Preface
The March issue of Texte zur Kunst is dedicated to Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, who died one year ago. During the three decades in which he was active as an artist, the vast majority of criticism written about Kelley – both positive and negative – was produced by members of his own generation. For them, his œuvre constitutes an intervention into what had been the status quo. His examination of culture’s objects, practices, and narratives revealed the contradictions between hegemonic culture and socially marginal cultural forms. In doing so, the work constructed a politics embracing difference and thus suggested the potential of living and working on the fringes of, but in relation to, given norms.
In contrast to its initial impact, however, for growing numbers of younger artists and writers, Kelley’s work sets the standard by which others are measured. The authors of this issue know him first and foremost as a representative of the status quo – cultural analyst, subversive, and artist-critic par excellence. This raises the question of the critical potential maintained by Kelley’s work. As several of the texts argue, meaning was often located at the moment of viewer reception and comprised the various psycho-emotional implications of that encounter. As such, the unending operation of Kelley’s œuvre will arguably be the process by which it takes its place in history, by which contemporary cultural production negotiates the work’s continued relevance.
Most of the contributors to this issue are either former students of guest editor John Miller, faculty colleagues of his, or both: from the School of Visual Arts, Yale University, Columbia University, and Barnard College (notably, Miller’s own friendship with Kelley began under the ægis of the California Institute of the Arts). In other words, what has shaped the discourse resulting in this issue is an ineluctable educational complex, which is a primary apparatus for producing and reproducing not only artistic subjectivities but also differentials in social class. In his own work, Kelley facetiously equated the educational apparatus with repressed memory syndrome, i.e., the inability to recall sites of sexual abuse, but this joke clearly served as an allegory for the unconscious component of all ideological formations. It is hard to see beyond the horizon of our cultural formation, yet that is one of the enduring challenges of Kelley’s work. This, too, was the charge faced by the authors of this issue.
Victoria Camblin views the artist’s work through the formal dichotomy of “soft” and “hard” to identify Kelley’s critique of dominant cultural forms by combining them with the often-repressed desires for soft bodies and fluid exchanges. Following a similar logic, Samuel Draxler’s discussion of Kelley’s well-known craft works reveals the slippery boundary between the performances of masculinity and femininity; Kelley, he suggests, depicts both genders simultaneously. Last year, Kelley’s “Mechanical Toy Guts” and Leigh Ledare’s “Alma” (1991/2012, respectively 2012) were exhibited in adjacent rooms. Ledare reflects on the way in which both artists’ works thematized subject formation, given viewers’ recognition of the conventions characterizing their social context. Adam Putnam’s quasi-fictionalized account of a recent meeting with the editors and authors of this issue sets experience on the same level as memory and repression, building a connection to the author’s first encounter with Kelley’s “Educational Complex” (1995).
Both Matt Keegan and Hannah Kahng turn their attention to Kelley’s video works: Keegan focuses on the role most often played by Kelley in his video-based collaborations with other artists – that of a child, a son, a student. Kahng, on the other hand, casts Kelley’s formal language in light of recent TV and filmic conventions. As viewers of Kelley’s work in general, argues Annie Ochmanek, we are confronted with our tendency to assume the work’s inherent entanglement with the artist’s subjectivity, a habit leveraged by Kelley. “Pay for Your Pleasure” (1988), Kelley’s installation comprising portraits of artists and thinkers captioned by quotes regarding violence, addresses the conventional understanding of art as aggression channeled by the artist into creation; Piper Marshall proposes that the work, too, says more about our desires as viewers.
In an attempt to act out the function of writing within Kelley’s artistic practice, Nicolás Guagnini calls on the writings Robert Smithson, Asger Jorn, and Kelley himself, creating a dialogue between them. Sam Lewitt describes the very penetrating nature of Kelley’s view on culture; in building a relationship to historical precedents while exercising an ironic sneer, the work, Lewitt explains, is very much indicative of its time. In order to broaden the cultural perspective taken by the present issue of this bilingual magazine, and to represent the German-American composition of the current editorial board, we invited Philipp Kaiser, Jutta Koether, and Martin Prinzhorn – representatives of two generations from three different German-speaking countries – to talk about Kelley’s significance for a European context.
The texts included in this issue engage themes that were central to Kelley’s own artistic practice, thus arguing by extension that room still exists for new and contradictory evaluations of the artist’s work in relation to the frameworks of culture and its history. A tacit assumption pervades all the texts: That it is possible to recognize complex inner workings of a division of culture through the mobilization and analysis of specific examples of its products. However, given the tendency of forms and practices to fade out of use over time, it is Kelley’s analytic methodology, rather than his individual works, which holds critical potential both now and moving forward.