Mike Kelley: Mister Memory

Despite its markedly different appearance, the artist considered Framed and Frame one of the key precursors to his Memory Ware project. (2) A series of sculptures included in the first Memory Ware exhibition relate to Aerodynamic Vertical to Horizontal Shift (1999), which reproduces part of the amorphous landscape of Framed and Frame but in an altered orientation (see p. 39). Displayed on sawhorses, Aerodynamic Vertical to Horizontal Shift essentially reframes a formless section of a formless whole as if to underscore, with muted irony, the inherent contradictions involved in that operation. Similarly presented on sawhorses, sculptures such as SS Memory Ware Hump (2000; see pp. 42-43) borrow the earlier work’s blobby concrete-like medium but also reveal part of their underlying wood framework and interior spaces. These ungainly works elaborate an almost comical dialogue between a string of binary oppositions: form and formlessness, surface and interior, ornament and design, “artistic” craft and DIY construction.

The following year, Kelley developed this strategy in more explicit terms in a group of sculptures that seem to compare and contrast different objects, ostensibly as a way of evaluating competing systems of value. Like some kind of wayward didactic demonstration, Balanced by Mass and Personification (2001; see p.101) juxtaposes a large water jug, covered in buttons like memory ware and displayed on a black pedestal, with a smaller plastic bottle, displayed on a white pedestal and featuring a crude rendering of a masklike face. Our attention is immediately and predictably drawn to the image of the face, however pathetically rendered, rather than to the more intricately and “artfully” composed surface of the larger jug. Our anthropomorphic bias, in effect, trumps the appeal of abstraction and craft, reminding us that our aesthetic responses are never disinterested. Balanced by Mass and Worth (2001; see pp. 102-3), meanwhile, satirizes notions of sculptural balance by pairing two identically sized, torpedo-like forms, each held aloft on two short poles; while one oblong is completely covered with beads and buttons, the other is adorned, at its tip, by a single 1940 Wendell Willkie campaign pin-an object whose monetary value exceeds that of all the sundry items encrusting its neighbor’s surface combined. By unexpectedly mixing the criteria for evaluating artistic and economic worth, Balanced by Mass and Worth hints at the absurdity of any lingering notions we might harbor about “eternal” formal laws or “transcendent” aesthetic values.

In Memory of Camelot (2000; see p. 75), another composite sculpture featuring distinct components, was inspired by John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal airplane crash in the summer of 1999, in which Kennedy’s wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette also perished. The work’s central element is a framed copy of the July 18, 1999, front page of the Los Angeles Times, featuring a banner headline about the crash and a pair of accompanying photographs: a recent image of Kennedy and his wife and the iconic news photograph of three-year-old “John-John” at his father’s funeral, saluting the president’s casket as it passes by. The framed newspaper is sandwiched between two contrasting sculptural components. On one side, a vintage Canadian memory ware bottle is austerely displayed on a black plinth, under a glass bell jar; on the other side, a painted figurine of John-John, based on the historical photograph reproduced in the newspaper, stands atop a large tree branch decorated in the manner of memory ware. The branch rises up from an undecorated stump, on which rests a tiny toy model of a castle. As with Kelley’s other composite sculptures, In Memory of Camelot incorporates contrasting aesthetics (for example, the minimalism of the plinth versus the organic shape of the branch), and, partly on account of significant shifts in scale between its various elements, the overall assemblage seems less like a coherent whole than a gathering of disparate parts – an effect that provides a clue to the artist’s underlying intentions.

Kelley described this unsettling ensemble matter-of-factly, as a sculpture “memorializing the death of John Kennedy Jr.,” (3) yet it is clearly a far less straight­forward proposition. The work’s title, it is worth noting, refers not to JFK Jr. but to “Camelot,” evoking the popular branding and romanticization of President Kennedy’s administration; it is thus a sculpture in “memory” of an idealized history, itself veiled in the myths of another time. Given the title, it is tempting to speculate that what initially attracted the artist’s attention was the pairing of the two photographs on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, which suggested the extent to which JFK Jr.’s public identity was forever mediated through the history of his father and, more specifically, through his father’s murder. Like an eerie reversal of before-and-after photos, the two images depict, respectively, the child after the tragic murder of his father and the adult son shortly before his own violent death.

