The Outlaw Gets Legit : Will 1993 Be the Short, Happy Apotheosis of Artist Mike Kelley?

There’s an edgy ugliness to Mike Kelley’s art, but Kelley himself has an odd, languid grace. A slender man with long, graying hair that’s usually pulled back in a ponytail, he has sharp features that soften considerably when he laughs. He’s a handsome man when he’s not scowling. That happens occasionally.

Watching Kelley dance at local art-scene parties (he favors a free-form hippie freakout style on the dance floor) one would guess he’s a man very much at home in his skin; at first glance, he appears to be just another T-shirted, all-American metal-head in search of the next beer. You’d never think to look at him that he’s a man with a chronically upset stomach and an anxiety level in the stratosphere, or that he pretty much had to drink himself through the performance pieces that launched his career in the early ‘80s. And you’d certainly never peg him as perhaps the most influential American artist of the ‘90s, which everybody pretty much agrees he is. The subject of a mid-career retrospective that opened last month at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and comes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in June, Kelley has secured his niche in the pantheon of American art at this point, but that doesn’t seem to have sunk in on him yet. He’s still nervous, worried and irritated.

Visiting the 39-year-old artist six weeks before his Whitney opening, I arrive at the house in Highland Park that he shares with choreographer Anita Pace and am struck by the thought that it’s unlikely Kelley’s neighbors have any idea they live next door to a cultural hero. A suburban tract house located on a nondescript street in a seedy commercial district, the Kelley compound is surrounded by a high wall painted yellow. A massive metal gate opens onto an area where most people would plant a garden, but Kelley has transformed the yard into a sea of concrete punctuated with a discarded toilet and a forlorn birdbath adorned with a kitschy statue of an ancient Greek.

Kelley’s rude front yard is very much in keeping with his art, which looks to the most unlikely sources--many of them dismissed as debased and beneath contempt by cultural conservatives--for subject matter and materials. Combining dribs and drabs of everything from Surrealism, Biomorphic Abstraction and head-shop art to Minimalism, assemblage, “Sad Sack” cartoons and Dadaist ready-mades, Kelley’s work defies categorization.

If a label must be laid on him, the most appropriate would be Conceptualist; as is central to this style, Kelley’s allegiance is to ideas rather than materials. In other words, he thinks of something he wants to express, then uses whatever he thinks the idea calls for to give it physical form. This approach has led him to make art out of stuffed animals and stained blankets. He has dressed large pieces of furniture in doll clothes, made birdhouses from how-to manuals and created large felt banners in the style of ‘60s cult figure Sister Corita Kent, whose graphic designs were a weird hybrid of Cubism and psychedelia. Kelley has also worked in more conventional ways--he’s produced a large body of drawings, paintings and sculpture--but that work, too, is rife with ideas about sex, the body and American life not often explored in high culture.

On this day, Kelley doesn’t appear to be pondering matters of high culture. He’s mired in the details surrounding the Whitney show and is attempting to do several things at once. The galleys for the Whitney catalogue, which features 14 essays on his work and life, are spread out on the dining room table waiting for him to check for errors. The phone rings constantly (arrangements for having his work shipped to New York seem incredibly complex), and an assistant is at work on another phone trying to track down architectural plans for the five schools and universities Kelley has attended. Kelley intends to combine the plans and make a model of a sort of uber -school, beneath which will be a network of tunnels conceived as a site for satanic rituals.

“I’m constantly going back to the world I grew up in,” he has said, “and I’m probably doomed to spend the rest of my life trying to sort out certain aspects of that world.” Kelley wasn’t the victim of a satanic cult as a child, but he very much feels himself to be a victim of childhood itself. This work in progress about his schools, which will be included in a body of work tentatively called “Steve Ditko’s Roommate,” suggests he is still caught up in the atmosphere of his youth.

