MIKE KELLEY: Right now I'm working on about the
30th tape in a projected series of 365.
And so, it's supposed to be one tape
for every day of the year.
[rhythmic drumming and clapping]
[women screaming]
[rhythmic drumming and clapping]
I knew by the time I was a teenager
that I was going to be an artist.
There was no doubt about that.
There was nothing else for me to be.
I think coming out of Catholicism,
I have a real interest in ritual.
I mean, ritual is beautiful,
but I never was a believer.
Yet...
I think my interest in art all along
has been in trying to develop a kind of
materialist ritual.
And I see all art as being
a kind of materialist ritual.
When I first started working
with stuffed animals,
I was responding to a lot of the
dialogue in the '80s about
commodity culture.
But I was really surprised that
when everybody looked at these works I made
they all thought it was about child abuse
Now, that wasn't anything I expected
and not only did they think, it was about child abuse,
they thought it was about my abuse.
So I said, well that's really interesting,
I have to go with that.
I have to make all my work about my abuse,
and not only that,
about everybody's abuse,
like that this is our shared culture.
This is the presumption
that all motivation is based
on some kind of repressed trauma.
My work is very reactive.
I'd make something,
I get a response that I'm not...
...I had no idea I was going to get,
I don't reject it; I embrace it.
I run with it, y'know?
That tells me what to do.
I decided to go back to
my originating trauma, which was
my student training,
and so I took all these drawings
that I did in college
as an undergraduate, which are perversions
of Hoffmanesque compositional principles,
and I relearned to paint that way.
And I did this series,
this is the first series of paintings I did
in this regressive manner.
They're called "The Thirteen Seasons."
They're oval- I broke from the rectangular form
because the oval, again, has no end.
And so it's eternal.
It's eternally recurring abuse.
In this kind of trauma literature,
the parts you can't remember is called
"missing time" and then you recover it.
Because I work so much
with various kinds of tropes-
and they're image tropes or music tropes
or performative tropes,
it interests me to try to
bring them into my system
in certain ways, y'know, incorporate them.
It's part of this whole process
of working through things.
Things start simple and get more complex.
Sense always comes after the fact
in my work-
to make it, at first glance, acceptable,
like I've seen some of that before or I understand that.
So it has to operate on multiple levels.
It has to be
available to the laziest viewer
on a certain level...
and then on a more sophisticated
viewer as well.
I think what I make is beautiful.
I think it's beautiful because
terms are confused and divisions between
categories start to slip.
And that produces,
what I think is a sublime effect,
or it produces humor,
and both things interest me.
And I...
I guess I'm interested in a kind of
sublime play or sublime humor.
-- Well, behind-
Behind the mule is a man,
and then the fake horse.
- Oh, that's better.
- That's even better. - Kelley: Yeah.
- You got a man in there to fill up the gap, that's better.
- The man is the pitchfork demon? - Kelley: It's the pitchfork guy.
- Stan? It's Stan, if you could get him.
- And tell him not to swing his pitchfork around.
- Kelley: Yeah, do something like that. Stomp, stomp, stomp.
[whinnies] And then go.
"Day Is Done"-- the project I'm working on right now,
is kind of built around a mythos
that relates to an earlier sculpture I did
called "The Educational Complex," which is
a model of every school I ever went to,
plus the home I grew up in,
with all the parts I can't remember left blank.
- I think I want to try it when these cheerleaders get to about here,
to give me a big scream,
you know like, "Whoa!"
Like that's the most wonderful thing you've ever seen.
- The audience should do a big scream?
- Should they raise their arms like that?
- Kelley: No, no, just, just... well, let see it
Let's hear a big "Wha!"
ALL: Whoooo!
- Kelley: Yeah, arms is good. Lift the arms up.
Whoa!
ALL: Whoa!
- Action!
[drum cadence playing]
- Kelley: All these videos are based on high school yearbooks.
It's not because I have any interest
in high school or high school culture,
but it's one of the few places
where you can find photographs of these kinds of rituals.
- Kelley: Stand this way, a little bit. Yeah, let's go for it.
- Kelley: It's really close.
- Man: It won't be the same. - Kelley: OK, it's fine.
The-, the image is the same.
- Man: The image is... - Kelley: The relationships are the same.
Almost all of this comes from writing,
and...
and then later I tried to say, well,
how can it be visually interesting?
It has narrative elements, but it's...
not straight narrative.
- Kelley: Cut!
[laughs]
- Woman: Good job, Stan!
All the writing is... is associative,
and it comes from my own experience, but
it's very hard to, say, to disentangle memories
of films or books or cartoons or plays
from "real experience."
It all gets mixed up.
So in a way I don't make such distinctions.
And I see it all as a kind of fiction.
- I can't walk by myself! I'm not responsible!
- Kelley: When I was younger,
all my writing was generated for performance work.
- I'm the sailor, but I don't have sea legs, sea legs.
But I don't walk and I don't talk.
[whistles]
So this project is very much
a way for me to get back into writing and-
because I don't have the time just to do it.
I have to work it into my work somehow.
It's like music. I-
I didn't have time to play music anymore,
so I had to make a project
that had to have music in it, so
I forced myself to make music.
[Kelley playing on electric organ]
- Kelley: Never had any musical training.
I grew up in a household where there was really,
very little interest in music, and
they didn't teach music in school.
And, um... I
grew up on rock and roll music, and all the
musicians I knew were self-taught.
I've been playing noise music for
many, many years.
But this project's really different
because this is like no other music I've ever done,
because it's all based on really,
typical forms, but
I know enough about that where I can fake it.
And, I mean, I don't know what I'm doing. Say, I can't say, oh that's this chord
or that's this note but I know what it sounds like.
And so we can piece it all together
and it's believable.
- Am I gonna to hear the, uh...
the orchestra sample too?
- Man: Uh, yeah, you'll hear, you'll hear what you just did.
- Kelley: OK. - Man: Here we go.
- Kelley: With the computer,
we can do everything ourself.
We don't need to get an orchestra;
we can...
do all the editing here.
We can make films by ourselves.
[cymbals resonating]
[drum rolls playing]
[cheering]
[applause]
- Kelley: My dream is to perform it live.
- Man: Let the final procession begin.
- Kelley: So that the whole thing is performed
like, say, in a 24-hour period,
so the day stands for the year.
It's very much like a passion play.
Though a somewhat formalized and ridiculous passion play,
though its ridiculousness is purposeful.
- CAST (harmonizing): ♪ Mary...♪♪ Mary...♪
♪ Mary...♪
- Kelley: I think that's
the joyfulness of it.
But then it's a black humor; it's a mean humor,
so it's a critical joy.
It's, y'know...
it's negative joy.
[laughs]
But that's art, I think,
y'know, for me at least.
That's what separates it
from the folk art that I'm going to,
that I still think the social function of art
is that kind of,
negative aesthetic.
Otherwise there's no
social function for it.
[women screaming] [upbeat funky music playing]
[clapping in rhythm]
[applause]