FOULPERFECTION The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England MIKE KELLEY FOULPERFECTION essays and criticism EDITED BY JOHN C. WELCHMAN © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Frutiger by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelley, Mike, 1954– Foul perfection : essays and criticism / Mike Kelley ; edited by John C. Welchman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-11270-1 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-61178-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kelley, Mike, 1954– —Written works. 2. Kelley, Mike, 1954– —Aesthetics. 3. Art criticism. I. Welchman, John C. II. Title. N6537.K423 A35 2003 700′.92—dc21 2002029391 Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph (1979). Black and white photograph altered with bleach. 30 ϫ 23 ins. Collection of the artist. Preface viii Introduction by John C. Welchman ix SECTION I Urban Gothic (1985) 2 Empathy, Alienation, the Ivar (1985) 14 Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature (1989) 20 Hollywood Filmic Language, Stuttered: 40 Caltiki the Immortal Monster and Rose Hobart (1992) Filmic Regression: The Baby and Baby Huey (1992) 50 From the Sublime to the Uncanny: 58 Mike Kelley in Conversation with Thomas McEvilley (1993) Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993) 70 Cross-Gender/Cross-Genre (1999) 100 CONTENTS SECTION II Mekanïk Destruktï^ Kommandöh: Survival Research 122 Laboratories and Popular Spectacle (1989) Death and Transfiguration [on Paul Thek] (1992) 138 Dyspeptic Universe: Cody Hyun Choi’s Pepto-Bismol Paintings (1992) 150 Marcel Broodthaers (1992) 154 Myth Science [on Öyvind Fahlström] (1995) 158 Shall We Kill Daddy? [on Douglas Huebler] (1997) 178 David Askevold: The California Years (1998) 194 Go West [on the art of John Miller] (1999) 206 Artist/Critic? [on the writings of John Miller] (2002) 220 Index 227 PREFACE This series of books comes as a surprise to me. I was shocked to discover just how much paper I have covered with ink. In my youth I aspired to become a novelist, until I realized I was no good at writing fiction and wisely, I believe, chose to pursue my interests in the visual arts instead. I came to writing through the back door, so to speak—first by writing short statements about my artworks, which developed into “performance art” monologues and, finally, into essays. The es- says were not labors of love, rather they were a response to my dissatisfaction with the way my work was being written about critically. I decided I had to write about my own work if my concerns were to be properly con- veyed. Also, I was not pleased with how contemporary art history was being constructed, so I felt it was my duty to raise my voice in protest and write my own version—whenever I could. In a sense, then, much of my writing was reactive. It never truly seemed that the decision to write was my own. If it weren’t for the urging of my friend John Welchman, this book would not exist. Special thanks to Patrick Painter for his generous support for the provision of illustra- tions. Sadly, though, many of the images that originally accompanied these essays couldn’t be presented here. John and I would also like to thank the following for their assistance in preparing this volume, or for kindly agreeing to allow images of their artworks to be reproduced here: David Askevold, Cody Choi, Darcy Huebler, John Miller, Sharon Avery-Fahlström, Plaster Foundation, Sebastian, Sixth Street Studios, Survival Research Laboratories, Eleanor Antin, John Waters; Emi Fontana, Glenn Bray, Nancy Youdelman, Mimmo Rotella, Catherine Sullivan, Rita Gonzalez, Julia Dagostino, Farhad Sharmini, Tim Martin, Metro Pictures, Alexander and Bonin, Regen Projects, viii the Paul Thek Foundation. Thanks also to the journals, publishers, or institutions that commis- sioned and/or published first or subsequent versions of these writings: Artforum, Grand Street, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, More & Less, Spectacle, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, C31; Sonsbeek, Arnhem; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Castello di Rivara, Turin; Deitch Projects, New York; Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, and Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; JRP Editions, Geneva; and Les presses du réel, Dijon. Mike Kelley, Los Angeles, 2001 INTRODUCTION This is the first of three projected volumes assembling for the first time a diverse selection of Mike Kelley’s writings in the numerous genres, idioms, and styles he has taken on (or invented) during the last quarter of a century. Kelley’s generic range is quite remarkable: it includes “creative” and critical essays for art and alternative journals, essays for exhibition catalogues, artist “statements,” scripts for sound sculptures, libretti, dialogues (real and imagined), performance scripts, mani- festos, numerous interviews (as both