's incomprehensible for the large majority of the (paying) public, giving it a vague air of hipsterism by locating it right next to a show of inane young artists.
Well done, Pompidou Center powers that be, here's a totally wasted opportunity to do your job.

Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, video from the Heidi installation, 1992, (Timothy Martin interviewing Peter and asking him, "do you know what masturbation is?)

What the Pompidou has done instead was welcoming the public to a totally imbecilic work by Loris Gréaud in the center of the foyer, where some stuntman was jumping out of some spiraling tower onto a large inflatable cushion. BIG DEAL. Oh, performance art, you've come such a long way. Not.

Then if you were so inclined you could have gone to the Simon Hantaï retrospective on the top floor, the one reserved for, you know, the masters. There was also a Lichtenstein one I skipped for lack of time, and that might have redeemed my whole Pompidou experience except I've been told by several people who've seen it that the curatorial choices were odd and that, too, was curiously installed. Oh well. Anyway, I chose poorly because that Hantaï retrospective demonstrated in the most clear-cut way possible that the poor schmuck took twenty years churning out crapstatic paintings (you know the kind: brown, brown and brown muddy brown painterly ones with an occasional maroon highlights or two), all 400 of them,  before he eventually arrived at something half-decent. Which are tie-dye origami-like jobs being unfolded, mostly in blue, but you also have some yellow ones. If you see just one of these it's actually enjoyable, if you see several together they make you realize what a mediocre painter he was, someone who actually never influenced anybody at all in his entire life. 

Why am I hating on Simon Hantaï, will you ask? Well I have nothing against the poor schlemiel, besides I think he's dead. Rather, I am hating on the Pompidou right now. The Hantaï retrospective could have easily be swapped with the Mike Kelley one in terms of real estate and not suffered from it, on the contrary,  editing out the brown sauce paintings by a few hundreds would have been very smart to avoid de-evaluating the work of an artist I was fairly neutral about before.
But now I know, Hantaï has never been a good artist, period. Not worth devoting that many resources for. So why did the Pompidou decide to spend its public funds on someone nobody will ever wake up thinking about, "this artist changed my life and the course of Postwar painting!"?

 Because he was quasi-French for fuck sake! Let's show the world the French had great Postwar artists! You see, when you learn art history in France, you are taught that the great drama of Modern and Contemporary Art was when Rauschenberg was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial in 1964, thereby ending France worldwide domination in modern painting (and art, then). It came two years after the definitive loss of the French colonies, so you can imagine the trauma.
The French art world, which is managed and dominated by mostly male and mostly white civil servants, never recovered from that loss. Ever since, they lament the lack of French artists in the collection of major international museums (read "American", I rarely see a French apparatchik bemoaning the absence of French crappy painters in the collections of, say, the Tate Modern or the Moderna Museet in Stockholm), and every decade or so they spend a big chunk of French public money to organize a showcase of French artists in the United States. That's when my US friends usually come to me and ask, how come there isn't good contemporary art in France? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind alongside French pop music's international hits.

Last night as I was discussing how terrible a painter Hantaï was, a French friend joked and said, "oh but you see, I was brought up in the cult of  Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, so Hantaï is actually a spot above". While not being totally untrue, I was, yes, but this summer the Pompidou doesn't devote any single solo show to a woman artist. None. So crappy painter for crappy painter, if they really want to make a point of showing off terrible Postwar abstract painting by foreign artists who were living in France, then why the hell not show Vieira da Silva? Seriously, if the Pompidou wants to spend money on artists who lived in France but are not well-know internationally, then I propose they should explore the work of Lea Lublin, who did really interesting work in the 1970s and would likely interest people abroad.
There's a whole side discussion to be done about the current sexist and racist cultural politics of the French (and European) art world, because they're terribly backwards here, but then when you see how they organized all their exhibitions at the Pompidou this summer you begin to understand it's a symptom of a much larger problem, mainly a lack of curatorial vision, self-reflection and stringent intellectual standards.

If you wonder where curating got its bad name to be used by all and sundry in the fashion industry, music blogs, novelty stores and lifestyle magazines, look no further than the cultural institutions that lose their sense of purpose and meaning to abandon all pretense of educational or scholarly goals.
The Pompidou is a shining example of that, even without organizing a TV reality show featuring a threesome between Marina Abramovic, James Franco and Jay-Z.
Just by selecting where to display which artist within the premises of the museum and how to give up on all pretense of intellectual organization within the Kelley retrospective, the museum let all its standards slip, and by doing so not only it let down the spiritual and historical legacy of a great artist, but its audience as well.



UPDATE: I've been told yesterday there was a banner indeed for Mike Kelley. But not on the facade where the main entrance is located, but on the back of the building where there is no visitors entrance (there's one for the library, if I remember well). Still looks like an afterthought to me and it doesn't make the exhibition better or more respectful of the artist, the public and the institution.

*The one notable exception I can think of, on the top of my head, was the rather wonderful Let's Entertain around 2000. It was so incredibly well-installed with very good wall labels and didactics. It was curated by Philippe Vergne and came from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where he was working at the time. 

Mike Kelley Retrospective At The Stedelijk Museum In Amsterdam.

Very special thanks to Ann Goldstein and the staff at the Stedelijk Museum  for facilitating my visit.


Let me preface this by stating I am probably not the best person to review the Mike Kelley retrospective that ended in Amsterdam on April 1st.

 For one thing I am too close to the subject, having spent a good chunk of my adult life researching his work for my Ph. D dissertation*. The latter was finished at the end of 2002, about ten years before Kelley's passing last year, meaning that even though I did follow what he was doing over the last decade or so, I didn't do it as closely as before.
For instance I didn't collect articles, catalogs, books and reviews of his latter work, I just contended myself with attending whichever exhibition he was having when I could and occasionally ask him a few questions to clarify things, but that was pretty much it.
So I have a rather in-depth knowledge of much everything he made between the mid/late 1970s to the late 1990s, and after that it becomes spotty. On the one hand I have too much knowledge of  some of Kelley's work, but on the other I moved from being a scholar to simply a big fan of his, and I might not have the necessary distance to evaluate the exhibition; while in some instances I may actually know too much and become overtly critical about small things most visitors wouldn't notice. So generally speaking I have no idea how people not familiar with Kelley's work would react to seeing it for the first time, but I'm happy to report a friend who had never really seen it was really shocked by it. It's great to know the work can still be fresh that way!

