via http://www.southwillard.com/news
October 16, 2012
A Long Road Home
It took me a long time to find my way to the brilliance of Mike Kelley and to the brilliance of LA. Being a New Yorker, I, along with an entire city and its “central mass” of the art world, remained sheltered and separated from exposure to the challenging and intelligent work of Mike Kelley and from what would have been an awe inspiring witness to the gradual evolution, development and final growth of the intellect and magnitude of his art, in particular Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites.
While New York was still riding a wave of Neo-Expressionism, Mike Kelley was already in the future, here where we are now, working in Los Angeles, making work that was as relevant then as it is now and will remain, relevant today more than ever, while the trends of the 80′s and 90′s in New York has long faded into memory.
Mike Kelley captures not only the essence of culture, but American culture specifically. He has a grasp on this modern consumerist culture in a way that is perhaps still barely understood by the culture itself. No wonder his work traveled so easily to Europe where the perspective on American habits and trends tends to be much more aware through the benefit of distance, outside of the seduction of context.
Mike Kelley
Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites
Go anywhere else in the world and the concept of a deodorized environment, spraying the home air with an artificial scent, is nothing short of absurd. Through his complex and massive installation, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, Mike Kelley truly creates a quintessential American existential environment, multi-layered in meaning and effect, and reflects on a culture that only exists on this continent. It is a commentary on the prosperity that has created an excess of consumerism, of buying in bulk, of collecting, and collecting in multiples, of the obsession of garish color coordination, all of which is enacted with a sense of entitlement to luxury and life-style, while embracing the cheapest and most transient objects of low to no quality, which in turn ironically make a claim to quality of life.
While the stuffed animals are turned away, the emotional connection to the beckoning eyes, the cute noses and garish smiles, is withheld from the viewer. The false identification with the cartoon representations of fuzzy fictitious personalities is severed for the viewer, and what remains are mere polyester shells, reduced and debased, from an imagined individuality, to a mere expression of color. Even in this, it is a quintessential American theme: the melting pot of the stuffed animals, arbitrarily organized, segregated, and ascribed value based on color, all while balancing around the central mass like the melting core of the earth, with its invisible gravity without which nothing is held together.
The spray-sanitizing, bright angular shapes seem to stand guard as though the sentimentality of the stuffed animals, these avatars of human emotions, need to be perpetually controlled and corralled, and even disinfected. This has a deeply disturbing and powerful effect over the suspended masses of color. Shapes are held in balance and constantly sanitized, renewed, cleaned and somehow severely denied. Angles and hard edges seem to rule over rounded forms and blurring fuzzy borders, all while standing in judgment. The sterilizing perfuming of the air denatures the very environment in which the denatured forms are held in suspension, like the core tragedy of the illusion of an entire culture, summarized brutally in this living, existential environment.
Contemporary Art