Memorializing someone typically involves creating an enduring, iconic representation, but Kelley’s sculptural ensemble undermines such a project by insinuating that our relationship with any single image is always filtered through, and informed by, the memory of earlier images. Instead of a romantic evocation of an individual, In Memory of Camelot sets up a series of loaded and ambiguous relationships between its various elements; perhaps the most disturbing of those relationships is the uncanny cross talk between the black-and-white news photograph of John-John and the colored figurine based on that image. In its extreme transformation of historical trauma into sentimental kitsch, the figurine calls attention to the ways in which the original image itself has functioned as a kind of collective screen memory, an anodyne surrogate for direct depictions of the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination. Ultimately, Kelley’s “memorial” is less concerned with its ostensible subject than with reflecting on the affinities between memory and art, both of which allow us to access not the “thing­in-itself” but only its re-presentation – the rhetorical constructions that stand in for some absent thing or experience. Rather than presenting an iconic image of remembrances, In Memory of Camelot generates a series of slippages between the various categories and conventions it invokes – suggesting a model, perhaps, for how Kelley might have wanted his own work to be understood and remembered.

Kelley created one other major memory ware work about a public figure. As part of his 2001 installation John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle)(see pp.106-7), the artist covered a ten-foot-tall figurative sculpture of John Glenn, the former astronaut and United States senator, with a mosaic of broken bottles and plates, ceramic shards, and tools. The astronaut was an ironically nostalgic choice of subject for the artist, who, in his youth, had attended John Glenn High School in Westland, Michigan. In addition to the associations conjured by the memory ware technique, the work’s formal references range from social realism to the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti to the monstrous astronaut in the 1959 science fiction film First Man into Space. Fragmented yet domineering, absurd yet heroic, Kelley’s sculpture conflates references to personal and historical memory, modernism and folk art, publicly sanctioned monuments and subversive antimonuments, fashioning a web of concatenated contradictions.

At first glance, the decade-long Memory Ware project can seem like an anomaly in Kelley’s oeuvre. In place of the caustic wit and satirical orientation that characterize much of his output, the “flats,” in particular, appear to emphasize decorative surface effects and to maintain a content-neutral demeanor. Yet the borrowed aesthetics deployed by the artist must not be taken at face value; instead, they represent elements in an associative labyrinth, discussion points within an intricately spiraling web of linked ideas and allusions. In the Memory Ware sculptures and paintings, Kelley elaborated on artistic strategies he had developed throughout his career, playing with conventions to reveal their role in generating and framing meaning and crossing the wires of readymade categories to confound our expectations. Underlying this approach was the artist’s strong opposition to any idealist assertion that objects – including artworks – have any inherent significance or value. Instead, Kelley’s works reveal that, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has observed, “the same object [in different contexts] can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime, charismatic apparition; the difference, strictly structural, does not pertain to the ‘effective properties’ of the object, but only to its place in the symbolic order.” (4) Indeed, as Memory Ware wryly demonstrates, even sentimental keepsakes, given the right framing and composition, can evoke “transcendent” values. The determining factor is not the formal vocabulary but the conceptual framing and contextualization.

On another level, the Memory Ware series is an extended chapter in Kelley’s larger engagement with the reuse, repurposing, and recontextualization of materials and ideas, including those associated with his own earlier production. In this respect, the sculptures and paintings participate in the artist’s effort to destabilize or subvert the historical reception of his own work; not only did he seek to problematize the ways in which it had already been interpreted, but he also wished to disrupt the process by which an artist’s oeuvre is reified and memorialized. With Memory Ware, Kelley articulated an ironic approach to that task while fashioning artworks – as he did in so many different ways throughout his career – that continually call into question their own identities. Atypical in appearance even as they explore some of Kelley’s core concerns, the Memory Ware series invites us to reimagine our understanding of this artist’s vast body of work – to put aside existing ideas and look more deeply, searching for previously unnoticed connections between his many projects and tracing new networks of associations within them. At the same time, it encourages us to reflect on the ways in which art’s meaning is always in play: as an artist’s œuvre comes to be seen within new contexts and different historical frameworks, our collective reading of it inevitably changes and evolves. To do justice to Kelley’s legacy, we need only take seriously the invitation offered by these works to keep reinventing our ways of remembering.

Ralph Rugoff is Director of the Hayward Gallery in London. As a curator, Rugoff first worked with Mike Kelley for the 1990 exhibition Just Pathetic (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles) and has been closely associated with the interpretation of his work ever since. Rugoff wrote an essay for the artist’s first retrospective, Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1993, and interviewed Kelley on several occasions; “Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed” was published in the winter 1992 issue of 21st Century and “Existing in an Ahistorical Fantasy Space of Trauma” in the exhibition catalogue for Horizontal Tracking Shots (Gagosian Gallery, 2009). Hauser & Wirth Publishing

(1) See Kelley’s text “The Meaning Is Confused Spatially, Framed” (1999), reprinted in Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 118-37.
(2) See Mike Kelley, Memory Ware, exh. cat. (Cologne: Jablonka Galerie, 2002), p.69
(3) Ibid., p. 70.
(4) Slajov Zizek, ‘Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture’ (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1992), p.143.