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.
Brian Fielding was a painter who used the language of paint with great sensitivity and articulation.
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In the early 1980s he was a tutor at Ravensbourne College of Art; quiet, serious and unassuming. I was a seventeen-year-old student there at that time. He was known as a very capable artist. Although I wasn't taught by him, I met him and sensed an aura about him. Later when I saw his work I associated it with Roger Hilton, who also succeeded in articulating emotion in the language of paint. Fielding’s work seems to take this articulation a step further, in that his work appear to emphasise the ability of paint to, as Patrick Heron called it, "render perceptions actual". Sensitivity in paint, nuanced voices that speak slowly and gently through the medium.
Reaching up and out, like a brush mark to some oblique idea of purpose. The point at which a work is left, Guston said, is "when it stops following you around like a cat". Leaving off and then touched again, the associations with music are well-known with abstraction in painting, but this can miss the depth of the actuality or materiality of the paint, the voice of the paint itself. Sounds in the distance, the need for monastic-like peace for the work to appear from the brain’s blur to some form of clarity that is specific but not literal.
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So much observation of painting wants an answer, a clarification. If one is trying to be specific about a feeling, a meaning, like Grey November how can one do it? Everyone will have different associations with this expression. Names for many paintings are ‘footholds’ or ‘ways in’. Is this his November, the artist’s November, or my November? It is a directive to an emotional world that may or may not have resonance for the viewer. I think the only approach is to be open to the language of the paint, and the only education needed for this is developing a sensibility to paint. The work of Fielding as an educator must have encouraged his students to open up their sensibility to the sophistication and liberation of paintings voices.
Look at Ground Plan: for me the ‘ground’ makes me think of rugby pitches at school, places that were cold and unpleasant, ice on the ground…black shorts, and a grinding feeling of distress and heaviness, with, somewhere in the distance a hope of escape…This is one reading of the work from my stance, what I associate with it. On another occasion it will perhaps be something else. Raw and basic to it is the way in which the paint is somehow alive, allowing these feelings. This is what happens when an artist is capable of this level of ability with paint. One might find works by others, there is even a website that sells works ‘in the style of’ anyone you like, but it misses the point; it is not about a look. So much of the art market plays into the hands of a commercialist system, a rarified product, like designer clothing. I believe Fielding dismissed this notion of art as product.
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While painting lends itself to become object and is not dematerialised work (as many artists of his time were trying to affect), his work is speaking about the dematerialised. It is not possible to own what he is doing in the paintings, even if you own the painting. Many of the painters of his generation were believers in the idea of works being in public collections so that they were available to all. Naturally the market finds other buyers and private collectors. There is something special about owning the works of artists and having them in a domestic environment, almost to look after them for a while. It has nothing to do with decoration, it is the antithesis of that, it is cultural warmth and may not even include the exchange of money. Barry Flanagan, in 1972 made his own money and put these lino print notes in a suitcase. He ‘bought’ other artist/friends' work with the ‘artwork/money’. It was symbolic of ‘cultural exchange’ rather than financial.
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Where does a painting go…? A painter I once knew used to worry his works were ‘working’ for a while and then somehow ‘died’…he referred to it as "long since past their sell-by date". What is absorbed from a painted surface between one person and another? Painting is saying something, it is speaking, it has ideas. Too often people appear to be educated with questions and answers and there is no value for ‘vagueness’; yet emotions are often vague, non-specific, at the same time that they are, in a sense, precise, certain, meaningful. Translate this into paint and I look at works by Fielding which allow the possibility of specific-vague-meaning; a place, a position which is very much where painting thrives.
Fielding's works are deeply aware of painting's history within the language of paint. This generation of artists seemed to re-see paintings by Renaissance artists only in terms of the nuances of human sensibility realised in the handling of paint on a surface. Equally one can use ‘insensitivity’ as another form of this language, as the Bad Painting School did in the 1980s. One has to become attuned to it in the way one has to become attuned to conceptual ideas, the way ideas develop and speak to the audience. It is a nuanced language of poetry in paint.
