The Postmodern Suicide, Part II, by Adam Lehrer

MIKE KELLEY AND THE VOID OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Like Wallace, the late artist Kelley soared to the top of his industry — the contemporary art world circa 1980s to 2000s — all while feeling inescapably contemptuous of those which had embraced him. Kelley’s body of work — an extensive and diverse range of output that included performances, videos, found objects, drawings, assemblages, textile banners, and theoretical and critical writings — was in perpetual antagonistic dialog with the contemporary art discourses of the moment they emerged from. The artist’s work often felt like a total rejection of the art world and its industries. Nevertheless, it was constantly absorbed by and then exploited by the same art world that it attempted to refuse. Kelley was, without question, one of the greatest American artists to emerge from the postmodern era. But that greatness meant that he was inevitably embedded into the very structure that his work was meant to reject. This must have been endlessly frustrating.

“He wanted his art to expose and capsize established and oppressive value systems, to upend prevailing taxonomies and systems of classification,” writes Tony Herrington in his Kelley eulogy. “But ultimately it ended up merely reinforcing them, by feeding the prejudices and sick appetites and desires of the privileged elite he had become a part of [4].”

Kelley was disdainful of the utopian thinking that had become inculcated into counter-cultural movements from the hippies of the 1960s to the postmodern artists and intellectuals of the 1980s (I often wonder if Kelley would have had the courage to speak up now, when the art world has basically been reduced to a propaganda apparatus for intersectional theory and bourgeois liberal parties). Before moving to Los Angeles to attend art school, Kelley formed the now-infamous proto-punk band (though Lester Bangs arguably described them more accurately as “anti-rock”) Destroy All Monsters. Alongside fellow famous artist Jim Shaw, filmmaker and archivist Cary Loren, and performance artist and singer Niagara, Destroy All Monsters performed a chaotic and noise-inflected rock n’ roll that drew on Sun Ra, the Velvets, ESP-disk, monster movies, beat poetry, and futurism. A unique subversion of rock n’ roll contradictions transpired within the group’s output. While rock n’ roll was a radical youthful expression of “low culture” made to be consumed by the masses, Destroy All Monsters was embedded with the clash of high-art and low-art cultural references that facilitated its inevitable recuperation into the bourgeois tastes of the high-art world. The band could never be taken at face as “a band” in the way similarly avant-garde groups of the time were (like Smegma, Nihilist Spasm Band, or the Velvets on their first two albums) because they were saturated in too many shades of intellectual, postmodern, art world self-consciousness. This contradiction would plague Kelley continuously throughout his career. Destroy All Monsters was a Detroit rock band that no one seemed to hear or see, but art world intellectuals discussed it anyways. It was meant to pervert rock n’ roll with art and inject art with the energy and rebellion of rock n’ roll, but ultimately lost the power of authenticity when subsumed by the art world. “I thought of Destroy All Monsters as an art band,” Kelley said to the late Glenn O’Brien. “There was no place for Destroy All Monsters, except maybe in the New York downtown scene [5].” Much of Kelley’s work suffered a similar fate; it lost the power of authenticity when absorbed by contemporary art.

Kelley lacked the tactile skill possessed by most artists, which forced him to persistently re-conceptualize and, eventually, revolutionize preconceived notions of what art is supposed to be. His deeply critical practice had the positive impact of facilitating Kelley’s skepticism of the art world, the culture industries, and art production itself. But by also producing his work with the expressed intention of it being consumed by the art world, he allowed his truly radical ideas to be chewed up and spit back out by the art world itself. This must have been intensely alienating for Kelley, but it was an alienation that he largely brought upon himself. “Young people who would have previously gone into careers in indie rock — which is one of the few arenas where a young person with no particular talent can make some money — can now accomplish the same thing in the art world,” said Kelley in the aforementioned interview. The crux of his sentiment is inarguably true, but what he failed to acknowledge is that his success in contemporary art paved the path for the bastardizations of his ideas that would follow.

