“Popular culture’s… invisible, people are oblivious to it but that's the culture I live in and that's the culture people speak,” said Mike Kelley, quoted at the end of this, the first major show of his work in Britain in more than 30 years. “All you can really do now is work with the dominant culture, flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it!”
I felt flayed myself by the end of this show, which a lot of artists are very excited about (Kelley, an American who died aged 57 in 2012, is incredibly influential but little-known outside of art circles, at least in the UK) but which left me reeling and unsatisfied.
Brought up in post-war, working-class Detroit, Kelley was always an outlier. One of the earliest artists to embrace multiple media, from performance to video, sculpture to drawing, sewing and stuffed toys, inspired by the feminist art movements of the Seventies. He was an artist of his own time but also, in many ways, for ours, challenging gender stereotypes, engaging with craft, messing up the masculine austerity of the gallery environment with the grubby, the soft, the puerile, the childlike and – horror – the popular.
Underlying it all are many interesting ideas. The shifting relationship between memory, imagery and truth, for example – and between memory and repressed desire. The stories and mythologies we create around ourselves and how they’re influenced by social power structures such as the family or education. Or – through playing absurd roles like the Banana Man, a TV character he’d heard described but never actually seen – his conception of adolescence as a sort of liminal space between childhood and adulthood.
His exploration of how to be a person in an image-saturated age has only become more relevant. Even by the early Eighties he could see that anyone who didn’t live under a rock was completely contaminated by media culture (his belief that no-one can truly exist in the present tense when video – a mechanical memory – exists is chilling when you really think down into it). How do we exist consistently and authentically, whatever that means, in a world powered by unreliable narratives? It’s uncomfortably current.
And I actually really enjoy his DIY-pop aesthetic, and its impulse as a pushback against the gendered inclinations of the 20th century art world and the clean-cut instinct of modernism, which centres the white man while simultaneously denying our inherent animalistic nature.
I like his cartoonish, naughty monochrome drawings – a reaction to being taught about colour and Abstract Expressionism in art school – and his subversive banners that read things like “F*** YOU now give me a treat please”.
But the show itself feels like an assault. The wall texts, clutching at meaning or context and never quite giving enough of either, seem completely defeated by the sheer multiplicity of ideas.
I felt bewildered throughout; it’s not always clear where one body of work ends and the next begins, and good lord, the noise. The relentless blast of dinks and shrieks and yells and clangs and music from various video and audio works is harrowingly inescapable from start to finish.
I wanted to run. It might indeed effectively disrupt the hallowed gallery experience but I doubt it’s going to turn many new people onto the work of the artist it seeks to celebrate.
Tate Modern, from October 3 to March 9; tate.org.uk