The series will also include several paintings Kelley made in the early ‘70s, which he plans to rework. Spread out on the floor of his studio, these old paintings, several of which were made when he was still a teen-ager, prompt Kelley to laugh out loud. Figurative works on paper, the scruffy paintings are like a visual dictionary of teen-age obsessions and focus for the most part on girls with large breasts, rock musicians, and satanic imagery; it’s amazing how in tune this old work is with the art he’s making now. In the studio, I notice a few heaps of fabric next to a pile of dirt on the concrete floor and comment, “Oh, I see you’ve been cleaning up.” He pauses for a moment, then looks me in the eye and flatly declares, “That’s a piece.”

Also on schedule for today is the task of listening to several hours of taped music Kelley made in the ‘70s with longtime friend artist Jim Shaw, when they were members of a screeching-feedback punk band called Destroy All Monsters. He hopes to have the tapes on the market by early next year. Kelley’s face lights up with a look of wicked pleasure when the music reaches a particularly excruciating crescendo of dissonance.

Metal music--particularly the Detroit metal scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s that brought together such disparate sensibilities as the Black Panthers, Iggy Pop, the MC5 and Sun Ra--was a formative influence on Kelley, who’s played in several bands and often uses the visuals of rock culture in his work. He brought that process full circle when he designed the cover for Sonic Youth’s “Dirty” album.

Kelley’s use of lowbrow elements such as heavy-metal music is a source of great fascination in Europe, where his work is wildly popular. “Everybody in the underground scene in Europe is talking about this whole fascination with ‘bad America,’ ” German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen has said.

Does Kelley regard his low sources as “bad”? That’s not likely, as he has a searing hatred for class distinctions of that sort. Besides, he genuinely likes the music. Nonetheless, many critics have a hard time gauging how sincere Kelley is in his handling of this material.

“We’re doing our own generation an injustice to say that material is only interesting in terms of metaphor, and we’re doing an even greater injustice if we deny how captivating the metaphor can be,” observes New York art critic Dan Cameron. “If it’s nothing more than disposable pop culture, then what were our teen-age years about? Was it all meaningless? I think Mike is saying, ‘No, it wasn’t meaningless.’ ”

Born in Wayne, Mich., in a working-class Catholic family (his father was in charge of maintenance for a public school system, and his mother was a cook in the executive dining room at Ford Motor Co.), Kelley doesn’t disdain his roots, but neither does he revere them to the degree many people assume. Saddled with a bad-boy persona by the popular press, Kelley is invariably described as an outlaw--a development that hasn’t hurt him in the marketplace. However, some who’ve followed his work closely dismiss that notion as hogwash.

“It’s true Mike’s work isn’t pretty, but that’s precisely why it’s so successful right now,” observes Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, an artist and writer who befriended Kelley in the early ‘80s. “The politically correct people can like it, people who want to believe low culture is important can like it, and it’s laden with social content and art history in a way people can respond to. I like Mike’s work a lot, but difficult? No. Radical? No. It’s very conservative work that arrived right on cue.”

When Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art presented the exhibition ‘Helter Skelter’ in 1992, “it was like ‘Wayne’s World’ comes to the museum,” adds Gilbert-Rolfe. “The culture was obviously totally ready for Mike’s work.” Kelley’s contribution to “Helter Skelter” was a sendup of advertising-agency conference rooms “designed by Frank Gehry,” their walls festooned with corny cartoons and jokes.

If sales figures are any indication, the culture is definitely ready for Kelley, whose prices start at $12,000 for drawings, hover at $40,000 for larger floor pieces (there are no longer any of those works available) and “go up exponentially” for museum-scale pieces, says his L.A. dealer, Rosamund Felsen. Those who love his art for its anarchistic edge might see Kelley’s financial success as a sellout; they also might be surprised to learn he didn’t get into this game because he had a quarrel with high culture.

“I grew up in a blue-collar situation where there were no ideas and everything was natural, and I desperately wanted high culture,” recalls Kelley, who moved to Southern California in 1976 to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where he felt distinctly out of step with the Conceptualist bent of the school’s curriculum. “I never had an attitude about the elitism of the intellectual community because to me the blue-collar world is elitist. They hate eggheads and are terrified of smart people and of anything that doesn’t conform to their idea of normalcy.