Kelley was innately repelled by commonly held altruisms around artistic production. His work, from the very beginning of his career, assaulted bourgeois tastes and dismantled the concept of art production as a noble pursuit. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, for instance, is a Kelley series from the 1980s and marked the first evolution in his ideas (moving away from working solely in performance, drawing, and installations); it took the form of a chaotic assemblage of handmade dolls and blankets that Mike Kelley found in thrift stores. Using Pollock’s abstract paintings as his compositional model, the title is then used to explore the role of guilt in the production of these kinds of objects: do parents spend hours fashioning these objects to make up for their failures as parents elsewhere? Kelley simultaneously problematized the tender labor of a parent and perverted that which is deemed acceptable as an art object in a Duchampian mode. 

In a particularly prophetic series of works, Pay for Your Pleasure, Kelley presented a series of portraits of famous artists and writers (each image painted by a hired hand): Oscar Wilde, Alfredo Jarry, and Plato among them. Accompanying the portraits is a quote by the depicted author with each quote, to one degree or another, lauding the criminal dimension of art or literary production: “THE SIMPLEST SURREALIST ACT CONSISTS OF DASHING DOWN INTO THE STREET, PISTOL IN HAND, AND FIRING BLINDLY INTO THE CROWD,” reads Breton’s image. At each staging of the show, Kelley also displayed an artwork created by a famous murderer, Ed Gein and William Bonin among them. In what felt like nothing less than an ominous portent of the moral totalitarianism of the art world in the 21st Century, Kelley’s show dismantled notions of art as a morally redeeming force. “Kelley’s provocative installation gaily throws a monkey wrench into all sorts of entrenched assumptions about art,” wrote art critic Christopher Knight about the series. “[One being] the blandly sentimental assumption that art’s highest purpose is to be redemptive [6].” Kelley believed in nothing short of gleeful fucking amorality as the driving pulse towards art creation. But his fiercely radical insights were still perfectly suitable to a culture industry bourgeois propaganda apparatus still then defined by a Gen X-inflected nihilism. No matter how sharp his ideas were, Kelley remained a sleeper agent; an unwitting propagandist, producing transgressive ideologies to be sold inevitably back to those who engaged with his work.

Barfing on the Declaration of Independence (Reconstructing History, 1989); recreating his academic environments in miniature and evoking themes of trauma and child abuse (Educational Complex, 1995); exploring the most troubling themes in the most Bacchanalian and low-brow presentations (Heidi, 1992), made in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, or Day is Done (2005). Despite all these transgressions and insightful critiques of the culture industries, the art world was rabid to make Kelley a star. It had no problem incorporating his transgressions into its broader apparatus, largely stifling the degrees of his contempt for the culture around him. This was Kelley’s central alienation; there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t result in him being celebrated and adored by the world that his work suggests he hated. All art, even great, radical and subversive art, becomes some form of advertising or propaganda for forces beyond our control in the unsociety.

Kelley’s writings on art and culture are interesting both formally — he pioneered an imminently readable style of what I can best describe as “good bad” language — and psychologically. Much of his writing presents a more direct window into Kelley’s alienation and dissatisfaction. In an essay on the industrial performance art troupe Survival Research Laboratories, Kelley expresses intrigue in the group’s choice to operate outside the art world and within the realm of the mass media and yield the kind of fluid and slippery cultural placement that Kelley coveted. In “Empathy, Alienation, and Ivar,” Kelley writes about the performative values of a strip joint, the Ivar Theater, and finds the messy presentation to be nothing short of “Brechtian.” “Technical problems are constant—amazing, considering the simplicity of the performance structure—and so numerous they seem to be a purposeful part of the show, as if the director (if there is such a person) has consciously employed modernist theatrical techniques to alienate the audience [7],” writes Kelley. It’s hard not to see the influence of Ivar’s pandemonium on Kelley’s own performances, and yet his work would never be able to access its raw dysfunctionality. In both of these texts, we understand clearly that Kelley was deeply aware of his own dilemma.

