
I got lost on my way to the Mike Kelley show. I don’t live in London anymore, and the city, possibly out of resentment, had made itself strange and unfamiliar to me. My train terminated unexpectedly in South Kensington and in a daze I changed platforms, realising too late I was travelling back the way I had come. When I eventually crossed the bridge at St Paul’s I was disoriented and agitated and increasingly distraught at the unmistakeable opening melody of ‘Hallelujah’ being plucked by an exceedingly sunny busker in front of the museum’s entrance. Please, I thought, please no.
Ghost and Spirit, on now at the Tate Modern, is not sunny; it is loud, rangy, rude and full of life. Hallelujah! This is the first UK retrospective of Mike Kelley, an artist about whom I knew almost nothing before seeing the show. I did not know where he was from (Detroit) or that he had Irish roots (Kelley!) and was a lapsed Catholic (same). Now that I know this I can’t say it makes much of a difference (isn’t everyone a lapsed something these days?) and thankfully the show dispenses with the biographical dross typical of such gigantic retrospectives. The reason for this omission soon became clear.
Let me start with what I did know: the stuffed animal toys, specifically the one on the cover of Dirty (1992) by Sonic Youth, a band whose vast discography includes the early ‘Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog’, an icy drone that suddenly explodes halfway through into a blizzard of violent, ecstatic howls – a uniquely abrasive cover of The Stooges’ song. A predilection for covers (see their affectionately tongue-in-cheek Madonna-inspired Whitey Album – thank you, Stephanie!) combined with lyrics (occasionally lifted from pulp novels and lifestyle magazines) that cross the personal with the pop cultural points to the band’s casual, freely appropriative way with words, their loose grip on authority, their distrust of it even, resulting in a relationship to the world that is volatile and tense, antiphonal, evolving, and unresolved. Their music emerges out of a maelstrom of references and shifting personae where nothing is fixed except the medium’s capacity to surprise and possibly transform. Mike Kelley’s naughty, exhaustive oeuvre similarly enjoys a roving, discarnate freedom of form, expressing itself through whatever instrument, character, object, colour, or screen happens to be at hand. The stuffed animal toy on the cover of Dirty is part of a larger artwork titled Ahh...youth! (1991) a series of mugshots of bedraggled-looking toys standing in forlorn profile with expressions like wounds. Included among them is a mugshot of the artist himself – a nod, perhaps, to his exploitation of his own image as material and his utter distaste for autobiography. Boo! I’m not here.
It’s fitting that his first appearance in the show, in The Poltergeist (1979), is something of a disappearing act: he flickers through the photos as a possessed medium in various stages of consciousness, the whites of his eyes suddenly shining. Poof! ‘POLTERGEIST IS A FORCE AND NOT A BEING LIKE A GHOST. BUT SOMETIMES IT HAS BEEN SEEN TO TAKE BODILY FORM.’ Form is something to take and lose, again and again: Mike Kelley is Banana Man, he is a medium drooling ectoplasm, he is Satan, a skull, a horny little monkey, a teenage brat defacing history books, and much more. In one room a scarlet curtain on wheels twirls around and around as if possessed, and with each turn the dancing silhouettes of naked women appear on the material like visions on rippling sand. But it’s the emptiness behind the curtain that provides the magic charge, the uncanny jolt that seems to be his specialty.
Masks proliferate throughout, the perfect medium for Kelley’s menagerie of characters whose competing fictional narratives gleefully distort what is real. Blankets with holes gouged out of them gape in traumatised silence from the walls, seeming to tell their own version of events. In another room several puppies have been arranged, ass to snout, in a kind of childish conception of an orgy, while a halting confession leaks out of a tape recorder. In the same room, a rug on the floor rises up in ominous lumps. (Among other things, the show boasts a remarkable range of pun and innuendo; the dirty jokes suggest themselves.)
‘I’m not moving, but I’m growing,’ says Banana Man in another room, all confused. Confusion is sex, as Sonic Youth declared on their debut album, and there is something virile and loose and lustful about the works on display here, as well as an ever-shifting tone of humour and malice, a denial of the tidy, an embrace of the sprawl; this contrapuntal approach, where the works seem to court a deliberately disorienting mix of familiarity and suspicion, horror and joy, makes all the nonsense in the world. You come away from each interaction more sceptical than before of all the forces, impulses, desires, fears, and beliefs that have driven you this far. Confusion may be the only form of certainty we have. Works such as The Power of the Unconscious (1985), a painting of an extinguished candle whose smoke envelops the admission ‘I forgot’ written in Gothic font, or Pansy/Metal/Clovered Hoof (1989) are both brilliant and stupid, good and bad, in and out. Caution, however, should be exercised; there is nothing more suspicious than a good time, and in the world of Mike Kelley, nothing is what it is. If the show sometimes feels like a warm embrace, it’s one that leaves a ‘kick me’ sticker on your back. Feeling bad never felt so good.
Exiting the museum with my friend, we noticed several more buskers had appeared to greet us, and continued to appear all the way into the city. All of them, with no exception, were playing ‘Creep’ by Radiohead. It was like a terrible joke being told again and again, only I didn’t know anymore which side I was on.
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is showing at Tate Modern, London, 3 October 2024 – 9 March 2025.
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