“I grew up naively believing the intellectual community wasn’t the same way, but I now know it is,” he says. “They have their own little fenced-in back yard they’re terrified of losing and are just as xenophobic as everybody else--and that’s why most critics are hacks. They’re no different than any other crackpot back-yard philosopher. There aren’t too many people in the world who are really willing to look at things--most people are just bent on protecting the status quo, and academia is that way to an extreme degree. It’s out to protect its own turf, and to that end, it sets up a terminology that doesn’t have much relation to daily experience. “

Two weeks before leaving for New York to install the Whitney show, Kelley paid tribute to his blue-collar roots when he attended a concert by Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk whom Kelley admired when he was in college. “I liked the pants-down dance,” Kelley laughingly says of the concert, during which the singer shed his jeans for a particularly frenzied number.

Prior to the concert, Kelley subjected himself to a book signing for the catalogue for “The Uncanny,” an ambitious show he curated for this year’s Sonsbeek Festival in Arnhem, the Netherlands, that explored the use of mannequins and simulations of the human form in art. Held at the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Beverly Hills, the signing seemed like some kind of endurance test for Kelley, who appeared to be in agony, sitting like a caged bird at a table stacked with books.

“It’s always been incredibly difficult for me to do public things, and the only way I was able to function as a performance artist was by drinking lots of alcohol--no matter how much I drank, it didn’t get me drunk because I was so nervous,” Kelley explained later over lunch with Walter Hopps, a visiting curator from Houston.

The two were meeting for the first time and had no particular agenda in mind, but they quickly discovered they share an interest in American social surrealism, a largely forgotten strain of Modernism, practiced by such artists as Peter Blume and Walter Quirt, that took social realism to a hallucinatory extreme. By the end of lunch, they’d agreed to attempt to collaborate on curating a show on the subject.

Kelley obviously has more than enough to do right now, but one gets the sense he expects next year to be a fairly rocky ride. So he copes with past success by focusing on future projects.

As Kelley works the room at his Whitney opening a few weeks later, he seems relaxed for the first time in months--in fact, he seems positively serene; one gets the impression he’s finally moved into the “let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” psychological phase of this massive undertaking. This isn’t to suggest Kelley isn’t slightly unnerved by this most momentous of evenings; during an impromptu speech at a dinner later that evening, Kelley attempts to thank all the people who’ve helped him along the way, but he becomes too choked up to finish. He seems at once utterly exhausted and genuinely moved.

Among those Kelley attempts to thank are several European critics and dealers who’ve come to New York to show their support. Kelley’s love affair with the Continent is clearly in evidence at his opening, where smatterings of French, German and Dutch can be frequently overheard. Though the opening is well attended by Kelley’s American colleagues--Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, Jim Shaw, Richard Prince, Paul McCarthy and Barbara Kruger are there--it is definitely an international event.

Why is Kelley’s art so popular in Europe? Is it the Jerry Lewis factor? Is it because his work suggests America to be a nation of drooling super-nerds whose idea of culture is a knitted afghan? Are they snickering at us as they throw roses at his installations of threadbare blankets and dirty stuffed animals, and could they possibly fully grasp the intentions of his multilayered work?

Surely the average European is unable to track the complex references in Kelley’s work, which prowls the dirtiest back roads of American culture; most people who grew up in the United States have a hard time decoding his art. What could a European understand of the contents of an American thrift store? What could they know of American heartland rock, ‘60s head-shop effluvia or the rituals and pranks of U.S. college fraternities, all of which play a role in the psychological landscape he evokes?

Apparently they know enough, because a good four years before Kelley came into his own on his home shores, he was hailed as the artist of his generation abroad. Kelley has already had an important retrospective exhibition in Europe (it originated at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland, in 1992 and traveled to London and Bordeaux). Major galleries in Paris, Vienna and Cologne have been showing his work for years.