Exhibitions are designed for "the audience" at large, and most of it isn't specialized. At the time of my visit, there had been 200,000 people who had visited the retrospective, and judging from what I saw most people seem to deeply enjoy the artworks. It's a pity Kelley didn't get to see how popular his œuvre has become, because as for myself I see it as a testament to his influence on the art of the last 30 years or so. Evolving from a deeply controversial artist whose work was often testing boundaries and expanding our conception of what art is to someone almost universally respected among his peers and loved by the public is no ordinary trajectory at any given time; to achieve that over the course of just a couple decades is even rarer.
This  is the journey that was presented at the Stedelijk Museum for its reopening after several years of renovation and extension, inside its new spaces, from December 15, 2012 to April 1st, 2013.

I haven't researched which architects designed the extension, but from my point of view they don't know much about what is needed to install contemporary art exhibitions. The new spaces have enormously high ceilings but the surface of the rooms themselves isn't that large, which is always problematic for large-scale installations.
 Unfortunately Kelley's work more often than not demands a lot of space, resulting in many instances in pieces being squeezed together when they would need some space to breath. This lack of wide floor space would also likely dictate what could be loaned in to the retrospective, as several major pieces were missing.
Now at any given time it's always difficult for a museum to get some loans due to many purely practical reasons (not enough budget, works loaned elsewhere, the childish tit-for-tat game played by museums worldwide, paranoid collectors trying to hide from their tax obligations, etc.) but I would surmise that the absence of, say, Frame and Framed... or Craft Morphology Flow Chart has more to do with lack of space and/or lack of shipping budget than any other  "real" curatorial choice. The unfortunate result is that, from my point of view, some works that are not so seminal in Kelley's output seem to be highlighted while some others are missing that could give a deeper understanding of his artistic process.

The exhibition was installed on two different floors and started in the middle, with the felt banners, stuffed animals and paintings of the Half A Man project, Kelley's exploration of American stereotypes about masculinity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a choice I found odd  because if these are Kelley's most famous body of works, chronologically it doesn't make that much sense to begin with them.
The handy leaflet with floor plan of the exhibition explained that the retrospective while largely chronological strived to link thematic concepts within Kelley's work (in fact mostly one theme, the question of memory, its erasure and later fantasy reconstruction). While I understood what it meant when I saw the works I am not so certain it was so obvious to casual visitors?

After the visit I realized that the impression of confusion in the exhibition design is largely due to a common practice in most museums: curators design shows to be "read" left to right, as with reading books, whereas most visitors immediately turn to the right and wander from right to left, or counter-clockwise, so to speak. Everybody I saw in the exhibition who hadn't bothered with audio guides did exactly that - as I did myself - and therefore was treated to a super confusing way of looking at the work.
The confusion was deepened by the architectural layout, because there is no way within the space to go from any beginning to any end, whichever side you take first, without going via the middle, so I assume the curators did the best they could with what they had. Basically to go chronologically you had to go directly to the far left of the space, then walk back to the middle and then behind it, go back again and then right. Befuddling, eh?

So if, unlike me, you started correctly with the oldest works you were treated to the early Bird Houses, then various props related to Kelley's performances, then moving  into the first hint of what were to become Kelley's later trademark large-scale works he called his "projects".
 These were long-term explorations of various subjects usually initiated with, say, traditional Western philosophical questions but viewed through the lens of vernacular culture, such as The Sublime, or abstract grammatical concepts like "the possessive" (usually marked in English with 's - I indicate this because some terrible French translations  in the 1990s substituted "possession" as in "demonic possession" for "possessive") with Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile.
Kelley's performances were never recorded except some audio for Plato's Cave... and the made-for-the-radio Peristaltic Airwaves, so the props and drawings are the only things that remain of what were mostly language pieces that integrated objects, noise and music.
A very moving thing about the props, aside from their small scale,  is how perfectly crafted they were. Kelley was never a sloppy artist even when he worked with seemingly shapeless forms (he was a master of the blob!) or cheap materials, even in his early days when he didn't have much money and worked as a janitor to sustain his art practice. The Banana Man costume  made for the video of the same name was particularly moving in that regard.

After this you were confronted with various works related to the Plato's Cave... and The Sublime projects, and then you could turn into the infamous Pay For Your Pleasure installation, a series of quotes about evil thoughts and deeds and portraits of famous artists, writers and musicians,  installed in a long corridor and leading to a painting made by a local  serial killer (each time the work travels a painting made by one has to be found - I don't know if/how they found one in Amsterdam). A donation box is installed at the entrance so the visitors can donate to a charity. It's a work that has been censored a few times, made in an era when American pop culture from James Ellroy to Bret Easton Ellis was obsessed with its psychopath serial killers, and confronting both the common delusion that artists are excused from their misdeeds because of their exceptional position in society as well as the redemptive/therapeutic qualities of art making for criminals. The work does plenty of other things as well, like squarely making fun of the illusory washing of one's conscience by donating to charity without really trying to solve any problem, an idea that comes no doubt from Kelley's visceral rejection of his Catholic upbringing, paying for one's pleasure being a reminder things such as the buying of indulgences.

The middle section of the exhibition was taken mostly by the various stuffed animal pieces, with More Love Hours Than Can Ever Been Repaid and The Wages of Sins, with a curious floor installation mixing the Arenas and Dialogues but all crammed together in a small enclosure, sadly, whereas Lumpenprole was majestically unfolding in an adjacent room. Things got a bit confusing with the various pieces for the 1992  Documenta in a nearby room, pieces that are not often seen but are mostly transitional between the stuffed animal ones and the next big project, the fake memory syndrome ones.