Due to his cultural position and, unquestionably, his own ambition, Kelley would never be able to escape the confines of the art world. His work, no matter how raucous or anti-establishment, would be sucked into the void of contemporary art and spit back out as luxury commodities. In 1993, Kelley curated an exhibition called The Uncanny that took its theme and aesthetic concept from the Freud essay of the same name. He wrote an iconic text to accompany the exhibition: “Freud writes that the uncanny is associated with the bringing to light of what was hidden and secret, distinguishing the uncanny from the simply fearful by defining it as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar [8].’” But every time that Kelley brought light to that which was hidden and secret, he saw it then embedded into the art world and its establishment structure in a way that reduced what was challenging about his work all together. The art world, for a long while, loved making its “edgelords” into stars, but in doing so transgression was often divorced from its most central purpose: challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. This was at the crux of Mike Kelley’s postmodern suicide, and perhaps he viewed his own death as the ultimate uncanny – an art statement that couldn’t be sucked into the void of the art world itself. John Waters, a Kelley collector, once said that he thought Kelley’s suicide was, at first, an art statement, before pointing out that Kelley killed himself at the height of his career. Kelley’s postmodern suicide then can only be read as the rational response to a culture that embraced him but refused to truly understand him. His fame and success was the noose around his neck, pulling tighter and tighter as it accrued. And unfortunately, his suicide was inevitably inculcated into contemporary art’s lore much in the way that his projects did. Kelley’s postmodern suicide shouldn’t be condemned, but it is tragic that it happened. His voice would be more important now than ever and he might finally have found himself in an art world that wasn’t actually neutering and selling his ideas so much as it would have been rejecting and ostracizing them. He finally might have occupied the antagonistic stance he so coveted, given where the art world has ended up now with all its moral authoritarianism and political singularity. But more on that later.

 

MARK FISHER’S DIAGNOSIS OF CAPITALIST REALISM AND THE FINAL POSTMODERN SUICIDE  

Mark Fisher had been slipping into the abyss for the better part of 10 months when he finally took his own life in January of 2017. Given that he had written extensively about clinical depression throughout his career as a cultural theorist and academic lecturer, his postmodern suicide was hardly shocking. But his demise still rings of profundity and tragedy. Fisher’s death was the death of the postmodern critic itself. With Wallace and Kelley gone, contemporary culture had already lost much of its greatest theorists of postmodern alienation and despair. Fisher, both politically and as a persona, was different from the aforementioned thinkers. But for whatever reason, he joined them in interpreting the essential emptiness that proliferates the unsociety of the neoliberal west – an empire in steep decay. This loss of a metaphysical dimension in society is replaced by a ghoulish apparition that becomes an undercurrent running through all culture, politics and entertainment. Fisher too came face to face with this demon, this demystified presence; and like Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, meeting the demon eye to eye was powerful and horrific enough to send Fisher to his early grave.

Alienation. It’s the singular collective experience, and yet – we do everything we can to obscure and forget it. Food, travel, luxury, entertainment, social media, therapy, New Age retreats, consume, consume, consume. But the alienation remains. The greatest postmodern artists are those who could look beneath the simulacra, as Baudrillard aptly called it, and stare that alienation in the face. Wallace saw alienation in a culture that had come to fear and despise sincerity, cloaking its misery in detachment and ironic cool. Kelley saw alienation in a culture industry that was so capable of absorbing, diluting and selling transgressions back to its luxury consumers. But what separates Mark Fisher from those thinkers and gives his death a sense of inescapable finality is that he, as a political theorist, was able to give that alienation a name: “capitalist realism.” “The widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now even impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it [9],” wrote Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism.

Wallace, a conservative liberal, and Kelley, a Pynchonian anarchist (of sorts), were incapable of understanding postmodern alienation in such succinct terms. But Fisher developed a system for describing the political economic undercurrent of postmodern alienation itself. Fisher diagnosed a societal despair that had solidified as the cultural mood since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Fukuyama declared liberal capitalism as the End of History. 