One of the stars of this years’ Sonsbeek Festival in Arnhem, Kelley was also featured in last years’ Documenta, a controversial art fair that takes place in Germany every four years and plays an important role in setting international cultural trends. And he’s developed a network of staunchly supportive European collectors, several of whom snap up the very works dismissed by American collectors as simply too weird.

“Focus, a German magazine, recently published a list of the 100 most successful contemporary artists, and Mike ranked No. 1,” says free-lance European curator Kaspar Konig. “His work was taken seriously in Europe long before it was accepted in the U.S.”

Adds Kelley’s Cologne dealer, Rafael Jablonka: “We had a screening of Mike’s films here two years ago, and hundreds of people turned up. Mike’s a cult figure for young artists and musicians in Europe, and I think they’re drawn to him for his revolutionary attitude and for the way he uses imagery from popular culture in his work. I had never seen anything like it before.”

Kelley’s nastiest pieces--”Pay for Your Pleasure,” for instance, a long corridor of massive portraits of such great men of history as Rimbaud, Artaud and Nietzsche, all theorizing on the connection between the criminal and the creative impulse--do go over extremely well in Europe, where the art audience is more agreeable than the one in the United States.

“Mike’s work has a lot to do with lying, frustration and violence,” observes Kelley’s French dealer, Ghislaine Hussenot, “and he creates a portrait of a difficult, messy society.” His work strikes most Europeans as distinctly American, but the problems he looks at exist in Europe too, she adds. The Whitney show may have universal resonances, but on the surface it has the feeling of a carnival ride through the underbelly of a distinctly American psyche. Spanning 15 years of work and including more than 170 of Kelley’s paintings, sculpture, drawings and installations, this wildly irreverent exhibition pivots on Kelley’s use of scatological humor and the naive craft techniques of the amateur artist to send up everything from mindless compulsions, consumerism, sexual dysfunction and Freudian theory to adolescent identity crises, the empty rhetoric of high culture, therapy, the occult and the nobility of failure. “Most Europeans don’t have the background to fully understand Kelley’s work,” points out Thomas Kellein, the curator at Kunsthalle Basel who oversaw last year’s European survey of Kelley’s work. “What they are able to read in the work is its strong political content and his highly original reinterpretation of formal art issues.

“Take ‘Lumpenprole,’ for instance, which is a huge knit blanket draped over stuffed animals. It’s like a remake of a Minimalist sculpture by Carl Andre. At the same time, the piece evokes all you can remember from your childhood, all the sorrows, fears, and hopes for love. Mike’s work is often described as exploring sexual dysfunction, but I find it to be more concerned with the issue of love. I don’t think he takes a cynical view of the subject either; I think he takes it very seriously.”

Kelley dryly concedes that “Yes, the work points toward certain problems, and I wouldn’t say I’m happy the problems are there.”

Kelley’s detractors have a different explanation for his popularity on foreign shores. “I do think part of the reason Europeans are drawn to Kelley’s work is because it presents a debased view of American culture,” says Newsweek critic Peter Plagens, who makes no bones about the fact that he doesn’t care for Kelley’s work. “His work is juvenile in the most nose-picking sense of the word and is a classic example of what I think of as study-hall art--you know, you’ve got some kid stuck in study hall for 45 minutes armed with nothing but a ballpoint pen and some notebook paper, and this is the sensibility that emerges. I can’t really say if Kelley’s appropriating that vocabulary or it’s really who he is, although it’s hard for me to conceive that Kelley could function as successfully as he does in the adult world if that’s really who he is. The Europeans are probably charmed by the idea that somewhere out there someone is able to behave like a 13-year-old boy in a cultural context.”

“Europe has its own tradition of artists acting like 13-year-old boys,” Kelley retorts. “The difference is they hold them in esteem over there. Jarry, Lautreamont, Rimbaud--these people are seen as making an important contribution to culture. In America, artists are dismissed as hucksters,” he adds with an annoyed sigh. “There was recently a segment on ’60 Minutes’ that was essentially an ‘expose’ of recent trends in art. Their basic take was that this work is a scam, is no good, is of no importance historically, and once again artists are pulling the wool over people’s eyes and getting lots of money for some trash.”

