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How Mike Kelley Became Himself: The artist’s search for subcultural America

2024; Wiley; Volume: 112; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2024.a936053

1467-9736

Jonathan Griffin,

Art Education and Development

How Mike Kelley Became HimselfThe artist's search for subcultural America Jonathan Griffin (bio) I first saw an artwork by Mike Kelley before I was able to recognize it as such. On the wall of a dorm room at the rural English boarding school I attended, someone had pinned a poster for Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty: a photograph of a stuffed toy crocheted from orange yarn, an alien with antennae and a bashful smile. The image is one of a suite of eight photographs by the revered artist titled Ahh… Youth! (1991). Back then I felt it to be a vision of abjection. It may have been a kid's toy, but to my thirteen-year-old [End Page 129] self it stood for something tawdry and defiled, an icon of lost childhood. That year at boarding school, I was miserable. Exiled from the cozy security of my family home and from a preparatory school at which I had felt like a little king, I now contended with the physical dangers of older boys, as well as culture—notably grunge and other alternative music—that I experienced as aggressive and threatening. In 1992, grunge was several years ahead of where I was at in my socio-cultural development. Its heart was in rainy Seattle, and closely associated with Sub Pop, a then-independent record label. Grunge came out of boredom and angst, a youthful disdain for the promises of Ronald Reagan's America and for the hypocrisy of conservative Christian cultural values. Following in the wake of punk, it stood in opposition to the arena bands that had come to dominate pop music in the 1980s, but this complicated its relationship to the corporatized world of MTV, which gave airplay to its artists. I had no beef with corporate America and few fears about the future. For me, it couldn't arrive soon enough. What I was yet to understand when I first encountered Dirty was that, for some, the album was evidence that Sonic Youth had committed punk's cardinal sin: selling out. In 1990, the band—who were based in New York City, not Seattle—had signed to DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen Records, capitulating their "indie" credentials by joining a major label. Dirty was their ninth and most accessible album to date, aligned more with the fashionable grunge sound than their previous recordings, which seemed rooted in the uncompromising experimental downtown scene of New York. To some, a Sonic Youth album on Geffen was the death knell for the counterculture. There are those who would argue that Kelley's visual art career crested in the heyday of grunge. He shared in its antagonism, its independently produced, low-grade aesthetic and its antiheroic self-image. He was—at least when he started out—an artist of the underground, who preferred to exhibit and perform his work [End Page 130] Click for larger view View full resolution Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph 7, 1978/2009. [End Page 131] away from the bright lights of the mainstream, for his friends and supporters, who were always his best critics. But Kelley's talent and ambition, it would transpire, made that position untenable. Despite the increasingly expensive and complicated multimedia gallery installations that he produced later in his career, his most widely reproduced artwork is probably still that Dirty photo of the crocheted orange alien that he had purchased in a thrift store. Kelley first met Kim Gordon—bass player, singer, and co-founder of Sonic Youth—in the late 1970s, while they were both art students in Los Angeles. When Gordon moved to New York in 1980, he went with her, but he soon returned to Los Angeles, a quieter, more dispersed, and more anonymous suburban city that may have reminded him of his hometown of Detroit. The artist grew up in the suburb of Westland, seven miles outside of Detroit proper. Google "Westland Michigan," and the search engine offers an image of unprepossessing grassy backyards separated by chain-link fencing. As Charlie LeDuff remarks in his 2013 memoir, Detroit: An American Autopsy, Westland may well be "the only city in the world that renamed itself after its shopping...