In Capitalist Realism, Fisher indirectly addresses the central dilemmas of both Wallace and Kelley. Wallace’s concern with the collapse of metaphysical life, love, and sincerity is explained by Fisher as the evolution from the Fordism of earlier industrial capitalism to the post-Fordism of postmodern late capitalism. To illustrate this shift, Fisher compares the earlier Hollywood gangster films of Coppola and Scorsese to Michael Mann’s Heat. “Heat’s Los Angeles is a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where markable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises [9],” he writes. Wallace too saw a world without meaning or resembling anything real, but couldn’t define it. Similarly, Fisher diagnosed Kelley’s dilemma of seeing his own transgressions being fed back into the system as “all that is solid melts into PR” (having some fun with Marx’s old mantra of “all that is solid melts'' to describe the totalizing processes of capitalism). Fisher references Mike Judge’s film Office Space and the psychological abuse endured by Jennifer Aniston’s character. “Staff are required to decorate their uniforms with ‘several pieces of flair’, to express their ‘individuality’ or ‘creativity’: a handy illustration of the way [those concepts] have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies [9].” As Kelley subconsciously (or consciously, perhaps) knew, art and creativity itself are absolutely vital to our system’s mystifying its true, brute nature. All art, no matter how radical or personal, is reduced to publicity for some cause well beyond our control.

In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher started to define the ways in which the alienation of capitalist realism had begun to erode the sense of forward momentum and progress in cultural production — in which poor economic conditions had flattened imagination and locked art and culture into a kind of “temporal loop” — while also writing more directly about his own intense clinical depression (or, his own postmodern alienation). In the text, Fisher argues that we are perpetually haunted by “lost futures,” or the futures that failed to happen. Using the 1979-1982 British sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel as the exemplar of this condition, he assesses a condition of time in which time has collapsed all together, all previous eras bleeding into the present, and from which the future is permanently locked out of the stasis. “But this stasis has been buried,” writes Fisher in the first essay published in the book, “interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness,’ of perpetual movement. The montaging of earlier eras has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is so prevalent that it is no longer noticed [10].” The lost futures don’t just signal a loss of hope for what may come, but have also disintegrated our perception about what is truly retro; Simon Reynolds of course has called this condition “Retromania,” in which we can’t even identify retro works of culture with an uncanny sensation because all culture has been reduced to the retro. Fisher uses the singer Adele as his example here, because even though her work is read as retro to a degree we can’t identify an actual era that her music is referencing. It’s all culture as a formless, timeless amoeba locked in a prison of now, folding imagination in on itself and resigning us to hopelessness.

The text is defined by Fisher’s quest for traces of what he calls “popular modernism,” or works of pop culture that are imbued with the modernist values and thirst for the future that defined the Fordist, early industrial economy. He concludes that in the post-Fordist economy and the unsociety that it has constructed, where the ruling class has ceased being able to perpetually revolutionize society and its productive forces, art and culture tends to become safe, trying to square itself with pre-established markets and ideas that have already been sold and internalized into the culture industries. Fisher’s search for popular modernism becomes nothing short of a mini-obsession, and in some ways is indicative of a man trying to cope with the reality that he has unveiled (that the world has stopped progressing) and ward off what must have felt like the rational measure to take (the postmodern suicide).

Fisher finds hints of popular modernism in music, literature, television, and film alike, even if it’s in miniscule whispers of what popular modernism once was. He lifts the terms Hauntology from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx to describe the effect of coming into contact with these echoes of popular modernism. The power of the artworks that he describes is only experienced as the faintest haunting, lingering reminders of all that we’ve lost and all that we can’t reclaim, which means these artworks evoke depression, resignation, and mourning as much as they do enjoyment and enthusiasm. In the post-Fordist neoliberal hellscape unsociety, the best a work of art can do is make us feel sad for what we can no longer access, Fisher suggests. 

That is, inescapably, fucking bleak.

So what haunted Fisher? In what works did the ghosts of popular modernism send shivers down his spines and goosebumps up his arms? If he was enthusiastic about anything, it was those works of pop modernism that were evocative of the brutal reality of an unsociety stricken with the pain of lost futures. He found it in Joy Division for the seminal post-punk group’s sense of foreboding and the future being foreclosed. In the literature of (and adaptations of said literature) British pulp crime writer David Peace, Fisher located a kind of pulp modernism that is never absent historicity, imbuing each urban locale with the haunting of its memories of ages past. The cultural theorist was particularly enthusiastic about a new strain of electronic music that he also dubbed “hauntological”: The Caretaker, Burial, William Gibson and others. These artists all make music that deals with memory and its obscuration specifically, layering samples in crackle, fuzz and hiss evocative of the temporal loopage of a society of collapsed futures writ large. Writing about The Caretaker’s 2005 masterpiece Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, Fisher says: “Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia was in many ways an act of diagnosis of a cultural pathology.”

