Mike Kelley at the Stedelijk

One of the most influential artists of his generation, Kelley's innervations across pop culture and the avant-garde are so transversal and far-reaching that the journey through his 35-year career at the Stedelijk Museum feels like visiting a metropolis such as London or New York.

At first, the recent Mike Kelley retrospective at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum wasn't meant to be an obituary, as it was conceived as the largest survey on the artist's work “to date”. When Kelley ended his own life in January 2012, though, the transition was inevitable. A retrospective is always a chance to take stock of someone's oeuvre, but — as the largest and first since the artist's death — the Stedelijk show carried an extra urgency to it. And the audience seemed to understand it, too: soon to travel to Paris' Centre Pompidou and later to MoMA PS1 and the LA MoCA, the exhibition had, shortly before closing, attracted more than 200,000 visitors.

One of the most influential artists of his generation, Kelley's innervations across pop culture and the avant-garde are so transversal and far-reaching that the journey through his 35-year career felt like visiting a metropolis like London or New York, a place where time and space coagulate into a fractal dimension of eternal possibility. The 200+ pieces exhibited in the recently renewed Dutch museum spanned across any possible medium: drawing, sculpture, installation, video, painting, collage — even the artist's Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof (1989) performance was re-enacted at the opening, thanks to choreographer and original collaborator Anita Pace. Despite the formal heterogeneity of it all, though, Kelley's overarching rebelliousness and envelop-pushing urges shone through.

"Mike Kelley", installation view at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Born in the 1950s to a public school maintenance manager and a corporate catering cook in a suburb of Detroit, Kelley didn't get any support in his artistic interests from his family. In fact, as the odd one out, escape from suburbia became imperative and the young Mike became quickly fascinated with failure and radical forms of rebellion. Inspired by Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs, he mingled with anarchists and punks, and got involved in the Michigan music scene with Destroy All Monsters, a noise band that also featured former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton (the artist's connection with music and subcultures lived on: in 1992 he designed the art for Sonic Youth's Dirty album and, later, he was part of the Poetics Project at Documenta X, with Tony Oursler).

In the 70s, the vacant factories in Detroit were apparently not as romantically-inspiring as they are for artists today, but were just downright depressing. For that and other reasons Kelley took off to CalArts, where he studied with the likes of John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson. Once finished with his studies, unlike many fellow graduates, Mike didn't migrate to New York. Instead, he stuck around and established a long-lasting relationship with Los Angeles and the local scene, meeting icons of Californian art such as Chris Burden, and eventually becoming a cultural landmark himself.

In chronological and aesthetic terms, the Stedelijk exhibition does a great job at bridging Kelley's university period and his early interest in crafts with later Gagosian achievements, conveniently showcased on the top floor. As if mimicking the artist's own ascension from the depths of the underground to the glittery art establishment, which he hated, visitors were wheeled upwards from the museum's bowels — upholstered with Kelley's croqueted stuffed animals and his comics-inspired works — to its summit — lit-up by the screens of his later and tech-heavier multimedia installations. It was quite a ride, but even though the artist's take on (for example) the comics medium shifted its focus on the way up — the early puke-centered Garbage Drawings (1988) and lurid magazine collections were replaced by reflections on urban utopias in the Kandor series (2007), which presents Superman's hometown in all its faceted glow — the same anarchistic playfulness and media criticality echoed throughout.

Kelley's concern with the materials he used was key to his poetics since the beginning: his college-time birdhouses (he wanted to make something “ugly, really ugly”) reflected on the pathos invested in certain objects and the way they become uncomfortable when used as art, a concept better expressed in his 1987 landmark piece More Love Hours That Can Ever Be Repaid, a patchwork of hand-made stuffed animals stitched together into a haunting clutter of codified softness. Invariably interpreted as a nostalgic reference to childhood or a creepy hint to child abuse, Kelley's signature puppets were originally meant as an investigation on gift politics. The questions implied by the piece's title — How much is a painstakingly hand-made object worth? How binding is this love-commodity really? — exemplify an interest in soft power relationships that developed in formally and conceptually different ways across the artist's career, often intersecting with psychological themes like repressed memories and personal history. In this sense, Educational Complex (1995) is a prime example: an architectural model of a mnemonic mixture of all the schools young Mike ever attended, the piece opened up a spatial investigation that evolved up to after Kelley's death (the last phase of his Mobile Homestead project — a life-size replica of the artist's childhood home, to be extended with underground dungeons — recently received a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation).

Apart from the pieces already mentioned, another highlight of the Stedelijk retrospective was definitely Pay For Your Pleasure (1988), a whole corridor plastered with large-scale portraits of renowned men of genius, each with a related quote about art and crime. At the end, a small, naïf-looking painting by a convicted criminal hung discretely on a pillar. Kelley's view of the artist as a failure, a suicidal and criminal outsider, strongly clashed with today's media obsession with the figure. Shows like Bravo's Work of Art are maybe the best example of the convergence of art and entertainment, something the artist dreaded with fear. As he expressed in an interview with Gerry Fialka, Kelley deemed today's LSD drawings spree a sort of “K-mart hippidom” and lamented the lack of desperation of today's hipsters, a category that he greatly influenced on an aesthetic level. While art doesn't need explanation anymore — because the market is the only explanation — the only social function of art is to fuck things up. “Politics has a purpose, it's about power relationships. Art doesn't have that, it's fucking things up for pure pleasure. It needs to be purposefully purposeless.” Nicola Bozzi (@schizocities)

Mike Kelley at the Stedelijk

One of the most influential artists of his generation, Kelley's innervations across pop culture and the avant-garde are so transversal and far-reaching that the journey through his 35-year career at the Stedelijk Museum feels like visiting a metropolis such as London or New York.

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