A weird thing happened to Mike Kelley as his work suddenly became more and more famous. He was subjected to the same process that often plague celebrities (something he wasn't, the art world of the time being significantly smaller than today and contemporary art then rarely reaching the mainstream outside of the periodical culture wars launched by the far-right) when their fans start projecting their increasingly weird fantasies on their idols and their output.
His work started to be stupidly misinterpreted, the same way a songwriter's lyrics can be deconstructed in crazy ways to mean anything at all.

Where a lovelorn, delusional music fan would think a song would be addressed to them and only them (something as anodyne as "I will always love you, Lee" ) and therefore allow them to start stalking their idol because the lyrics OBVIOUSLY indicate the musician's secret sexual orientation/contain secret Rosicrucian/Satanist/Nazi/Communist coded messages/location of Knight Templars secret treasures/message to aliens/sea monsters/white supremacists/wizards, etc. the casual art person would think that OF COURSE Kelley's work with stuffed animals was all about child abuse and THEREFORE, tada! Kelley would somehow send secret personal messages about his own autobiography**.

They would assume that Kelley was himself abused as a child, something he repeatedly denied all his life and there is no reason whatsoever to doubt his word, because he was generally not given to that kind of bullshit - he had no time for that.
If you look at the works themselves you wonder how people would come to this conclusion (OK they're dirty and smelly but damn! They're very funny and cute), especially since the very abundant literature about them explains how they came from the concept of gift-giving as a free act located outside of consumer society, in reaction to the post-readymade objects that populated the NYC art world in the 1980s (Koons, Steinbach most specifically, also reading Danto's Transfiguration of The Commonplace should illuminate the whole thing for you).
 They were also used visually as a response to Barry LeVa's floor pieces, which in the late 1980s were still largely forgotten. So here's for the art context. As far as the general culture, Kelley was also interested initially in the exploration of masculinity in relation to crafts, more specifically with stereotypical gender expectations (sewing and knitting as "feminine" occupations and skills). That also launched quite a few battles along the lines of "is Mike Kelley a feminist artist" in various art publications of the time.

Now mainstream culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s was often obsessed with predators in general, concentrating its revulsion not only on serial killers but was also starting at the time to get focused on child abuse, molestation and incest (and nowadays pedophilia). It would be too long and complicated to get into that now, but suffices to say that when every biography of a dead actor or musician published in the 1990s mentioned the possibility of child molestation and abuse, the climate was ripe to appose this type of projection onto a visual artist's work where the materials used were old dirty toys. It's a bit harder to do with geometrical abstract paintings, but I'm sure if you try (not so) very hard you could also surmise Mondrian spent his childhood locked inside a square, or that Frank Stella made his black paintings because he couldn't afford buying more colors. Stuff like that is easy to make up.

Kelley's work was often reactive (a word I use instead of "reactionary" because in Europe the latter is loaded with right-wing meaning), usually responding to mainstream ideas in society or to general trends in art and counter-blasting them with tropes and ideas he saw riding below the general consciousness level but very present nonetheless, using visual cues taken from every day objects that were either mass-produced or hand-crafted. Sometimes he focused on certain well-known subcultures to do so, in other occasions he would study very specific customs and practices drawn from local or regional groups but that could be understood by everybody. He would also pick up on fads and trends gaining mainstream traction nationally and globally, such as fashionable psychological illnesses suddenly making headline news, like the so-called "recovered memory syndrome".

He initially picked up on that because of all the assumptions people made about his supposed abusive childhood, and decided to  pretend he had effectively been abused as an artist through his rigorous formalist education (when he was effectively an adult) at the hand of none the less than Hans Hofmann whose theory of the "push-and-pull" in painting influenced the entire Post-War US art system, and by ricochet much later on was seen as the oppressive hand torturing Kelley out of his Surrealist influences to make him into a formalist painter. Hofmann, needless to say, died years before Kelley entered art school.

So it started more or less as a joke, but morphed into successive bodies of works, some of them really hilarious, some other totally outrageous, all of them loosely linked via the general theme of memory (recovered or not, fake or not).  There were the aliens and UFO works (which I think are rather transitional, like the 1992 Documenta ones, helpful to kickstart a new phase in his art but not major artworks per se), the Memory Wares, highly sought-after by collectors but not as interesting as, say, Educational Complex, the white, Modernist maquette made from memory of all the places where Kelley had received some education, with holes cut out where he couldn't remember the spaces, pretending that if he couldn't remember them therefore they were the place where educational art abuse must have had occurred (obliged to, say, study 13th century tempera paintings instead of debased hippie posters or latter-day derivative Surrealists), or Black Out, a large-scale installation linked to his upbringing in suburbs of Detroit.

Most of these were represented at the retrospective, and loosely connected visually (the buttons and pins of the Memory Wares jumping into the broken china of Black Out. They make  the process of accumulation present in Kelley's visual vocabulary more apparent, same with the use of pure abstraction as an obliterative gesture (begun with the Hans Hofmannesque monochromatic brushtrokes, followed by the holes in Educational Complex, etc.). The blown-up newspaper articles used in Black Out announce the blown-up high school yearbook pictures later used for Day Is Done (upstairs), and the stuffed animals of the 1980s and 1990s will be reused for a Voyage Of Growth And Discovery, his collaboration with Michael Smith (not represented in the exhibition) where the sculpture of the Burning Man recalls the John Glenn statue in Black Out. There were lots of things like this in the exhibition that I am very grateful for because they make some things more obvious to me, but I am not certain they were understandable for regular visitors.
In that context I could only regret the absence of Framed and Frame, Heidi ( with Paul McCarthy, one of his most famous works in Europe), Sublevel and a few other works like Exploded Fortress Of Solitude that concludes the Kandors project (also shown upstairs).

One half of the upper level was almost entirely devoted to a partial showing of Day Is Done, his huge project reconstructing activities such as theatrical projects depicted in old high-school yearbooks, activities that often imply sadistic and ritualistic aspects. It would have been impossible to show it entirely if only to get the loans, and the entire space of the museum would have been needed for that.

