How We Got To Know Mike Kelley

A Conversation With Diedrich Diederichsen, Jutta Koether, and Martin Prinzhorn

Thomasburg, Austria, Christmas 1991

JK: I heard about Mike for the first time through the massive publicity campaign that curator and journalist Karen Marta staged in 1988, at the time of Kelley’s first successful exhibition in New York, at Metro Pictures. It was the fourth exhibition he had there, but the first that really got much attention.

DD: Jutta was actually the first person in Europe to start talking about Mike, and got me involved with the work, although there was no doubt that I’d like it. What everybody’s talking about these days, at least everybody in the underground scene in Europe, was just starting up then. Hardcore rock fans were suddenly talking about Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy, and this whole fascination with “bad America”. I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre¹ in a suburban movie theater in Hamburg-Barmbek in 1981. Up until 1985 or 1986 there were probably no more than ten to a hundred people in Germany who were even interested in this sort of thing. Mike’s John Wayne Gacy piece (“Pay For Your Pleasure”, 1988) was the first work I saw by him, just at the time that all the hardcore groups started to get interested in the same material. But I don’t want to limit Mike to this concern with “bad America”.

MP: I got to know Mike in 1988, as an “import”, when Peter Pakesch, then temporary director of the Grazer Kunstverein, told me be wanted to bring this West Coast crowd to Graz for the “Graz 1988” exhibition. Liz Larner was there too. I remember after the opening the scene shifted to the Hotel Erzherzog Johann, and since it was a West Coast exhibition, lots of grass got smoked. The whole West Coast posse went back to Mike’s room and smoked grass. Liz Larner got locked in the room and Mike lost his key and for two hours the whole hotel went crazy looking for his key, until Mike realized it was in his pants pocket. That’s my first anecdote about him.

JK: He impressed me because at that time I was on the lookout for art that could cross over to the Spex audience.² That is, I was looking for an American artist who wasn’t underground in the sense of the Lower East Side scene, but who was dealing with the tensions and contradictions that we dealt with in Spex. Early in 1988 I wrote an article on Kelley for Spex, and it’s funny that with all the research I did the only really good article I found was in the American edition of Elle.³ It went into his West Coast connections, performance background, and all the practical joking.

DD: Then Rafael Jablonka brought Mike to Cologne in 1989, for a one-artist show at his gallery. In the evenings, Mike really didn’t have much to talk about with his other friends, so he invited us over, which was incredibly productive for me since Mike could tell me a lot about connections during the late stages of the L.A. hardcore scene with the art and performance world: about artists like Raymond Pettibon⁴, about the New Alliance label⁵, and comedians like Glen Meadmore, whom we had just discovered in Spex. But he also talked about hip-hop (he was really into the LP by Eazy-E then), which we didn’t know about yet. The group N.W.A. was just getting known. We also talked for hours about trash-pop producers Kim Fowley, Mike Curb, and others – that is, about unappreciated geniuses of opportunism, of exploitation at the lowest possible level. Also about Mike’s musician period in Ann Arbor, with that Stooges-offshoot band Destroy All Monsters and things like that. Most of all we talked about Mike Curb, who did lots of movie music for trashy biker pictures and cheap, drugged-out hippie films and that sort of thing, but who also had a „serious“ band, The Mike Curb Underground, and who now has renounced his past and become a right-wing extremist politician. The Curb cassettes that Mike sent me back then went over big at parties. I was already aware that he had worked with Sonic Youth and with Mike Watt of fIREHOSE.

MP: That led to all the misconceptions on the part of people like the Cologne gallerist Christian Nagel, who said that we and artist Albert Oehlen were just interested in Mike because of the kind of music we listened to. At that time the big thing was to bring New York Neo-Conceptualism to Europe. Pakesch, looking for alternatives, just took a look at the map and then turned to the West Coast.

JK: Among those misconceptions, one has to mention the silk scarves.⁶ They’re certainly the most common works by Mike in Europe. All the art types who don’t know anything about heavy metal take them for extremely authentic Hollywood metal, but they’re really supposed to be just the opposite of authentic. Mike asked me and some other people to collect German-language banners from metal bands in Düsseldorf. These would of course be second-hand. Mike wanted what had been used in Germany rather than get them where they are actually made, even though he lives in L.A. right around the corner from the center of heavy metal culture. In general, however, receptiveness to the new American art in the late eighties developed very slowly and hesitantly. In Cologne, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, and Jon Kessler were in an exhibition at Max Hetzler in 1987 for the first time, then Christopher Wool at Gisela Capitain and John Miller at Sophia Ungers and so forth. Mike’s first exhibition in Cologne was in 1989 at Jablonka and was, so to speak, the final step in an offensive to develop in the Cologne public a taste for this new American art. No one understood this exhibition, except for Albert Oehlen, who actually bought the right thing, the lowest in every sense: the bath mats. Jablonka had also told Mike that no one would be able to understand this exhibition – yet. And then they agreed to show his black-and-white aesthetic, hung the “Sack Drawings” up nicely, and then Mike laid down the black and the white bath mats in between, in a way in memory of what he had originally planned for the exhibition – objects and materials strewn over the floor.

