Mike Kelley in “Memory” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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...♪

♪ Mary...♪

♪ 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]