“It might seem strange to describe a culture that is so dominated by past forms as being amnesiac, but the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterized not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories [11].”

No future, no memories, and the only thing keeping him going was the search for works of art that shared his cultural observations. It’s no shock that Fisher’s depression only worsened as he lost the will to keep looking for these works of cultural production and slowly came to other brutal realizations about ideas and movements that his lingering leftist idealism kept him grasping onto. His final text, The Weird and Eerie, ceased diagnosing the present all together and instead distinguished between the modes of “the weird” and “the eerie” as two separate aesthetic forms throughout the culture of the 20th Century, without much broader cultural implications. Fisher was also experiencing resignation and dread over his realizations that the problems that he associated with neoliberal politics weren’t at all any different from those associated with “the left,” and even worse, that the ideology of neoliberalism had sucked “the left” into the same political void that everything else had been sucked into. His iconic 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle” is his most explicit denunciation of the tendencies that had come to define these fucking hideous leftist politics and functions as a reasoned manifesto against the horrors of call-out culture (we call it cancel culture now) and for solidarity. “‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone,” Fisher writes. Yeah, no fucking shit my guy.

Fisher’s postmodern suicide seems perfectly rational given the tragic weight of his conclusions about the unsociety. When there’s no future on its way and no hope for a better tomorrow, why wait for tomorrow to come? If time is locked in a perpetual stasis, why not drop out of time all together? It’s easy to see Fisher as the last in line of a certain critical stance towards the present that itself died with him. But that critical stance lives on – of that I assure you. And just because Fisher’s postmodern suicide was rational, that doesn’t mean it was the right choice. On the contrary, I’d argue that it was only rational given his very specific ideological limitations. But, more on that later.

LIVING IN COMMUNE WITH THE POSTMODERN SUICIDE AND CONCLUSIONS

Given that I have now spent thousands of words (and a shit load of time) defining and explaining the specific postmodern criticisms of alienation and subsequent postmodern suicides of three of our greatest fallen artists and writers, you must be wondering if I too grapple with my own postmodern suicide. You must assume that I, also living in this “unsociety” or nonexistent society, am feeling the seductive pull of the blackpill. After all, for me to both address and sympathize with their deaths must mean that I must have also experienced those same realizations about our unsociety, and that the postmodern suicide must be beckoning me from my doorstep, yes? No. Perhaps I lack Kelley’s, Wallace’s, and Fisher’s supreme sensitivity, perhaps I’m closed off from my emotions in a way that they were incapable of as druids wide open to the sensory world. But I don’t think so. On one hand, I can’t identify with the perpetually depressive state of someone like Fisher. Even in a world this fucked, I maintain a joie de vivre and a zest for living that almost makes me judge and feel rather disgusted with the idea of giving up. More than that, I think their postmodern suicides were, even if rational, borne of very specific limitations.

Wallace’s limitations stemmed specifically from his attachment to the same system that created the despair and tragedy that he so poetically diagnosed. A conservative liberal, Wallace remained susceptible to the spectacle and simulacra of postmodern politics and culture – he, even seeing what he’d seen, often bought into it. Writing lovingly about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, Wallace says: “There’s something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true.” True, you say? McCain was, of course, a war mongering brute who wore the thin veneer of political respectability with manners and pantomimed decency. Nevertheless, he supported all the brutal state measures that had abolished the metaphysical dimension of life that Wallace mourned. But in his extreme thirst for sincerity, Wallace lost the ability to see through the spectacle of faux-sincerity, and thus couldn’t formulate a coherent way forward.  