The Kandors were shown next, a decade-long project based on Superman's childhood city preserved in jars and its various depictions in the comics series. This is a part of Kelley's work I know the least about and am in the process of doing research on, so there is very little I can say about it  at present except that in my opinion these operate a complete shift in his work (and I hope to explain that in the book I'm working on).
 In the auditorium upstairs a selection of his videos was presented, alas when I sat down with the intent of watching them all (I spent hours at this museum...) there was a bit of a dysfunction and the Four Dance Baskets from Heidi for some reason looped for 45 minutes straight instead of the 15 indicated...

Generally speaking I felt the retrospective was organized with the idea of trying to pick up items from almost every single phase in Kelley's work, a very brave attempt to demonstrate the breadth, depth and scope of his entire output, but a very difficult one as many of the installations are too large to be shown together at any museum.
Similarly, the collaborations with various artists (Tony Oursler, Paul McCarthy, Michael Smith, David Askevold, etc.)  could constitute an exhibition in themselves, so  some of them are not represented. The sound works  were blasted to a PA system while taking the escalator to go to the second level, something I enjoyed immensely myself but was thinking maybe having a room with lots of headphones and couches to stay in and immerse oneself in would have been really cool.
I think most visitors were left with the evidence that Kelley worked in a very large variety of mediums (drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures, videos, sound art, performances) and hopefully a sense of what a joyous iconoclastic artist he was in his practice.
My only regret (because nitpicking about which works should have been there is really a specialist problem) is that the catalog wasn't out when I visited the show. I had forgotten about that bad European habit of publishing catalogs way after an exhibition is over,  and I deeply, deeply missed not being able to buy one.
The bookstore was selling the Phaidon Press monograph by the dozen, but 1) I already have it and 2) it was published a while ago, so recent work isn't represented. Hopefully the catalog will be out soon now, and I can't wait to buy it.



The retrospective ended with Kelley's very last work, not the house that is being completed at MOCAD in Detroit but the sound piece he made at The Box, Mara McCarthy's gallery in Los Angeles, shortly before he died. As a last work it is a bit anticlimatic , but also very poignant because I think it clearly signaled a phase in Kelley's process when his work was going through a transitional phase. He was done with the Kandors project, almost done with the house and therefore the "memory" one,  and who knows what else he could have been onto next?

*Many people asked me why I never published my dissertation. The short answer is that it was written in French and that I moved back to the US almost immediately after I was done with the defense, and that translating oneself in a second language is arduous at best, not mentioning very time-consuming. 
The other reason was that writing a Ph.D. dissertation on a contemporary artist like Mike Kelley at a venerable institution such as the Sorbonne University was a bloody nightmare through and through, and after getting my diploma I pretty much had it with French academia. Besides, offers from publishers weren't exactly forthcoming anyway.
I'm planning to write a new book on Mike's work, about one half of which will be based on my dissertation, the rest on new research. Stay tuned, and please forward all those great publishers' offers!

** As a side note, when I started researching my dissertation in the mid-1990s and met Mike Kelley, he informed me of these type of misinterpretation of his work; I was confounded because none of the research material I had and used (mostly catalog essays, magazine articles and exhibition reviews) mentioned it at all. 
It's only when I started meeting people in the US art world and casually mentioned my project that I first heard them surmising it. Much later on I began to see this type of BS "in print" only when I came across  some secondary market works offered for sale, with some casual note offered by  the sellers to "explain" the work. It cascaded after Kelley's death when many people took to the internet and their blogs/tumblr/HuffPo to explain everything about Kelley's passing without bothering to do any research or even having any argument to present. Case in point: Kelley would have been responsible for the terrible state of today's indie's music via "his influence on Sonic Youth".  Next thing we know, he would also have been the cause of the Beatles break-up, or even the Gulf War while we're at it. Needless to say that all those allegations of abuse are very painful to Kelley's family, and were deeply annoying for Mike himself when he was alive.

Candor Exhibition At Long Beach City College Gallery

The Candor exhibition at the Long Beach City College Gallery closed yesterday. It was a homage to Mike Kelley, featuring former students of his. Please find a few images of the show below. I took them at night, so apologies for the yellowish tinge in all the picture. It was a really nice show, very tight and holding together beautifully.

 Lisa Ann Auerbach

 Andy Alexander

 Daniel Mendel-Black

Kurt Forman

Sharon Lockhart

 Pam Strugar

I didn't get the exhibition's checklist so I cannot give you the titles nor the dimensions of the works. I know that most artists showed recent work, with the exception of Pam Strugar who decided to show a piece she made for her final MFA show at Art Center when she was Mike's student. The exhibition is over but there are talks about maybe doing a web catalog in the future.

Heavy Scholarly Week Is Descending Upon Us

Heya beloved readership,

As some of you know, the College Art Association Conference is descending upon Los Angeles this week, with registration already in full swing earlier today. If you've been following FBC! for a while, you know how deeply ambivalent I am about the thing.
There are two things that give me the willies in general,  art fairs and  the CAA Conference. One, I do badly with crowds - I love everybody equally on this planet, but far, far away from me - and two, I do badly with people taking themselves way too seriously.
Now, I understand the need people have to network, and that it's convenient for institutions planning to hire future tenure-bound faculty to have a general cattle call HQ, but these being precisely what I'm trying not to do, I was to avoid the thing altogether, especially since I'm being too broke to devote money to sessions dealing with the stuff I laugh about usually (see that second link I posted above).

But CAA has elegantly showed they had no hard feelings against me  for making fun of them the last time around and kindly sent me a press pass; so yours truly is going to attend a couple of sessions and then report. I won't tell you beforehand where I'll go, I keep my identity vaguely secret (see "I abhor networking above", or more plainly "FBC! is a sociopath"). Also, I still have more deadlines so the whole thing is way too much, and I just realized today I had to re-read my undergrad nemesis, Stilfragen by Alois Riegl. If you've ever read it, you will understand.

