ART REVIEW : Mike Kelley’s Messy, Underbelly World : The Artist ‘Soils’ N.Y.’s Whitney Museum With Wonderfully Impure and Exquisite Trash

The fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art is a mess. Individual rooms hold all manner of sculptures made from used stuffed animals, grimy dolls and tatty, crocheted afghans, often the kind made at home by hobbyists and sooner or later discarded to the bins of the neighborhood thrift store.

Elsewhere, several dozen sculptures and paintings on paper are arrayed cheek-by-jowl. They frankly describe (or obliquely suggest) rather unpleasant bodily functions and various social humiliations.

It’s as if the clean, white galleries common to modern museums are being ignominiously soiled by art. Even getting off the elevator visitors are brusquely confronted by a wall of more than 50 drawings of garbage, depicted as being gaily strewn about by unseen forces.

In blunt black paint on white paper, these cartoonish, ironically elegant drawings of fish heads, battered tin cans, apple cores and indeterminate swill surround the name “Mike Kelley,” the artist whose mid-career survey this is, painted on the wall. The exquisite trash adorns his appellation like garlands of acanthus leaves on some classically inspired memorial.

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Rightly so. For at 39, Kelley stands as a pivotal figure for his artistic generation, both in the United States and in Europe. This compelling survey, ably organized by Whitney curator Elizabeth Sussman, is easily the most significant solo exhibition of a living artist to be mounted this year in an American museum.

Kelley has worked in Southern California since 1976, but the Detroit-born artist has shown in New York for more than a decade--although without the whole-hearted embrace that occurred first in Los Angeles and then in Europe. (A mid-career survey was seen last year in Basel, London and Bordeaux.) The Manhattan exhibition, which will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next summer and to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet next fall, offers New Yorkers a much-needed opportunity to play catch-up with the full sweep of Kelley’s art.

The fact that serious new art might “soil” the pristine precincts of a museum is very much to the point of Kelley’s wonderfully impure endeavor, and it’s pushed to the limit in this presentation. The cover to the show’s catalogue even sports a photograph of Kelley dressed as a janitor (a job he once held), wielding a mop and bucket. The artist casts himself as blue-collar clean-up crew, stuck with society’s messes--despite society’s disregard for the social dynamic that enforces such uncivil hierarchies.

Unlike so much other art today, however, Kelley’s is neither mewling complaint nor self-satisfied protest. Instead, it’s far more volatile and productive: He embraces the ostensibly lowly situation, traveling deep into its underbelly.

Our culture officially reveres painting and sculpture, so he chooses to do hobby crafts, such as sewing or building birdhouses. Hyper-masculinity having become a contemporary sculptural norm--what Kelley has wittily dubbed “I-beam art”--he pointedly makes sculptures on “girlish” themes, decorating chests of drawers with magazine decoupage and assembling stuffed animals into totems.

The list of rehabilitated leftovers goes on. Scatological messiness usurps reductive purity as an operating principle for modern art. Pimply adolescence gets the cultural respect usually afforded to adult reason and childish wonder. Sophomoric humor and knuckleheaded dumbness stand front and center, in the spot usually reserved for intellectual brilliance.

This last is one feature of Kelley’s work that seems explicitly linked to a Southern California tradition. (It also helps explain the difficulty many East Coasters have had grasping Kelley’s aesthetic strategy.) Because the New York School of the 1950s was wrapped in a prideful banner of intellectualism, the first great wave of L.A.-based artists in the 1960s had to embrace an anti-intellectual posture: The smart-guy look was already taken.

Like a number of his West Coast predecessors, Kelley is in fact a very smart guy. Enormously well-read, he can fashion narratives about dumb-cluck hillbillies that resound with the moral weight and tragic poetry of Aeschylus. With neither condescension nor hauteur, pleasurable seductions are woven together with extraordinary insights into social and cultural realities of late-20th Century life. Each animates the other.

The result is rich and dense because Kelley draws on his own working-class Catholic background, with clear-eyed equanimity. (In this he’s heir to another great American artist with a similar history: Andy Warhol.) His work goes straight for the gut, where embarrassment, shame, discomfort and dis-ease fester beneath the skin.

A profoundly political dimension marks Kelley’s art, but it doesn’t operate by appealing to your middle-class conscience--guilty or otherwise. Adamantly anarchistic in sensibility, his work insists on libidinal gratification as a universally available agent of power.

In a way, the Whitney show couldn’t be more different than the survey that traveled in Europe last year. Kelley typically works in discrete and coherent series, but they’re not presented here as distinct, chronological units.

It starts out that way, with rooms devoted to the early birdhouse sculptures, to a wonderful group of 45 hitherto unseen notebook drawings and to performance-art props and drawings. Soon, though, things get, well, messy, albeit in a purposeful way.

My guess is that, by mixing together conceptually related works from different series, Kelley may have wanted to unravel his typecasting as “the artist who uses stuffed animals.” For in 1987, with a large wall-hanging composed of thrift-shop toys sewn together in an indescribably poignant cross between a baby’s quilt and a Jackson Pollock painting, his reputation in New York was established. “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid,” as the wall-hanging is revealingly titled (and which the Whitney acquired), was an explicit declaration of a sharp difference between Kelley’s art and the powerful commodity fetishism of the high-stakes art scene of the 1980s.

This remarkable object is assembled from lovingly homemade gifts once given by adults to children--gifts that are now soiled, abandoned and relegated to the “useless” realm of art. It unflinchingly asserts that the transactions of an emotional economy are far more powerful than the cash kind.

With the quilt’s sly allusion to the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock, “father” of contemporary art, Kelley also plainly identified himself as a knowing child of his artistic times. This generous exhibition demonstrates convincingly that he’s among the most knowing of all.

* Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York (212-570-3633), through Feb. 20, 1994. Closed Mondays.