One gets the impression that Kelley feels attacks of the sort voiced by Plagens are just the beginning, and now that he’s been elevated to the highest peak of the art world, it’s his turn to get whacked--and he’s probably right. Though early reviews of the Whitney show have been glowing--Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight hailed it as “easily the most significant solo exhibition of a living artist to be mounted this year in an American museum,” Kelley’s Big Moment comes at a time when a distinct shift of taste seems to be taking place in the art world.

“There seems to be a backlash right now against bad-boy art and unbeautiful things,” observes Robert Storr, the curator who oversaw the Museum of Modern Art’s visually lush Robert Ryman retrospective and included Kelley’s work in a MOMA show last year. “It’s funny, but the basic response to the Ryman show has been ‘at last--beauty again,’ and I’d hate for it to be the case that one admires the beauty of one artist as a way of condemning another whose interest was never in beauty to begin with.”

“That hasn’t happened yet, but it will in a year or two--we’ll go back to some gorgeous something or other,” Kelley declares with an edge of dejection in his voice. “The funny thing is, I’ve always thought my work was about beauty. Unfortunately, the art historical take on beauty is that it’s about control, and I’ve always been offended by the way beauty is discussed in the art world. For me, beauty is about experiencing the loss of the self and realizing you don’t know everything.

“There’s no comfort in this,” he says. “The kick comes in realizing your own boundaries, which elicits a wondrous sense of awe. This experience is often present in really low things, and this is the kind of beauty I try to build into my work. Obviously,” he concludes with a rueful laugh, “my take on beauty is at odds with where art-world trends appear to be moving.”

The day after Kelley arrives back in L.A., he resumes his teaching duties at Art Center in Pasadena, where he’s been an instructor for six years, returns to his Destroy All Monsters music project and dives into preparation for an upcoming lecture at Cal-Arts. Was he transformed by being clutched to the bosom of Manhattan and feted for days?

“There are many things about Mike that have remained consistent through all the changes in his career, and at the top of the list is his sense of humor,” says L.A. artist Patti Podesta, who’s known Kelley since the early ‘80s and designed several books for him. “One time we were at an opening at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in the early ‘80s, and he poured a pitcher of beer over my head, and that wasn’t totally out of character for him. He was capable of acting wild in those days. He’s not as devil-may-care as he used to be, but he’s still a lot of fun, and at parties he and his friends still occasionally go off on these insane comedy routines that last for hours--it’s just heavenly silliness.

“The success he’s having has brought about changes in him, though,” she adds. “It’s made him less self-conscious, and he’s also become more generous and a little less frantic. In another way, it’s a lot more hectic, and I don’t think he enjoys that. I think he’s a bit tortured by constantly being labeled the adolescent bad boy.”

Kelley’s persona definitely sticks in his craw, but for now he’s just relieved to have the Whitney installation and opening behind him. “It’s weird looking at all those years of work together because I’m used to thinking of it as a kind of progression, and seeing it as this big heap it sort of collapses into one thing,” he says. “Rather than pleasantly surprising you with wonderful things you didn’t realize were in the work, seeing it all together makes you aware of your limitations--it’s sort of depressing. It also seems to invite a biographical reading--you know, what does this work say about the person who made it?--and I felt revealed by the show in a way I didn’t expect to be.”

Kelley may be pleased about the early reviews, but that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s finally home free.

“Sure, the critics are lying in wait for me,” he concludes with a shrug of resignation. “All the people who’ve dismissed me up to now are having me shoved in their face, and I expect a huge knee-jerk response. Every artist who’s ever had a retrospective goes down in popularity at around the same time the show goes up, and that also means that whatever money you were making you stop making. So maybe it’s a good thing I’m having this show right now. The economy’s already in the toilet,” he says, laughing, “so who cares?”