Interview

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It has been my experience that if a work of art, or a song, or even a person, confuses you at first, maybe pisses you off a little bit, then chances are it's really, really good. I remember that's how I felt the first time I saw work by Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures in New York. I think I didn't like the work, but I spent an hour looking at it, and I remembered the name Mike Kelley the next day.
I figure it took me as long to get it and to like it as it took me to get "Paint It, Black" by the Rolling Stones. Overnight? But that means that it changed my brain, which is what all art worthy of the handle does. What was this stuff crawling across the floor and up the wall? Pop art takes on arte povera? I figured that it definitely had something to do with the Thelonious Monk tune "Ugly Beauty," but that tune doesn't have any lyrics. Kelley's work embraces the extreme contradictions of American culture, partaking of beauty and ugliness, craftsmanship and happenstance, intelligence and mindlessness, reticence and aggression, tragedy and humor, yet always finding a mysterious integrity at its heart.
Kelley's career began at a time when the artists who had great success generally tended toward repeating themselves, creating a highly recognizable signature look that functioned like a brand. But then Kelley's generation-or let's say, the best minds of Kelley's generation-broke away from that tendency. They weren't afraid to put up a show that didn't resemble the last, that changed course and engaged new ideas. Kelley's style might appear to be all over the place­-Jerry Saltz termed his aesthetic "clusterfuck"-but I think the point is that Kelley's style isn't so much a look as it is a feel, a groove that combines roots in conceptual art and an unashamed intellectuality with a sensibility steeped in funk. I mean, you might think Joseph Beuys meets James Brown's "It's Too Funky in Here." Or Marcel Duchamp meets The Contortions.
It's no coincidence, I think, that Kelley started out in a band, a punk band before there was such a thing. He was a founder of the legendary Detroit group Destroy All Monsters, a group that everyone heard about but few people actually heard. Just as that band pushed music across borders into strange new territory, his art has cut a wide swath through the formally and sometimes preciously defined precincts of art. He is an intellectual who operates from gut instinct, a thinker who's not afraid of stupidity. And he's a master showman and impresario who rethinks it every time out, by any media necessary.
Mike Kelley is a Los Angeles artist. You'd imagine that he could make his work anywhere, and it resonates wherever it's shown, but Kelley seems to thrive on and celebrate the sprawl and ordered chaos of that last-chance city. L.A. is in many ways the apotheosis of middle America, a hyperextension of mall culture, a metastasized suburb where the American Dream goes to get rich or die trying. I visited Kelley in his studio compound in the Highland Park area-it's a kind of anonymous, unpretentious place, in a neighborhood that's a rich mix of ethnicities. You might find people from all over the world around here, but a quick look around Kelley's and you know this is America.

GLENN O'BRIEN: It's funny, I didn't know about you for a long time, but I knew your band, Destroy All Monsters. It was a mythic band. You got a tremendous amount of publicity for people who never actually put out an album.

MIKE KELLEY: There were a couple of singles after I left. When Ron Asheton [the guitar player formerly of the Stooges] joined the band they played in England-everybody was a Stooges fanatic over there so a lot of the buzz came from that. Also, Niagara [the group's singer] just looked so great that that generated press as well. In the early days of punk, there weren't very many bands so Destroy All Monsters played a lot with Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys and Midwestern bands like that. But half the people in Destroy All Monsters didn't want to be in a traditional rock band, and the other half wanted to go off in a hard-rock direction; there was a real conflict of interests.

GO: It almost seemed like a great publicity stunt because Destroy All Monsters was the kind of band that you would read about every month in Creem magazine, but then they never came to your town and there were no records.

MK: Well, a lot of that probably had to do with Lester Bangs [the rock critic], who was a big Detroit fanatic. But there was no music scene left in Detroit after the '60s and no money to put any records out and no distribution. So the band fell apart at the very moment when they probably could have had some kind of presence in the punk scene.

GO: What was your intention when you got involved?

MK: I thought of Destroy All Monsters as an art band; I was much more invested in Krautrock bands like Kraftwerk or the machinic disco of Giorgio Moroder than I was in the emerging New York punk movement. I was mostly interested in pure noise. The only band from New York I'd heard that I was interested in at the time was Suicide. But Destroy All Monsters was a very eclectic group of people. Cary [Loren] was the main person writing the songs, and he was very much coming out of a kind of Lou Reed, Velvet Underground-like place. Jim Shaw and I were generating all of the noise behind his lyrics. Jim and I decided that we wanted to go to graduate school; we didn't want to be in a rock band. So Cary brought in Ron Asheton, and there was an immediate shift in the band's direction. Then things just fell apart. My intentions were really from the art side, not the rock-music side. There was no place for Destroy All Monsters-except maybe in the New York downtown scene. But you know how amazingly segregated that scene was at the time. We would not have been accepted.

GO: Also how unsuccessful.

MK: Well, it considered itself successful inside itself.

GO: But people today think that the Velvet Underground was really famous.

MK: No, they weren't-they were a cult band.

GO: Well, Iggy Pop did get famous. He used to get his picture in Rolling Stone because he was the first person to dive into the audience.

MK: He was of interest as a freak, but the Stooges didn't sell any records. It's funny, though, how the bands that contemporary youth culture mimics now were ones that nobody wanted to hear in their own time. Who would have thought that the Stooges and the Velvet Underground would have so much influence on contemporary pop music? It's fascinating to me that such peripheral music could have that kind of major effect.