The complete program of the sessions can be found here. Note that to attend, you need to fork over the $$$ to be a CAA member (which entitles you to a subscription to either the Art Journal or the Art Bulletin. I strongly recommend the latter, unless you get the level of membership that entitles you to both journals) plus the cost of attending the conference, or you can get some single-day or even single-time slot tickets. Everything is explained here. There is ONE session that is open to everybody, I understand (please double-check with CAA):

CAA Distinguished Scholar Session Honoring Rosalind Krauss

The Theoretical Turn

Thursday, February 23, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM

West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center

Chair: Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study

Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Harvard University

Hal Foster, Princeton University

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University

Briony Fer, University College London

  

Indeed, their website is super handy, so if you're interested in attending some of the conference just spend some time on the site, everything is well-explained. Things I recommend skipping altogether: the receptions, unless you have some alumni something or other going on and you're dying to see that asshole you were in graduate school with and who's doing so well at [insert Ivy League fab job here]. Also, do not, under any circumstance, try to eat or drink anything at the Convention Center. Instead, walk over to Hygge Bakery and raid their dark rye bread, hop on a DASH bus and explore the newish downtown eateries, whatever, but don't waste your money at such a ghastly place. Speaking of the DASH, if you live in Los Angeles and can conveniently bus yourself to the Convention Center, do so to avoid the super expensive parking.

Now, glancing at the program, I'm alarmed at two things. One is purely practical: FBC! still isn't ubiquitous, so it's impossible to attend everything I'd like to go to. Sorry, Rosalind Krauss and distinguished speakers mentioned above. The other thing is there seems to be a majority of modern-to-contemporary sessions in contrast to, say, Classical Antiquity, Medieval Art, Renaissance, etc. And many, many of these modern-to-contemporary sessions are dealing with stuff that has too many -Re and -Identity and -Body in their titles. Hey, art historians in the US of A, have you noticed the 1990s ended up with the century? Anything new going on? No? Oh well.
There are a bunch of local people talking at CAA this year, so check the LA Raw session chaired by Michael Duncan on Thursday afternoon, or the Seeing Is Doing on Thursday morning with Simon Leung, Andrea Bowers, etc.


Now, that is A LOT of scholarly things going on in LA. But, it's not all! On Saturday afternoon, and unrelated to CAA, Thierry de Duve will kick off a 10-weeks seminar on Duchamp at the Mackey Apartments/MAK. The whole seminar costs $140, or you can pay $20 per session (there's a deep discount if you are a member), but this Saturday it is FREE. From 3 to 5 PM, after this the sessions will move over to Mondays, 7 to 9 PM. De Duve is one of Duchamp's foremost scholar, so this promises to be interesting.

After all these scholarly things, I feel like everybody will need to look at real art. Let me remind you that on Saturday night, For The Love Of Mike at the Farley Building will be an event showing Mike Kelley's videos for 24 hours.  MOCA has also put together its holdings of Mike Kelley's works (some of them fairly spectacular) while LACMA has done the same with its own super meager collection (3 or 4 works at most.) Please go look at Mike's art and have a thought for him and for all the works he has left us.

For The Love Of Mike: 24 Hours Video Projection At The Farley Building

In Mike Kelley's memory, the Mike Kelley Foundation For The Arts and various sponsors are organizing 24 hours of projections of his videos at his studio, the Farley Building in Eagle Rock, from Saturday, February 25 at 9 PM from Sunday, February 26th at 9 PM.
Be there and pay your homage to Mike.  Details if you click on the picture above.  When you go, please be respectful of the neighbors during the evening and the night. I advise carpooling to maximize your chances of finding a parking spot. Across the street is Colombo restaurant where Mike liked to eat, so you can have dinner, breakfast or lunch if you wish and have a drink in his memory.

Mike Kelley Tribute Concert At The Box This Saturday

I would like to thank all of you who sent me very sweet messages after my very personal (and emotional*) post last week. I have been especially moved by the numerous former students of Mike who gave me their testimonies about how their whole lives has been touched by Mike's teaching.  I also came to realize that there wasn't a public outlet for everyone's grief. It is my understanding that per Mike own wishes, there isn't any public, official service or memorial to be planned.    I am not going to speculate about his reasons, I just decided to interpret it as Mike's way of telling us to organize ourselves,  and not to rely on, I don't know, some designated social outlet he would have hated attending himself. So it's up to us to remember him in what we feel is more adequate, and I cannot see anything better than the concerts and performance organized in his memory at the Box Gallery in Chinatown this Saturday. Please click on the photo above to see all details.

 If you need to leave tangible manifestations of your appreciation for Mike somewhere, there is the makeshift shrine in Highland Park on Tipton Way, that seeks to recreate his More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid/The Wages Of Sin (1987). It's on Tipton Way, way up the hill on your left. If you decide to go, please respect the neighbors and come only between 8.30 AM and 10.30 PM. Be careful not to place candles near flammables.

It is a wonderful place to go, as people chose to put objects and inscriptions pertaining to whatever part of Mike's work touched them. Above, a view of a "Destroy All Monsters" dragon. I especially like that the "shrine" appropriates Mike's uncovering  of vernacular culture to revolve it full circle;  and make use of that secular gestures people have in the US of depositing teddy bears and flowers in public places in the memory of the recently departed.

 It's raining today and likely all the blankets and the stuffed animals are going to get soaked, then dry up and become smelly and dirty... which is exactly how Mike would have wanted it!

This is a blanket and platypus contributed by yours truly, while the other two stuffed animals (the ones not in the row near the wall) have been donated by the Alexander-Crosby family, Andy Alexander being a former student of Mike.  The lovely thing about this memorial shrine is that within 30 minutes of being there, I've met with quite a few people who I know were close to Mike. More blankets were added as I was leaving, which is good as there are already quite a large amount of stuffed animals, but maybe not enough blankets.
Special thanks to whoever organized the Mike Kelley shrine. I think Mike would d be pissed off that I call it a shrine... but I don't really know what else to call it.