MP: He was then calling the bath mats Yin and Yang or something.

JK: Jablonka was really tripped up by the mats: he didn’t have a clue why Albert wanted to buy these of all things.

DD: I think the reception of Kelley’s work confirms the false internationalism of the art world. People in the art world act as if everything in it is interchangeable and as if everyone has an equal right to be heard, and that’s peddled as liberalism – really it’s just the false internationalism of the commodity. Contrary to this idea of total transparency, Europeans proclaim their local, regional, and national traditions, which are always in danger of becoming national stereotypes, such as “the Germans paint”, “the Belgians have this oblique sense of humor”, and so on, while globalism is ascribed to the Americans. In opposition to this Mike seems to assert that American art itself has a lot of regionalism in it, and not only in the geographic but in the cultural sense as well.

MP: And Europe only cares about New York. New York is surely the primary location of this phony internationalism, it’s where an artist from Ohio gets internationalized. That’s the problem: New Yorkers contextualize Mike’s work in a different way, emphasizing the performances in order not to have to understand the sculptures, because these present them with obstacles – unlike, for example, Koons’ works, which they understand very easily.

DD: You also mean that they try to shunt him aside totally with talk about the intensity of rock and roll and ignore, for instance, his humor.

JK: A guy who went around New York in old used clothes, didn’t deliver any obvious art works, and besides that was active in a lot of different media, was really bucking the trends of the mid-eighties. His stance was extremely anti-establishment at the time, and was met with an attempt to pin him down to objects. There was also an attempt to understand all his work as the remains, or residue, so to speak, of his performances. Finally, there were some really clever types who accepted the fact that Mike’s work was about diverse parallel activities that couldn’t be separated out from one another, but who then complained that at the Whitney Biennial, for instance, he’d show a single object that by itself couldn’t convey all the associations represented in his work.

DD: Which of course is an absurd criticism, since first of all it elevates a museum like the Whitney to some higher plane which an artist who works on many different levels can only attain by showing his entire oeuvre. And, secondly, it totally disavows the idea of parallel activities.

JK: Yes, and then a comparison would be made with an artist such as Cady Noland, who makes conceptual demands that also have to be completely legible at a single site.

DD: And in fact the opposite is true of Mike’s art: that one has to experience it at various sites in order to understand it, and the very variety of these sites is important, that is, the difference between stage and gallery, and so on. As far as I know, Cady Noland, often regarded as Mike’s New York counterpart, only exhibits in art contexts. These days an avant-garde gallery owner takes offense if the woman who manages his gallery leaves an art dinner in New York around 11 pm to go see Thin White Rope at CBGB’s.

JK: But one has to differentiate clearly between Mike’s interest in popular culture and that of other artists. For him popular culture isn’t just a bunch of interchangeable symbols that inject high art with some sort of mundanity. Instead, popular culture just presents one of many possibilities with which to pursue his themes – debasement, for instance. So if he’s interested in a serial killer such as John Wayne Gacy, then that’s got something in common with the interest of various hardcore bands in the same killer, but it’s to be differentiated from other artists’ interest in hardcore.

MP: For me the difference between Neo- or Post-Conceptualism and Mike’s investigations of popular culture is very important. For him it’s not just a matter of diverse influences and sites, but also a matter of the demands he places on different sites.

DD: So unlike, say, Richard Prince, the variety of levels applies not only to the input, but also to the output.

MP: Exactly, and therefore the results of Mike’s investigations need to be really sound.

DD: Perhaps we should address the parallels that everyone has noticed in Mike’s art to the work of Martin Kippenberger or the earlier work of Albert Oehlen, Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, and then also address the differences. The criticism that Mike’s work doesn’t meet the demand that an object has to be able to say it all on its own was also the first aspersion cast on Kippenberger, whose art practice has been likened to Mike’s. On the other hand, Kippenberger, save for the SO36 period⁷, has really only wanted to have an effect within the art world. Although this isn’t fundamentally so different from Mike Kelley now, we have to remember that, working in L.A., Mike really has no choice: out there galleries, exhibitions, and museums don’t seem to be taken so seriously.

MP: A more important difference between Kelley and Kippenberger is that Martin never did the kind of reading and formal research that Mike has always done. He just looks something over, sometimes intensively, but is never tied down to any intellectual accountability.

JK: Martin and Mike are connected, of course, by an artistic ego that needs to collaborate with others and needs to see a social necessity in their work. Martin’s ego, however, parodies the old-fashioned Eurocentric “artist of genius”, whereas Mike acts like a mad film director.