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During the late 1990s and early 2000s a move away from 'Conceptual Painting' to a process of using the art market as the art itself meant that the works themselves did not matter except as ploys to the action, the process. This ultimately becomes very harsh. I sometimes think how appropriate it was that ‘The Shard’ (meaning a sharp fragment of glass or metal) should have been designed during this period. It seems to symbolise a cultural shift which celebrated the hard, cold, triumphal, cutting and repulsing. What could be more contrasting to these paintings by Fielding of gentleness, warmth, humility, allowing and embracing?
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Michael Bracewell put it very succinctly when he coined the phrase ‘when surface was depth’, this is a world away from the mindset of works like these by Fielding. They do not consider the notion of detachment or removal. They are bodily, often painted on the floor or on canvases one can almost enter due to their scale.
What does the artist do who does not want to involve themselves in established structures of recognition? Many artists of Fielding’s generation found the hardness of commercialism interfered with their working practice; the increasing need for an artist to become a self-promoting businessman. Rather they were brought into consciousness of art seen from a much more Romantic point of view: the artist as monk, or contemplative, spending many hours before making the next mark, a way of working that was perhaps influenced by Zen Buddhism. The artist Basil Beattie has referred to this time spent looking. He talked about "looking obliquely": a contemplative form of driving at something but not quite knowing what.
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I think it is right that artists should try to liberate art from a system that turns it into a form of pure commodity. The Pop Art movement was ‘against’ commercialism, particularly American, and yet it has now become regarded as a celebration of it. Many talk of new technology as a means to free art from pure product which may well work, but the sensibility of touch that is involved in dust ground into oil and applied to cloth seems unlikely to be possible digitally. Â
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If it’s not broken you don’t need to fix it. Modernism broke around the time Fielding died. It could no longer fulfil its promise; a curious mix of left-wing politics and anti-religious belief, admiring of literal forms paired down to the ‘basic form’ based ultimately on the Enlightenment rationalism and a Protestant mindset that had become cultural rather than ecclesiastical. But the beauty of Modernism was the desire for this pure form, this basic ground of felt experience that could be articulated directly. Like the Protestant revolution that dispensed with ritual and votives and said the believer had a direct line to God. So the artist pared down to the point of pure feeling into form, directly from mind to the material. The marvellous and generous works of Fielding are a gift to those who spend time with them. They humbly speak through the language he was so evidently masterly with. They are not ‘about the artist’s feelings’ they are about feeling made into a form. This language cannot be used any more, we who are ‘Post’ Modern are stuck with being self-conscious, conceptually aware of ourselves in a way that did not exist before the collapse of Modernism.
The delicacy of handling and speaking through paint, controlled with authority that is gleaned from the process of looking and thinking in that medium. It is a deeply enriching experience that has nothing to do with the external workings of market forces, but is its own purity. The realities that create it are, like food and drink and health, necessities, but that is all. What is really going on is something special and invigorating, a mind's felt experience actualised in a material form that is visually transferable, a feeling eye. There is a beautiful drawing by Roger Hilton, the gallery called it Nude and Object but it is quite obvious to me that the ‘object’ is an eye and the tentacle lines coming from it are its feeling out towards the ‘Nude’. I always think of it as the feeling eye which I think is an appropriate description of Brian Fielding’s achievement as a painter.
Images courtesy Jonathan Clark Fine Art https://jcfa.co.uk/artists/158-brian-fielding/works/
Daniela Nicolaescu's debut collection is a stirring ethereal whirlwind that remains rooted in the earth, corporeal. It is divided into parts, Earth, Water, Air, Fire; and the fast-paced movement continues through raw earthly experience, watery furlings, twisting back and forth, airy imagining, fiery feeling.
It assembles poems over a decade of writing, from 2012 to 2023, across Romania, Italy, England and France. It is a bilingual edition, in English and French, but as a "free translation" (as the author terms it), almost entirely translated by Nicolaescu, it does not read as a parallel translation; instead the translations vary throughout, in what is kept and what is left aside in either language. Some keep the essence or atmosphere of the poem but leave wide gaps between the direct meanings of the words themselves. In this way the poems live in harmony, co-exist in the collection, but are also very much independent of each other.