In the next few weeks** I am going to talk to you about two different projects started by formers students of Mike, Andy Alexander with werk.by and Jennifer Moon with The Revolution. Both are projects that try to engage the art community as a locale for  collective reflection and action, and to shift the discourse back to what an artistic practice aims to do, as opposed to "having a career and making it in the art world". Many thanks to them for bringing us back to reality.


[I've just been reminded that many artists make work because they enjoy making work no matter what, whether they get recognition or not. It should go without saying].

* I was crying my heart out while writing the post, I had a migraine on top of it so I couldn't wear my glasses. And I had written it on a Word. doc format, which fucked up mightily with the html when I pasted it on the blogger interface, hence the crappy editing and weird formatting. I still can't read it now, so this post is going to stay as is in all eternity.
** I have a few deadlines coming up, so posting will be very irregular. Sorry about that.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid. - Ever.

Mike Kelley, Dearborn, October 27th, 1954 - South Pasadena, January 31st, 2012. Photo by Cameron Wittig / Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, via Artinfo.com

Dear Mike,

They say you’re gone. It crushes me, but I have to accept it. I am shocked by the depth and extent of my grief. After all, we weren’t close.  I have been weeping ever since the news started to trickle through my phone yesterday morning. To tell you the truth, I was surprised my friends showed so much concern about my well-being, it’s not as if something has happened to me. And then I started crying my eyes out. Today I discovered one could cry in one’ sleep, and wake up crying. I know you’d be deeply embarrassed by so much sentimentality, and by such a public display of it.  If you were still here, you would make an incredibly funny, sick joke about it.  I’m sorry I’m being all so cheesy on you, but then, it is your own damn fault after all.  Not because of the way we left us, but because of all the works you made. Your work.

At first, I really hated it. It bothered me so very much, it was so grating, so annoying. 
At the very last minute at the Sorbonne, when I was all set to become yet another Duchampian scholar, I lied through my teeth to my supervisor, saying he had previously agreed I’d write my dissertation about your work, and would he please sign up my Mike Kelley  topic on the official form. You smiled when I told you that, the one and only time you looked genuinely flattered about something.

Not the story about my lie (I don’t think I ever told you), just that I had hated your work so much I had felt compelled to research it thoroughly, and devote several years to it, and by doing so, radically change the entire course of my life. You see, when I had first seen it in person (at the Jeu de Paume, in a group show), there was this stupid TV show in France endlessly making fun of our own white trash, our own primitive hillbillies, reinforcing the classist stereotypes my upper crust brethren in the French art world always insisted didn’t exist. So I misinterpreted your work as participating in the same working-class bashing. Please forgive me, as you know my English was particularly bad at the time, I had never set foot in the United States then, and literature about your work wasn’t yet as abundant as it has become in the latter years. In short, I knew jackshit about your work, and even less about you.

Of course the one thing I got correctly was that your work, after all, did deal with issues of class, and that is the reason why it was - and still is nowadays- so intensely subversive.  You didn’t articulate it as the crushing of the 99% majority by the 1% corporate minority, but you did point out the invisibility of vernacular culture, under the pervasive rampant consumerism operated by Late Capitalism. You wouldn’t have said it in such crude terms, because you were one of the subtlest minds I’ve ever met, and you hated art that spewed propaganda. As you said, propaganda is just that, and you didn’t see the point of preaching the choir. Unlike what your critics said, you were, for one,  never crude. Only a dim-witted New York art critic would think your work had anything to do with perversion, or that you would only be “a titan of the Los Angeles art world”. As if your influence hadn’t been felt so deeply nationally and abroad: you had a first-class international standing more than a decade before the United States woke up to your achievements (if one excepts the 3 or 4 successive Whitney Biennials you were in from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s). Right now, in Los Angeles and New York, you can be certain a few panicked curators and museum directors are frantically trying to devise plans to solicit donations of your work to complete their meager collections, because they thought they’d rather invest in New York artists first rather than properly represent the artistic production made here. From My Institutions To Yours, indeed.

   

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. Stuffed fabric toys and afghans on canvas with dried corn; wax candles on wood and metal base, 90 × 119 1/4 × 5 in. (228.6 × 302.9 × 12.7 cm) overall plus candles and base. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee  89.13a-e, Photo courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

I’ve always been puzzled at all the epithets hurled at you by the provincial critics in New York, the kind who had never traveled the world, let alone crossed the Hudson river.  No wonder they ignored your international impact and influence. There were all kinds of controversies going on in the 1990s, of course, and you were often lumped together with wildly different artists, but all in all your work wasn’t “scatological”, as I’ve often read, nor “perverse”, though I’d agree it is transgressive - intellectually and formally. There might have been five or six works where shit was involved, figuratively, out of a production that at the time must have reached a few hundreds pieces, and the works where feces where depicted were the logical and conceptual conclusion of a larger ensemble. Well, like shit always is, right?

 “Master provocateur”, they say, and this I know you’d have enjoyed, but that wasn’t the aim, it was the result. Unlike younger artists today who thinks they have to be provocative at the expense of thinking out their work through and through, yours was designed to matter, intellectually and visually. You often introduced new shapes to do so, such as (in the early 1990s) the "blob", for lack of a better word, often made with chicken wire sprayed with rapid-setting compressed Styrofoam, and painted with slightly repulsive but widely available commercial colors, such as "puke pink", and a light brownish color you told me was called “fawn”, after which you joked you spray-painted Bambi colors. Rachel Harrison’s works own more than a passing resemblance to those sculptures you made referencing conspiracy theories alien abductions and fake repressed memory syndrome, a response to all the people who thought your work was about child abuse. Because your work was so complex and mixed so may different layers of meaning and references, people often clutched at straws trying to superficially grasp what is was “about”. From their own misconceptions, they leaped further and assumed you had yourself suffered an abusive childhood. You’ve denied it consistently, and because I knew you and I knew you never bullshitted anybody  -  it was a freaking waste of your time – I always believed you, besides, you would have never made work about it. But you ended up making fun of the rumors by making work about the “aesthetic abuse you had suffered in art school under formalist/modernist education”, which was totally hilarious of course, but also lead to such beautiful pieces as Educational Complex. 