DD: I think the problem in Germany is that we understand American culture either as a form of commodity – which basically holds true for the New York art world as well – or as extreme wildness, GG Allin, crap and noise and hardcore and punk rock and pornography and Lydia Lunch. People just aren’t ready to understand that American culture can, in the same gesture, both defend and detest such “regionalisms”, just as people elsewhere do with their traditions. America’s not entitled to that dialectic between limits and the activities necessary to overcome them, because, as I’ve said, people need America to be the site of this pure, false internationalism. All the important American art of the present – from Larry Clark to David Hammons and, especially, Mike Kelley – can be seen as an aggression against international commodification.

II. Postscript, Los Angeles, 1993

by Diedrich Diederichsen

In the past two years, the Cologne art world has agreed on a new definition of American art. Now New York is responsible for unsalable but morally irreproachable activism, while Los Angeles and the West Coast are responsible for art that can be sold. After Mike Kelley, Cologne galleries have exhibited the work of Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams (both at Max Hetzler and Gisela Capitain), Meg Cranston (Tanja Grunert), Lari Pitman (Jablonka), Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw (both at Esther Schipper), and then there were group shows at Hetzler and Schipper. In 1990, at “The Köln Show”, one could see works by Liz Larner, Thaddeus Strode, and Cindy Bernard. More group shows followed. Then came shows in Paris, followed by Rotterdam, Zurich, Basel, Vienna, and Graz; and the display copy of the “Helter Skelter” catalogue in the Walther König bookstore in Cologne got dog-eared. In the early nineties, avantgarde New York art moved further and further away from the object, but from Los Angeles there came pictures and sculptures – and these with the soon ubiquitous practice of incorporating citations or elements from pop culture and low art. In 1992, Mike Kelley had a museum exhibition in Basel and London. The catalogue, by Thomas Kellein, reads in part like an accumulation of famous last words about the artist’s apparent enshrinement in the museum, words written by someone who had been uncomfortable with him for years, but who now seems able to provide assurances that once more “art” has been saved from becoming completely politicized.⁸

Kellein admits his “shameful feelings”, for which Kelley’s work provides “slightly nauseating evidence”, and distances himself from questioning the “perversity of [Kelley’s] supporters”.⁹ He writes in a tone that reveals how long and hard he thought in order, finally, to be able to comfort himself and his audience with the conclusion that “what remains for us, from this bloodthirsty deed is the experience of beauty”¹⁰. Now this is exactly the experience that Kellein and his fellow European epicures can project onto any artist, so long as they possess the power and the museums to define and construct “beauty”. This definition Kellein formulates in his final sentence: “And once again for ourselves, we have got away with no more than a fright.”¹¹ This exercise in escapism through the use of the powers of definition and canonization, among others, is actually a beautiful if unconscious description of the essence of the bourgeois attitude toward aesthetics, as formulated by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.¹²

Mike Kelley’s European reception has thus lost a battle but not the war.¹³ Because the same bourgeoisie (or at least one of its factions) embraces precisely that art which enlightens them about their attitude toward aesthetics¹⁴, they appear to believe that they can get away with just a scare. The pleasure of willingly admitting one’s own social and political conditioning in matters of taste could be even greater than the thrill that Kellein gets out of contemplating the “beautiful” results of the patricide he thinks is requisite for any “new beginnings” in art.¹⁵ This admission produces perfectly enlightened, cynical subjects who now understand the rules of the game and see no reason to upset the playing table. In this sense every “enlightenment” needs to be supplemented with at least the scare that Kellein believes he’s escaped.

1. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film was the first “splatter picture” to make its way to Europe. ↩︎
2. Spex, a music magazine published in Cologne and edited by Jutta Koether and Diedrich Diederichsen. ↩︎
3. John Howell, “Painter Prankster”, Elle, 37 (September 1988). ↩︎
4. Raymond Pettibon, totally unknown at the time in the art world, but already a name on the music scene because of the many record covers he had designed for West Cost punk bands such as Black Flag and the Minutemen. ↩︎
5. The record label for the Minutemen and fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt, who along with Kelley and others is in Pettibon’s video, “Sir Drone”. ↩︎
6. First shown in “Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof”, Metro Pictures, New York, 1989. The silk scarves have since been seen at every art fair in Europe. ↩︎
7. SO36 was a music club in Berlin that Kippenberger ran in the late 1970s. ↩︎
8. Thomas Kellein, Mike Kelley, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1992). The exhibition traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, a separate installation was exhibited at Portikus, Frankfurt. ↩︎
9. Ibid., pp. 8-9. ↩︎
10. Ibid., p. 10. ↩︎
11. Ibid. ↩︎
12. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984). ↩︎
13. This sense of defeat is exacerbated by the sometimes unfortunate German translation of Kelley’s words in Kellein’s text. When Kelley says “reactionary” in the sense of “reacting to or connecting with” (pp. 90, 94), he is translated as “reaktionar”, which in German is generally synonymous with right extremism or politically right wing (Kellein, pp. 90, 94). ↩︎
14. Compare, for instance, Andrea Fraser’s exhibition in January 1993 at the Munich Kunstverein, which used concepts developed by Bourdieu about taste, the aesthetic attitude, and class war from above. ↩︎
15. Kellein, Mike Kelley, p. 10. ↩︎