Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

A long overdue London retrospective of the pioneering, prescient American artist is not for the faint-hearted

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 89.13a-d. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024.

Tate Modern, London
3 October 2024 – 9 March 2025

by JOE LLOYD

The Statue of Liberty has a problem with body odour. The Capitol is scrawled over with a pair of sky-facing breasts. And the Lincoln Memorial spews out stinking dollops of faecal matter. These are not the work of some acne-ridden schoolboy, but of the celebrated artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012). “Here we have,” he wrote in the catalogue for his Reconstructed History (1989) collage series, “a collection of grotesqueries, defacements of some of the most cherished images of our American past … what could be the purpose in tarnishing the heroic figures and events we hold so dear?”

Some viewers will see this as unbridled puerility. Grotesque caricature has a long history in art, from Lucas Cranach’s gnarly paintings of ill-matched couples to Philip Guston’s bollock-headed drawings of Nixon. Like the latter it also offers a dose of levelling anger – other images deface heroic images of colonial acquisitions. By drawing on images he found in a textbook, too, perhaps Kelley is suggesting that the American heroes of the future are today’s snot-nosed kids. The next Lincoln could be the teen daubing poo on the president’s memorial today. The child contains the seed of the adult, and the adult contains the cracked carapace of the child.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view, featuring The Poltergeist 1979. Copyright Tate photography (Lucy Green.)

Few artists have played around with American childhood as much as Kelley. His oeuvre is as disparate as it was prodigious. As befits a founder member of a psychedelic punk band called Destroy All Monsters, Kelley was concerned with subverting as many authorities and structures as he could lay his hands on. But he often returned to the bric-a-brac of late-20th-century youth: cuddly toys, costumed characters, UFOs, superheroes, school buildings, high school tribes. Kelley died by his own hand in 2012, and has become an inspirational figure for many artists since. Several of them – Cauleen Smith, Mark Leckey and Grace Ndiritu – appear as contributors to the catalogue for Kelley’s touring retrospective, Ghost and Spirit, which has now arrived at Tate Modern. It is the first major survey of his work to reach Britain.

Mike Kelley, Ahh...Youth! 1991. Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024.

In some senses, the time has never been riper for a Kelley showcase. Successive waves of 1980s, 90s and early 00s nostalgia have brought his yard-sale Americana back into fashionable consciousness. His interest in the child buried within our subconscious seems almost prescient today. Today, thirtysomethings catch Pokémon, dress up to watch the Barbie movie, have annual Disney film sing-alongs and refer to themselves with infantilising language (“the boys”, “girlies”, “not on a school night”). For some, the popular culture and signifiers of their childhood – and sometimes those of childhoods before their own – have become lasting habits and affectations.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view featuring Sublevel 1998. Copyright Tate photography (Lucy Green).

His cuddly-toy works suggest buried desires and traumas (although Kelley was keen to affirm that any trauma hinted at did not reflect this own childhood). Many are part of his Half a Man project (1987-89), which examines the adolescent as a failed, unreformed version of an adult. A 1990 performance, perhaps mercifully here only as documentation, saw the artists Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose enact BDSM practices on stuffed animals, smearing their rears with faeces-coloured paint in the process. One piece is a conga line of plush sausage dogs positioned as if rutting; another has toy-like impressions visible under a blanket, the bogeymen beneath the bed. The seminal work More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) is a canvas covered in discarded toys, arranged to look like an abstract expressionist action painting or a Gustav Klimt tableau of bodily intimacy.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view featuring Memory Ware Flat #17, 2001. Copyright Tate photography (Lucy Green).

There is something oddly affecting about seeing all these tattered objects with their unchanging smiles, once loved then forgotten, stitched together for ever. But for Kelley there was a further kicker. The child is given gifts with the “unspoken expectation of repayment”, but as they have no ownership, they can only repay in love. But as love has no fixed worth, the rate of exchange is unstable and the child is thus a “partially indentured servant”, unable ever to pay its debt. For all the carnivalesque humour of Kelley’s work, it often has a pessimistic – even nihilistic – slant. Ghost and Spirit ends with a monologue from some foaming piss, which we follow down the drain.

Jim McHugh portrait of Mike Kelley as The Banana Man, c1983, with (in the background) Last Tool in Use, 1977. Enamel 73.7 × 55.3 × 7.6. Photo © Jim McHugh.

Kelley’s concern for youth was bound to an interest in the nature of memory. He created mock newspaper front pages filled with ludicrous stories, a premonition of the fake news and conspiracy theories that rush across social media today. In the absurd (and occasionally obscene) film The Banana Man (1983), he plays a children’s TV character whom he had only heard about from friends, as if replacing a gap in his own memory. His Educational Complex (1995), not on show here, was a huge architectural model that recreated the buildings in which he had studied, with blank blocks to represent areas of “institutional abuse”.

Ghost and Spirit is not for the faint-hearted. From the moment you enter the first chamber you are greeted with a cacophony of sirens, squeaks, howls and dissonance, along with Kelley’s voice reading out a story about a poltergeist. The visual overload is almost as intense. There are times, especially early on, where we run into the difficulties of exhibiting long past performance art; it is hard to know what these were like. There is an abundance of objects, from the mundane to the bizarre, that are shorn from their intended context. The wall text does not always help matters: good luck trying to work out what Monkey Island (1982-83) is trying to do.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view featuring Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series 2004-5. Copyright Tate photography (Lucy Green).

The exhibition’s climax takes the clattering confusion to another level with the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000-11) project. Here, Kelley incarnated photographs from US high school yearbooks, creating video works and installations that purport to export the suppressed memories of teenagers. There is a debate over the ideal man that breaks into a brawl between Kiss fans and a hillbilly, a spinning curtain with the silhouette of a pole dancer, a glowering red devil, white-faced clowns. One film shows a child chased by a withered Virgin Mary; another has two pot plants talking after an alarming country performance by an actor dressed as a dungaree-wearing redneck. Kelley compared it to channel-surfing, but it is more akin to a dozen channels playing at once. This is maybe the closest art has got to replicating 21st-century information overload – and it makes you wonder what Kelley would made of today’s great morass.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view featuring Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series 2004-5. Copyright Tate photography (Lucy Green).