As time went by, your work became increasingly beautiful, in a roundabout way, since you never addressed “beauty” as an intellectual pursuit of yours, rather, for a very long time, what you made amounted, at least in my mind, to the conscious construction of an idiosyncratic anti-aesthetic, build of the constant flotsam and jetlag of American vernacular and popular culture. All the while commenting on the visual codes of modern and contemporary, but by exploring oft-neglected elements. When Surrealism was decried in  1990s art historical and theoretical circles as a mannerist, retrograde movement whose only output of consequence was photography, you claimed Magritte and Dali –those sellouts! – as a major influence. You were enamored of Peter Saul several decades before he got ‘rediscovered’. You wrote about Paul Thek and Öyvind Fahlström when they were everything but fashionable, keeping their flame alive.  When you made the stuffed animal pieces, they were primarily floor pieces responding not so much to Minimalism – for which you always has utter contempt – but to the process art of Barry LeVa.  Who, at the time, was almost forgotten in many art circles. I never told you how hard it was to find documentation on LeVa in France in the 1990s.

 Mike Kelley, from the Kandors series, 2011 - photograph FBC!

 What was challenging for your audience was that you were interested, as you said, in things that were superficially invisible to the culture at large, yet operating within such deep sub-levels that they could operate seismic shifts –whether we’d like it or not.  In this respect, you brought up to the surface the weirdest shit ever, Mike Kelley, and to make it more palatable to us, you’d wrap it up in your incomparable wit and humor.  You didn’t dig up “stuffed animals”, you hunted and gathered hand-made used, smelly toys and then, yes, stuffed them right under our noses. The first time I saw Craft Morphology Flow Chart, it stank. It reeked of urine, stale sweat, dirty old socks and that acrid smell of incompletely dried woolen fabric. Mostly, as I recall, it smelled of fear. It was a morgue, this installation, after you had decided to kill off the decidedly non-cute stuffed animals that were threatening to become your visual trademark as an artist. You were too smart to let your work reach a point of formulaic non-return, and you didn’t like your audience to mistake your visual vocabulary for a golden goose, so you killed it, and by doing so you expanded your exploration into death.  As G.B. said yesterday, a lot of your work dealt with death, the death of a culture, the death of ideas. Objects were dead things to you, and that celebrated essay you wrote wasn’t titled “The Uncanny”, it was called Playing With Dead Things.

You played. You mocked your own work. I mentioned the smell; you were so well aware of it you made another piece where clusters of hanged stuffed animals were displayed next to giant deodorizers, periodically releasing industrial-strength artificial scents. That stank worse than death, and you knew it.

Mike Kelley,  Sigmund Freud figurine gifted by yours truly, photography FBC!, 2011.

Yesterday, when everybody was wondering and lamenting why, oh why, Mike, I saw people saying: “but he had so much fame and success”. If they had known you, they’d be aware you never cared for these whatsoever, that you were weary of fame and success,  that it didn’t befit you ti be a "top artist". Success only mattered to you as a mean and vehicle to make more work. One sold-out show was money reinvested in making more work, in exploring more subjects, in collecting more junk to research not so much the dark recesses of America’s collective unconscious, but the mechanisms of it.  The way the collective unconscious and its refuse worked. Money served to invest in a bigger studio, in storage space, in more materials, in hiring staff.  A more boring lifestyle as yours there has never been, and anybody looking for scandal in your private life would be better off looking at your run-of-the-mill US politician. You worked, worked and worked, and when you had to collaborate with institutions for retrospectives you complained it wasted too much time you’d rather had used to make more work. You didn’t like things to be easy, and when you suspected your work had reached a point where it could become stale, you’d shift and research various projects to push it further afield, in a different direction. Some time there was collateral damage with dead ends and loose threads, but that was the necessary by-product of constantly experimenting. Whether those shifts might have cost you a following, you didn’t give a shit about it.

As a matter of fact, you’ve always been uneasy and slightly bemused by your own success. As you stated many times, when you decided to become an artist in late adolescence, it was all but an invisible profession, the chances of success were equal to zero. Not only that, but coming from a working-class background, when nobody in your family had ever gone to college, when you had no money in the world to yourself, choosing to be an artist as your profession was the most romantic, and you would say political decision as far as having a “career” was concerned. It was political for you, because it was useless to society, it didn’t exist in the media, it was invisible to all but a small fringe of like-minded people.  Until recently you taught at Art Center, because, as you often told me, an artist “ought to have a day job”. You never mistook the job of being an artist with the desire for self-promotion usually disguised under the slogan “art can change the world”. Because you knew it didn’t, and it wasn’t going to do it anytime soon, and only idiots would use that slogan to try and justify their own half-baked output.

It wasn’t really important for you to be a top artist, a powerful one, a revered one, or even a well-loved one, all you were concerned about was to make art that mattered. Art that moved people, even if it rubbed them the wrong way. Especially if it rubbed them the wrong way!  As long as it was meaningful to you, then eventually it would become meaningful to others, eve if they misunderstood it along the way. It was the price to pay after it was unleashed in the wide world, even if the misunderstandings sometimes infuriated you.

 Often you told me of your contempt for younger artists trying to find success by all means, however despicable these might be, at the detriment of making art that mattered, that made sense. I think what you meant is that artists, as such, if they have a responsibility, is to go and try not to be subservient to the system, however difficult it might be. I sometimes misunderstood your opinions about it, thinking they were indicative of your deep-seated insecurities, thinking maybe you were afraid of new artists coming up on the scene. It always pained me to see how insecure you were, because you were so incredibly smart and bright, and deep. You pushed every single project as far as you could, intellectually, and the vastness of your general  knowledge was mind-blowing. I would have tons of other things to say about your work, as indeed I have already devoted years of my life to it. God knows I must have bored quite a lot of students with marathon lectures about it.  Like you, I never truly believed art could change the world, but I knew it could change the life of people, since yours changed mine so radically. I moved halfway across the globe to talk to you and study your work, in a city where I didn’t know anybody, in a country I had no interest in, in a language I didn’t master. I’ve met countless people who moved to Los Angeles to become your students at Art Center and whose life was changed by you and your teaching. Today we’re all missing you and wishing you’d stay with us.