GO: That sort of relates to the "Kandors" exhibition you had at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin-I was so struck by those pieces. That was such an obscure pop-culture thing, but it really hit me. It didn't have to be explained to me. I immediately knew that Kandor was the capital of Krypton, the planet that Superman comes from, and was shrunken in a bottle and kept in the Fortress of Solitude. What got you onto that subject?

MK: It's a long story. I'd referenced the bottled city of Kandor in writings as a symbol for alienation; it has a kind of Sylvia Plath-Bell Jar overtone to me. But I liked that it had the sci-fi element as well. I did a project in 1999 for a show in Bonn-a turn-of-the-century-theme show with a technological slant. So I decided to work with an out-of-date image of the "future." Kandor is a prototypical "city of the future." My idea was to link it to the technological "web space" of the Internet-and the failure of that "utopian" system to actually bring people together physically-where people can only connect virtually in a very alienated and disconnected manner. Some years later, I decided to go back and focus on Kandor as a physical object; in the Bonn show there were no bottled cities, only images of it lifted from Superman comic books and presented as collages, and a computer animation of various versions of the city morphing into each other. When I researched it, I discovered that Kandor had never been drawn the same way twice in the Superman comics. It was such an unimportant part of the Superman mythos that a fixed city plan was never developed. That interested me, because I was working on the Educational Complex sculpture-a model combining every school I had ever attended. I was interested in architecture as it relates to memory-how unfixed our memories of space are. I had been trying to draw architectural spaces from memory. My memories of floor plans were all wrong-big patches of space were missing. So I related that inability to remember such spaces to repressed memory syndrome. In the Jablonka exhibition I decided to downplay such references to focus on the beauty of the bottled cities as objects. I produced 20 different bottled cities based on images from the comics; they're all supposed to be the same city, but each one is unique. I thought that was an interesting paradox-that all of these different models were supposed to represent the same place. I only had time to finish 10 cities for that show; the remaining group will be presented at Gagosian Gallery in New York next year.

GO: It's kind of vague in my memory how the city of Kandor was shrunken and put in a bottle, but I guess it was Brainiac, the villain, who did it, right? So I don't know if your role here is Brainiac the shrinker or Superman the savior.

MK: The story has been changed over time by the publishers of the comic to make it appeal to different generations of readers-but, yes, initially the city was stolen by Brainiac and shrunken. I don't remember why. To tell you the truth, I'm not interested in the story; I'm not a fan of Superman comics. I just like the idea of being burdened with one's past. Superman, as a baby, is sent away from his home planet, which blows up; and then, later in life, he's saddled with the responsibility to watch over his hometown forever. What a horrible scenario-but everyone is stuck with their past. Kandor is locked away in Superman's Fortress of Solitude-like the monstrous, alien, malformed relative that's hidden away in H.P. Lovecraft's The Shuttered Room story. I'm attracted to these overtones of secrecy.

GO: A lot of your work could be seen as creating these monsters that are on the border of being cute and yet monstrous at the same time. I mean, you were in a band called Destroy All Monsters. Was monstrosity always an interest of yours?

MK: Oh, yeah. Monstrosity is fascinating and attractive-although I don't think of my work as being specifically concerned with the monstrous. I think my work is more about structural interplay-I entertain many kinds of subjects in it.

GO: I think there's a monstrous element in your work that has to do more with benign monsters than malignant monsters. For example, the stuffed animals all put together are kind of a Happy Meal version of the two-headed baby that's on the cover of the tabloid.

MK: At first, I didn't realize that the stuffed animals had a monstrous quality. It took me a while to see it. When I first started buying craft objects it was because they were, obviously, gifts. I was interested in gift-giving. Artists were going on about this in the art world at the time-the artwork, as gift, was supposed to be an escape from the commodification of art. So I began buying things that I recognized were made by hand. My assumption was that they were meant to be given away-most craft objects are generally made, specifically, to be gifts. The handmade objects I found in thrift stores were, most likely, not sold. I started hoarding them; I had never really looked at dolls or stuffed animals closely before. I became interested in their style-the proportions of them, their features. That's when I realized that they were monstrosities. But people are not programmed to recognize that fact-they just see them as generically human. Such objects have signifiers of cuteness-big eyes, big heads, baby proportions. You can empathize with those aspects of them. But when I blew them up to human scale in paintings they were not so cute anymore; if you saw something like that walking down the street, you'd go in the other direction. I became interested in toys as sculpture. But it's almost impossible to present them that way, because everybody experiences them symbolically. That's what led to my interest in repressed memory syndrome and the fear of child abuse. This wasn't my idea-I was informed by my viewers that this is what my works were about. I learn a lot from what my audience tells me about what I do.

GO: See, I always saw those pieces as sort of about the breakdown of nature and the cracking of the genetic code and mutation.

MK: They're very easy to project upon. I did a number of shows in which I used such objects in different ways. But people tend to think about these works in a very generic way as, somehow, being about childhood. That was not my intent. But, leaving those works behind, my personal interest in the monstrous is more sexual in orientation. I have always been, primarily, interested in abstract monsters-the blob monster. When I thought about it, I realized this stemmed from my childhood, when I didn't know what female genitals looked like. I thought the blob monsters in films and comic books were what genitals must look like, so such monsters were very sexual to me. They were not purely repellent-they were mystifying and alluring.