Art Review : Nothing Like a Little Enlightened Impurity : A mid-career survey of Mike Kelley’s work underscores the artist’s scathingly funny and insightful touch.

Never have the ground-floor galleries of the Anderson Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art looked more beautiful than they do right now, hosting the touring exhibition of Mike Kelley’s fiercely intelligent, often ferociously witty art. At its debut last fall at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where the mid-career survey was organized, the show looked first rate. It looks even better here.

Part of the reason is simply that the nearly 200 drawings, sculptures and installations have been presented with impeccable care in a sequence of rooms that maintains a high level of interest from beginning to end. With the exception of two sculptures that employ recorded sound, unfortunately placed in adjacent galleries that make for some dissonant cacophony, you’d be hard pressed to fault the elegant and informative mechanics of the display.

More to the point, though, is that Kelley, who is based in Los Angeles, has shown in this city almost every season since his memorable solo debut in 1981, and often with exhibitions that rose far above the usual gallery fare. The LACMA survey, which opened Thursday, offers a joyful opportunity to revisit a good deal of that older work; to draw connections among disparate bodies of work produced during the last 15 years and, in some instances, to discover work that hasn’t been shown here before.

Kelley is an avatar of the power and humanity inherent in recognizing the radical impurity of human experience. His art searches out dark and soiled places where defects, fault lines and inadequacies are obvious and routine, and where failure takes on the poignant, fragile, even heartbreaking beauty that accompanies any loss of self.

He finds evidence of that bittersweet condition throughout American culture. Remember Sad Sack, the hapless Army private of comic book fame? At some inevitable point in a Sad Sack narrative, the dedicated grunt would typically wind up face down in a garbage dump or, worse, a latrine, suffering yet another in a seemingly endless sequence of daily degradations. Kelley, in an extensive series of ink drawings derived from these squalid tales, renders the flying swill in gestures as graceful, fluid and balletic as an Abstract Expressionist painting.

Pointedly, the pictures leave out any representation of a human figure. In these “Garbage Drawings,” an absent self is surrounded by the radiant choreography of used tin cans and old banana peels.

Abstract Expressionist painting’s down-and-dirty liveliness, long since drained away in its elevation to the pristine heights of our cultural pantheon, is cleverly restored. Simultaneously, the drawings acknowledge that an apparently bottomless pit of degradation yields the renewable fossil fuel that runs the modern machinery of mass culture.

In plangent ways, Kelley’s work regularly mixes up common categories of High Culture and Low. The aim is not to bring one down or shore the other up, as much as to suggest that both create their own uniquely imprisoning boundaries. Each pretends to characterize normalcy.

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Likewise, drawing on his own working-class Catholic background, the 40-year-old artist often performs a similar amalgamation of High Church and Low. A series of brightly colored banners describes feel-good homilies in the cheery style of Sister Corita, while dark, existentially tinged references to the satanic theatrics of heavy metal music abound.

Kelley’s assault on cultural purity, high or low, is frequently leavened with sometimes bawdy, always sly humor. A work called “Citrus and White” consists of two lumpy spheres made from clusters of grungy, used stuffed animals and plush toys, suspended on cords before two plastic wall sculptures, geometric, pristine and Minimalist in bearing. The faux -Minimalist sculptures are actually giant room-deodorizers, which periodically spray clouds of lemon-fresh disinfectant in the general direction of the soiled, Pop love-tokens.

Elsewhere, a hand-crocheted afghan of orange wool, spread out on the floor, features a row of stuffed dachshunds--”autograph hounds,” once beloved of teen-age girls with rock ‘n’ roll crushes and lately retrieved by Kelley from the discard bins of area thrift shops--all lined up along a single brown stripe down the middle of the blanket. The doggy pun implied between an afghan and an autograph hound is compounded by the blanket’s goofy imitation of a Barnett Newman stripe painting, which constitutes that artist’s “signature” style.

Kelley’s art is unusual in its eager embrace of symbols of adolescence with which to conduct intellectual discourse. Indeed, his detractors typically point to his affection for scatalogical humor, metal-head music, tales of teen-age sex, stuffed animals, coarse language and the rest as collectively indicative of an appalling absence of artistic maturity.

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But adolescence is, in fact, among the most significant inventions of the modern world. Unknown before our time, it embodies a social dynamic almost completely ignored by visual artists. Wedged between the supposed innocence of childhood and the normative maturity of an adult universe--both conditions that have been regularly plumbed by modern artists--this neglected, betwixt-and-between period turns out to be a perfect vehicle to drive home Kelley’s anti-purist vision.

Near as I can tell, Kelley’s burlesque renunciation of aesthetic purity is just about the most thoroughly effective assault on postwar formalist doctrine yet achieved by an artist. Formalism, which regards aesthetic purity as art’s highest value, has been the target of repeated fusillades for nearly 30 years. However, its attackers have almost always missed the bull’s-eye: They’ve labored to banish aesthetics from artistic consideration, when the problem has not been aesthetics at all, but the demand for aesthetic purity.

Kelley’s resonant and insightful work dramatically reorients priorities. By elevating radical impurity to a position of aesthetic prominence, this scathingly funny, deeply moral art generates a liberating sense of individual and collective pleasure.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6110, through Sept. 11; closed Mondays and Tuesdays.