interviewer and interviewee), polemics, panel presentations, screening introductions, radio broadcasts, public lectures, CD liner notes, invented case histories, and poster texts. The variety of subjects and issues about which he has written, noted, and talked is equally broad, ranging from commentaries on and additions to his own work and that of teachers, friends, colleagues, and heroes, to meditations on contemporary music, science fiction, and popular culture. He has produced important reflections on the nature of caricature and contemporary dialogues with it; on ideas and effects of the uncanny; and on UFOs, gender-bending, pop psychology, adolescence, repressed memory syndrome, and architecture. Among other issues, his interviews discuss the De- troit underground in the late 1960s, conceptual art, feminism, sexuality, rock music, formalism, the relation between New York and Los Angeles, politics, and the pathetic. And writing itself. I have organized this profusion of vehicles and themes in a manner that I hope is both useful and accessible, but that also acknowledges some of the play, irony, and overlap that abound in Kelley’s work, whether written, performed, videoed, drawn, or installed. The present volume surveys two of the leading aspects of Kelley’s writing, collecting his major critical texts on art, cinema, and the wider culture; and his essays, mostly commissioned for ix exhibition catalogues, on the artists (or art groups) David Askevold, Öyvind Fahlström, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek. Volume II will concentrate on pieces that were integral to Kelley’s own art practices from the mid-1970s to 2002, including his most influential statements and “manifestos”; texts from photo- editions and posters; a sequence of humorous pseudo-psychological interpretations and quasi- fictions; introductions to videos; and writings on architecture and Ufology. A projected third volume will collect, edit, and annotate a selection of scripts for the celebrated series of performances Kelley wrote, directed, and performed or co-performed in the concentrated burst of activity between 1976 and the mid-1980s that established his reputation as one of the most innovative contemporary artists working on the West Coast. Even three volumes will accommodate only part of Kelley’s writings. There is no space for his signature essays, liner notes, and panel discussions of contemporary music, or the large and ex- citing body of interviews, recorded conversations, and broadcasts. While not really known as a writer by many in the art world (in large part because of the multiple geographic and media loca- tions of this work), considering volume alone Kelley takes his place alongside the theory-oriented abstractionists of the historical avant-garde (Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich) as one of the most productive artist-writers of the twentieth century—ironic company, perhaps, for an artist engaged in projects in the conceptual vernacular who is “staunchly against the whole idea of nonrepresentational art.”1 This volume begins with “Urban Gothic” (1985), written just a couple of years before Kelley virtually abandoned live performance. With its distinct aural qualities (“spoken word rather than written text”)2 and persona-driven incantations, the piece bears explicit traces of the styles and methodologies Kelley used to develop his performative work, reminding us that from the start his writing took on experimental folds and complexities that matched the material and thematic over- lays of the performances, drawings, and installations. But while the style and form of Kelley’s criti- cal writing modulated after 1985 into a combination of first-person critical opinion, contextual observation, and historical and thematic revisionism, what he once termed the “library work”3 that underwrites almost all of his projects in different media remains a constant resource—“It’s just like doing a research paper,” he once remarked.4 Indeed, Kelley’s commitment to research, compilation, x and citation—what we can term his archival impulse—and its reassemblage, dismantling, or explo- sion comes as close as anything to a center for his intergeneric activities; and the notion of “poetic” concentration, or condensation, emerges as the key figure of this continuity in “idea generation.”5 So while it was never abrupt, the shift from speaking, singing, chanting, or ranting—first improvised, then based on a performance script—to writing texts for publication demanded new forms of attention and reference, as well as a turn in Kelley’s orientation to research. Owing partly to teaching duties in the graduate Fine Arts program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena,6 he was conscious, in particular, of a move in the mid- and later 1980s from what had been a ha- bitual involvement with historical and avant-garde literature to reading in art history and criticism and cultural theory.