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.