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I read this as a subtle commentary on translation too: the translator's difficult debates with themselves and others before having to make the final decision of how they read the piece in one language, and what they will offer from it into the other. Down to word-level, sentence, atmosphere as a whole; which word is kept for the translation if a double meaning doesn't work; or histories contained in a word, cultural or literary reference, unique to the one language. Ultimately translation is of course a reading by the translator, while keeping horizons as open as possible during the process to embrace other possible readings, and attempt to put something of that palimpsest into the final translation from which the process behind has vanished, other than explanatory notes. But there are no explanatory notes in Nicolaescu's collection, other than the introductory note, crediting the two poems translated by Radu Bata, and calling the rest translations freely adapted from personal interpretation. Inevitably, as the writer of the poems, and the translator, proximity to the text could not be closer. Â
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Collected across many years, and across diverse locations, the poems reflect on versions of the self across time, and the person that moves forward, containing or dismissing the voices, memories, experiences of before. It considers the natural change and continuity happening to the individual on a universal basis. The poems are also very much contemporary, reflecting and speaking of our age. In 'Therapeutic exercise', there is a paralleling of the mind to a computer; a memory that can be removed like deleting a typo: "Your body is a memory, / from which I will discreetly fade away / as if removing a typo" (101).
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This also contemplates the body becoming memory, and the memory as being something written. Several of Nicolaescu's poems pay explicit attention to the nature of the written word, as well as the relationship between the body and language. In 'Ungraspable':
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Years ago, I stared at blank walls
until I could listen to
the sound of my mind
projected onto them.
Silent walls like pages
that could not have been turned —
playgrounds for ideas
to jingle and merge.
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I wanted to be real
in the eyes of my shadows,
staring at me from the distance, but nothing fits in the body
— smell, flesh, or voice —
ghostly mind haunting the walls,
the pages of an elusive existence.
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(97)
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There is a paralleling of "walls" and "pages", which reminds me, although in a very different tone, of Apollinaire's 'A La Santé' (1913) written while he was imprisoned, noting his naked vulnerability ("I’m bored between these completely naked walls / Painted in pale colours / A fly with little steps roams upon the paper / Through my uneven lines"); as well as Henry Howard Earl of Surrey in England in the sixteenth century in 'So cruel prison how could betide' (1557), where the walls enclosing the poet remind him of previous encounters in this space, and reflect his memories back and him ("The void walls eke that harbored us each night, / Wherewith, alas, revive within my breast [...] The secret thoughts imparted with such trust, / The wanton talk, the divers change of play"). Here Nicolaescu appears to follow in this poetic tradition, where room and mind are paralleled, and walls with pages; it contemplates how the thought becomes a word, written onto the page. The line breaks show a sensitivity to the visual appearance of the poem as it corresponds to its meaning: "walls" and "pages" placed at the end of the line, faces the 'silent' and 'blank' white space of the page. Does this imprison the thought, or free the word? It plays between the silence of the mind and the sound of the spoken, between the shadows of thought and the flesh of the word, the movement of page in motion as it is being read, and its stillness, like a wall, before it is turned, or before the book is opened.
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There is a very physical grappling with language that is reflected in harsh bodily metaphors. In 'To inhabit a language", for example, the poet writes:
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To inhabit a language
is to perform an operation
in the night, without an anaesthetic,
wearing gloves like a surgeon
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(171)
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The image is visceral, painful, and asks how one really holds a language; how it may be entered as a space, or held as a material, or broken apart and examined.
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Then the spaces between, the divisions and contradictions between languages, between selves across different languages and locations, come to a fore in 'The Distance to Cross':
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Solitude inserts itself into the space
between
your dry clothes and your wet body
between
two foreign words
that can't speak through gestures.
Between you and the other,
two tectonic plates collide.
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(201)
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It delicately locates solitude between opposites "dry" and "wet", but between entities that also appear connected or attached, as clothes resting on the body, especially a wet body, would give the impression of something clinging. The "foreign words" are treated like 'bodies' too, treated as bodies that have the potential of voice, but cannot gesture, cannot communicate between then; and so, however close they are placed, the space between them is vast. The poem looks at distance between bodies, perhaps always foreign, even our body to ourself, different across different times, different across different countries, different across different languages. How do you word your body, see yourself within or outside a language, native or foreign? Â
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Nicolaescu's collection Hyperboréen took me on a captivating disquiet journey through the visceral and dreamy, and an introspective look into identity through language, contemplating the location of the self between foreign worlds.
The book launch for Hyperboréen will be held at Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds on 7th September 2024.