I am very thankful for the way your work made me rethink all my formal training, all the seemingly immovable landmarks of art history I had been made to think were the shit, how it made me have a hard look at aesthetics, and maybe made me much more demanding of what artists should do. I’m heartbroken you decided to leave us, and I’m sad I never really got to tell you how much your work mattered, like very few other artists’ work do. I think what you’ve done is of the magnitude of what Duchamp accomplished, and as such isn’t properly understood yet – certainly not by me.  I had told you a few times of the joy I had when I was translating some of your writings, how blown-away I had been when seeing the Uncanny show, and many other things. But when I spotted you across the courtyard at the Welcome Inn on Sunday, I didn’t run to say hi to you, and this forever I will regret. I was talking with L & T then, saying how you always complained I was never calling and getting together with you, and that since being hit in car accidents my pathological fear of driving was getting in the way of socializing with you. Yesterday morning when I woke up and went to meet P.S for lunch –whose work you always told me you loved, “because I’ve never seen anything that looked like it”, I thought I should give you a call to see if you’d like to go to the flea market one of these days.  I didn’t know that you had already gone.

No doubt more and more tributes are going to pour in the next few days. No doubt some greedy merchants and collectors are already aligning their assets to see what profit they can make out of your passing. I should say your death. You’ve always been super straightforward, and you weren’t big on euphemisms, you would scold me to use one. "Be direct!".  I’m not going to comment more about your work, but just reminisce and throw pell-mell some favorite memories of you. I miss you already, you reluctant genius, you.

Your piercing, unsettling, very deep blue eyes, so dark blue they often came out as black in photographs. How you hated having your picture taken – I am glad, in passing, that artinfo.com picked that really beautiful photograph of you I have reposted above. How you could sing really well, in a deep, crooning voice.  How you were almost as short as me, and how we could compete about who had the smallest hands (me). Your very nasal voice, and how, when I first came here, you were always concerned I wouldn’t be able to understand your Michigan accent, even though you always articulated so well that for the longest time, you were the only person I could have a conversation with! That maniacal laughter of yours, that sounded a bit like a hyena, and how it lasted such a long time.  Itw as a legendary laughter, for sure. How you could always be so self-deprecating and make the sickest, funniest joke. One of my favorite moment with you was before a show you had in Paris, and we were talking about music, and somehow I said something like “Mike, I always thought [as a kid] you wanted to be a rock star”, without missing a beat you were all like “oh no, I always wanted to be a porn star”, and I said “come on Mike, it’s not too late”, and then you went “Ooohhhh  you have no idea, I could only have been a fluffer!”, and we laughed and laughed and laughed. How many straight men would have been able to say that joke? Only you.

Things we disagreed about: The Doors, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Allan Poe (you liked, I didn’t). Things we both liked: buying junk at flea markets, music – you knew obscure stuff from all over the world. We went to look for some Oum Kalthoum CDs for you in Paris, and you told me how much you loved drone music. I remember also on that same trip you picked up a Johnny Depp badge and a PSG football club scarf, because you found both to be super cheesy, but that you actually confused  Johnny Depp with Leonardo diCaprio. Your green jacket, that I dubbed the “leprechaun green jacket”, as I often thought you were a mischievous leprechaun sent in this world to wreak havoc on us. No one but you could get away with wearing that particular shade of green. You were proudly Irish, the way Irish-Americans are, though I don’t know whether you actually ever set foot in Ireland, and you always bought little Irish trinkets, and being you of course you had to make fun of that particular subculture, to the point you made a few artworks and installations connected with shamrocks and Guinness. 

How you could have enough distance about your own work that you knew when some of it was crap, the inevitable consequence of experimenting all the time in the studio. You called me one day to enlist my help to have one of my colleagues remove a piece from a show because you would have been so embarrassed if it had been chosen to represent your work. We both agreed you were really not a good draughtsman, as you often said, “I was trained as a painter”, and what a great sense of color you had and how you were always super embarrassed when people paid you compliments. How you were hiding in the offices at Gagosian during your own openings by fear of the crowds and the general circus, and only came out at Day Is Done because your brother was there. I had given you a Sigmund Freud figurine on that evening, because your birthday was near, and I was thrilled to see you had reused it last year for your Colonel Saunders piece. You bought me lunch in Paris at the Café Beaubourg once, and were concerned I might not have had such a good time because I had only drunk water. You joked I was a cheap date, I failed to point out to you that in Paris, Perrier was more expensive than wine.
 How solicitous you were when we were running into each other on the days when I had migraines. How you, in fact, good lapsed Catholic boy, very rarely cursed.

We’d rummage through slide documentations of old works, particularly the ones you had made in Australia, and you would tell me they didn’t exist anymore, and that if you had the time and opportunity, how you would like to remake them. You made me aware of cultural differences in a way nothing else could have, and you were always correcting whatever misconceptions I (and everybody else) could have about your work. No, you didn’t know about Marcel Mauss until after you had made the pieces about gift-giving, rather, you had been influenced by Mary Douglas, whom you had been made aware of by Dana Duff.  When I had said I thought the YBAs couldn’t have been made possible without you (and by this, I meant “being accepted as valid”), you correctly pointed out they were already making work at the same time, if not slightly earlier, as you. You told me a lot about the Los Angeles art community and history that was here when you came West, that unlike everybody’s misconception, Cal Arts wasn’t the only game in town. You were so curious, open and alert.  You were always so supportive, agreeing to be a reference for job searches for almost anybody who asked, writing support letters for grant applications, artist visa applications and other situations where it was critical you’d be here for your friends and your former students.

You gave us all so much, while probably not being aware of it. I am so sorry you decided to quit, because more than ever, your voice is being needed. I cannot blame you if you decided you couldn’t participate in the system anymore, but I am going to miss you a lot, and I am going to remain indebted to you for the rest of my life. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Been Repaid. Ever.