Kelley, who grew up working class in Michigan, was a victim of his own seismic ambition. He lamented that the art world reduced his ideas to little more than branding for the art world itself, but still actively sought out its approval for his own success. Kelley sometimes collaborated with artists and musicians who chose to work outside institutional paradigms all together — such as Los Angeles-based performance artist/noise musician John Duncan or Japanese noise musician and mixed-media artist Masaha Nakayara (Violent Onsen Geisha/Hair Stylistics) — emphasizing his craving for that underground authenticity. But he only wet his toes, and willingly allowed himself to be thrown up on the cross for the art world and its financial excesses.

Fisher, who understood and defined the cultural mood of postmodernism and the unsociety better than most (and almost certainly better than all other tepid social democrats,) had the fatal tendency of refusing to take his critiques to their logical conclusions. His lingering enthusiasm for leftist politics, for instance, can only be credited to his refusal to understand why the thing that he called “The Vampire’s Castle” actually existed. He tried to rationalize it as the result of leftists being “misguided,” and never acknowledged that perhaps “the left” functions in such a way because the left is in fact a reactionary disciplinary apparatus for the status quo itself. His politics remained of a middle class democratic socialism throughout his career, and his critiques of the Labour Party typically hued around their “abandonment of the working class,” failing to acknowledge that the Labour Party itself was a bourgeois party and thus functionally designed to manage and dilute the rage of the proletariat more than advance its cause. And lest we forget Fisher’s final recommendation for freeing society and culture from its stasis, which is what he called “Acid Communism” in his final, unfinished essay. In the essay, Fisher advocates for the left to get back in touch with the spirit of revolt and joyousness that it had in the 1960s and 1970s: “Of course we know that the revolution did not happen,” he writes. “What has shifted beyond all recognition since then is the existential and emotional atmosphere [13].” But only a middle class hippie academic could think that it’s “emotions” that are preventing a revolution, and not the power and domination of capital and Control Society itself. Fisher’s calls for a shift in mass consciousness are no different than similar calls that were made in the late 60s by the New Left, which we now know paved the path for the hyper-individualism that would itself bring about neoliberalism as governing orthodoxy. And what happens when you call for a shift in mass consciousness that never transpires? Your idealism collapses, your hope fades, and the postmodern suicide calls your name ever louder.

The postmodern suicide then is only the most logical blackpill to take when you fail to examine yourself. Mike Kelley, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Fisher all might have had similarly brutal and accurate realizations and observations about culture and unsociety, but they failed to apply that critical lens to themselves. It is only through the critical diagnosis of our own ideological, spiritual, and political limitations that we can formulate a coherent path forward and out of this ugly unsociety. It is only through understanding the way we perceive that our perceptions can be internalized rationally and not destroy our senses of self. I might share these thinkers’ observations, but I also understand that I’m prone to hysteria, sadness, and anger. I also know that just because the world feels hopeless, and I sometimes feel hopeless, that the world won’t stop without me. I also know that despite its problems, the world still offers so many fucking joys and simple pleasures that if we just disconnect from critical thought for a moment, we really can bask in the seismic beauty of this whole goddamned thing. The tyranny we’re experiencing can’t persist forever, because nothing does. It’s not all about me. Wallace, Kelley And Fisher — our most tragic of postmodern suicides — combusted because they never came to terms with their own very postmodern narcissism. Rigorous self-examination is the only way to survive the unsociety.

Pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran once told a journalist how he was saved by the idea of suicide. “What allowed me to live was that I knew I always had this option.” This is the healthy way of managing the postmodern suicide. The postmodern suicide, the only proverbial blackpill, is to be kept in our pockets as a reminder of the safe exit. When we are reminded of it, we are forced to continuously reassess our beliefs, ideas, and our senses of self. In that dialectic — between the postmodern suicide and the decision to keep living — radical creativity will thrive. By resisting the postmodern suicide, we inevitably develop more intellectual rigor and confidence in our will to survive. By living in the allure of the blackpill but holding ourselves back from swallowing it, we just might formulate strategies about how to free ourselves from this “temporal loop” and take back the future once and for all. By refusing what feels rational, perhaps we can make the unsociety a society once more.

This article was originally published in September of 2021 by apophenie