Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, currently on display at Tate Modern until March, 2025, offers a very extensive exploration of the American artist’s multifaceted career, from the late 1970s until his tragic death in 2012. Kelley’s work delves into themes of memory, identity, and the interplay between popular culture and personal experience.
The exhibition is a chaotic, filthy mess, an adolescent whine-fest, a wacky, anarchic pile-on, and a loud, annoying show that really punches you in the gut.
It is brilliant!
“Art is about fucking things up,” he said in 2004, “for the pure pleasure of fucking things up.”
Born in 1954 in Detroit to a working-class Catholic family, Kelley’s upbringing profoundly influenced his artistic trajectory. His education at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the late 1970s exposed him to an environment that encouraged experimentation across various media, including performance, video, sculpture, and drawing. This eclectic approach is evident throughout the exhibition, which is organized chronologically, allowing visitors to trace the evolution of his artistic practice.
The exhibition opens with Kelley’s early work, “The Poltergeist” (1979), a collaboration with David Askevold that sets the anarchic and slightly daft tone for this retrospective. This series of photographs features Kelley mimicking early 20th-century spiritualist imagery, with ectoplasm-like substances pouring from his nostrils. It is an introduction to his fascination with the supernatural as well as the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction.
A significant portion of the exhibition is dedicated to Kelley’s “Half a Man” series (1987–1991), where he incorporated found objects like stuffed toys and crocheted blankets to create what he ironically called “blue collar minimalism”. Kelley saw craft as a way to counteract the dominance of modernist painting and sculpture, which he considered inherently masculine, by using familiar objects like worn and grubby stuffed toys that appear to have been snatched from the arms of babies. The toys are disturbingly battered and abused, and some of the stuffed dogs are even fucking each other. One of his photographs of a stuffed toy from 1991, is best known from the cover of Sonic Youth’s album ‘Dirty’.
Kelley was deeply influenced by music culture, particularly punk rock, which informs both the aesthetics and the themes of this show. Kelley was a member of the underground music scene in Detroit and later in Los Angeles, where he engaged with punk’s subversive, anti-establishment ethos. His involvement in music wasn’t just limited to inspiration; he was an active musician as well, co-founding the band Destroy All Monsters in the early 1970s. The band’s raw sound and DIY approach were qualities that Kelley would later bring into his visual artwork.
The galleries in the Tate reflect this and are filled with the raucous din of loud music, singing, shouting, yelling and eventually full-on screaming.
The exhibition also features “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions” (2000 – 2011), a series where he restaged his high school yearbook photographs into elaborate video installations. These works examine the performative aspects of social rituals and the construction of identity during adolescence.
A standout section of the exhibition, and my favourite part, is dedicated to Kelley’s “Kandors” series (1999 – 2011), inspired by the fictional city of Kandor, trapped under a glass dome, from the Superman comics. These illuminated models of cities, encased in glass bell jars, symbolise themes of preservation, memory and loss, just as Kandor did in the comics. They are magical, nostalgic, and strangely moving.
The exhibition is not without its challenges. Some critics have noted the overwhelming sensory experience, with loud audio and dense installations that can be disorienting. The Evening Standard described the show as feeling “like being flayed alive,” and I’m sure Kelley, whose aim was to disrupt traditional gallery experiences and totally immerse viewers in his chaotic world, would have given his critics a big “Fuck you”.
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is on at Tate Modern until 9 March 2025
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