WIn a Superman comic book today he wants to once again portray the often-told, sad backstory of the famous hero (orphan! refugee!) in such a way that it moves the audience to tears, but he must not cry himself, otherwise the touching message will become blurred. The artist Mike Kelley, who was born in the suburbs of Detroit in 1954 and who had a very complicated relationship with the character Superman, has often worked on material that harbors similar dangers, namely at least one that makes you cry, if not despair.
He took into account lay psychological assumptions about his motives when they were brought to him from outside, i.e. from the audience or critics – and worked through them aesthetically for the next phase of his work. In Düsseldorf you can now experience a cross-section of the results of this working method in the basement of the K21 building of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection.
Saved from the dump
Kelley's most famous faces include stuffed animals. He saved them from the garbage dump, where they would otherwise have gone moldy: bunnies, bees, delicate, indefinable creatures, slightly dirty, colorful, with a loving look and the shy smile of frugal low-income earners. Many of these dolls were made by long-forgotten parents who couldn't afford branded plush friends for their children. A famous photo series of images of the finds, supplemented by Kelley's own head, is called “Ahh . . . Youth!”. It was included in the 1992 album “Dirty” by the rock band Sonic Youth, whose minds at the time invented a self-questioning music of youth and counterculture, stimulating especially for younger people (the people in the band were on average children of the mid-fifties) during the nineties had to cope with a narrowing of the prospects for social mobility that still existed in their parents' generation.
Detail from Mike Kelley's photo series “Ahh. . .Youth!”
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Image: Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Mike Kelley was also a band, so to speak, whose basic positions were not guitar, bass, drums and vocals, but rather intoxication, sadness, humor and horror. The Düsseldorf selection strings together strong hits from this source like Kelley once did with his stuffed dachshunds, which here again stand around, nose to bottom, slightly out of place in their crocheted blanket ambience. They are probably constantly listening with big ears to the rotten voices that blare from a floating silver foil ball elsewhere in the show about colorful experiences of being abducted by aliens.
If you want to get to know Kelley, you have to be prepared to allow all sorts of spooks, such as the cotton smoke ghost plasma in a well-known Kelley picture motif boring into the artist's nose and ear openings, physically more annoying than the wallpaper pattern esotericism of early modernism . Judgments like “childish” or “adolescent” are often and eagerly scratched at Kelley’s world of ritual ass examinations and porn mishap performances. His response to this kind of challenge is probably the striking visual imposition as such, as on the textile alcohol flags that decorate a passage in Düsseldorf – a royal penis with an eye in the glans, a waxen melted suffering face that clearly knows more drugs than the pharmacy, a shamrock named 13 that celebrates superstition as such, and finally a devil named Mike Kelley with heavy metal typography dots over each “e” in the name. The flag work also smells like heavy metal overall and is therefore called something similar, namely “Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof”.
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