A miniature city tended by Superman, a crop-wielding libertine, and sex with a corn cob ? Adrian Searle grapples with the excessive art of Mike Kelley
Huge, misshapen lumps of splintery black rock are spotlit in museum gloom. One has crushed a golden arm beneath its bulk. Another has trapped a giant's severed leg against the floor. Another rock wears a warrior's helmet. Called things like War Memorial, Fallen Warrior and Ozymandias (after Shelley's poem), their portentousness is as hollow as the rocks themselves, a weightless geology of studio-made rubble and molten lava that came out of a pressurised can. They're monuments and memorials whose purpose is forgotten, if they ever had one.
In the midst of all these scattered remnants is a cave, or some kind of bunker ? perhaps constructed by human hand, perhaps by the Germans who created such bunkers on the Channel coast of France in the second world war. Unless it's a troll's hut. Or it could have been hewn by an alien, or hacked out of the rock by Superman, using one of his stupid superpowers. I never did like Superman, which is a pity, because the entire exhibition, Exploded Fortress of Solitude by American artist Mike Kelley, has got something to do with one of the more arcane details of Superman's comic-book history.
Kelley is one of art's conflaters, of high art and low comedy, popular and unpopular culture, theory and idiocy, bad taste and good ideas. His bunker is a fairground Plato's cave of black resinous drools and spooky glowing lights; a grotto twinkling with rare and precious plastic crystals, and with a bell jar as its main attraction. Inside it stands Kandor, a city on the planet Krypton shrunken and bottled by the evil android Brainiac in a Superman storyline first introduced in July 1958. Kelley has been making these cities under glass for some time, riffing on the different and entirely fanciful versions that appear in the Superman comics.
The cave itself is Superman's Fortress of Solitude, which, as I understand it, is his den. It's where he keeps Kandor and its miniature inhabitants safe, supplied by air tanks with the right mix of gases replicating Krypton's atmosphere. With me so far? It's all bunkum, really, as is Kelley's bunker, cave, or what have you. One anomaly is the almost medieval set of chains and fetters dangling from the cave's exterior wall, and the fact that the cave itself is also used as a film set for a ridiculous half-hour movie projected in the final room of Kelley's show.
Based very loosely on the style of Hammer horror movies, this film features a crop-wielding 18th-century libertine ? imagine the Marquis de Sade played by Russell Brand ? a female victim with a pert bottom, abducted on her wedding day, and a trio of ludicrous subsidiary assistants.
It's all a bit like a theme night at an S&M club. But what's the theme? Imagine Pasolini's movie Sal� redone as a Carry On film, but without the realism, the scat or the sophisticated humour. The film is called Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais). Kelley likes his titles, which indicate a complex system of interconnected activities, a nomenclature of his approaches towards his artistic and musical projects.
Vice Anglais could be a Hellfire Club romp in the West Wycombe caves. The cliches are entirely deliberate, I hope. There's even a vinyl LP of the soundtrack, whose sleeve tells us that the libertine's brutish sidekick is called Pile Driver, and the clown, Poof, is Pile Driver's "bottom-boy". The anal and the id are constants in Kelley's work. The album sleeve also tells us that Vice Anglais was written in response to Robert M Cooper's Lost on Both Sides, a 1970 study of critic and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work and career, and a corrective to the scandalous reputation of the co-founder of the pre-Raphaelite movement.
Heaven knows what all this has to do with Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Rossetti was a bit of a stud, and put himself about rather more than the morally scrupulous Superman. Perhaps that's the point. I can understand Kelley's conflation of Superman with fallen warriors rather more easily. Maybe the whole thing has to do with socially acceptable role models and the performance of masculinity. The whole thing is hokum, bosh and piffle. So, too, you might say, were Hammer's movies, with their heavy-handed perversities, their repressed "kinky" eroticism, their stereotypes. But at least they were fun.
The humour here is barely adolescent. Pile Driver sodomises Poof with a corn cob (the camera cuts away, probably to save the embarrassment of that ear of corn). M'Lord thrashes Josette (blood everywhere). Enter Golden Rod, a mysterious and aloof silent being who may have wandered out of Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten. Or out of Kandor, come to that. Everyone cowers. In the end, you just don't care, and, like reading De Sade's catalogue of abuses in The 120 Days of Sodom, it all becomes very boring.
There's more, much more, to Kelley's show. Beyond the bunker is another memorial, this time one of those impromptu shrines to the dead, with lots of daft votive offerings to one Sandy, or possibly Andy, collected on and around a fibreglass rock. Among the yellow ribbons, the bits of clothing and the commemorative soft toys (a staple of Kelley's earlier art), are a turkey baster, various other kitchen accoutrements and packaging for a bald skinhead wig.
Sex toys and Sylvia Plath
This, though, is Kelley's modus operandi. His is an art of excess, and excessive analysis. Kelley is also a sort of sorcerer's apprentice, running amok in the alchemist's shop. He likes setting ideas and symbols on a collision course, letting things run out of control. But if Kelley is the apprentice, who is the sorcerer? His crucibles are full of errant symbolism, theories, enthusiasms, social phenomena, historical curios and arcana. Further versions of Kandor stand about in the last gallery, each under a bell jar, and each ventilated by hoses connected to bulky cylinders, every city a kind of glowing architectural cluster of buildings that look, variously, like sex toys, lipsticks, streamlined perfume sprays, maringues and globs. But then that's what modern cities look like now.
In 1999, Kelley made a short video in which Superman recites selections from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Writing in the current exhibition catalogue, Jeffrey Sconce (an academic who specialises in media theory) discusses the link Kelley has made between "two gendered forms of adolescent alienation, the Man of Steel (a figure still revered by misfit adolescent teenage boys around the world) ? and the eventually suicidal poet Sylvia Plath (a figure still revered by morose teenage girls around the world)." So there we have it. And both Superman and Plath had dual identities ? Plath publishing The Bell Jar under the name Victoria Lucas in 1963, Superman also being Clark Kent. Though why boys are misfits and girls are morose, I have no idea. I read Plath avidly as a teenager, and my antipathy to Superman began pre-adolescence.
Kelley has been thinking about this stuff for more than 20 years. What does it all add up to? You almost expect to see a dead horse up there on the screen, getting a good flogging. Kelley overdoes it, time and again. Ah, you might say, but that's the point. It's what he does, to the sound of all that cinematic thrashing.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/07/mike-kelley-exploded-fortress-solitude
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