MIKE KELLEY / RECONSTRUCTED HISTORY / 1989

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In Reconstructed History, Kelley imitated how tomorrow’s leaders of society—the next generation—make their mark on the past through the act of defacing textbooks with doodles and notations—signifying their own ‘reconstruction’ while moving towards the future. In keeping with his conceptual practice and predilection towards using non-art objects as material, Kelley explored the found textbook as medium. He mined yard sales for used American History textbooks and graffitied over their pages. Perverse scribbles of lewd comments and gestures enliven the repressed nature of these seemingly heroic and historic images.

Utilizing the vernacular of scholarly tomes and creating interventions on their pages, Kelley challenged traditional attitudes towards history and education and questions the societal and cultural values usually ascribed to these subjects. This series of works prompts us to reconsider the way history books communicate the stories of our predecessors to our successors, investigating the re-appropriation of meaning through the interpretation of the past. Through this lens, once bland textbook titles become ironic (‘A Record of Our Country’, ‘History for Young Citizens’). Kelley wrote, “The past is where these things belong—adored but not emulated.”

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text via skarstedt

PAUL MCCARTHY / PROPO / 1991

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‘Between 1972 – 1983, I did a series of performances which involved masks, bottles, pans, uniforms, dolls, stuffed animals, etc. After the performances these objects were either left behind or they were collected and stored in suitcases and trunks to be used in future performances. In 1983, the closed suitcases and trunks containing these performance objects were stacked on a table and exhibited as sculpture. In 1991, I opened the suitcases and trunks photographing each item. The group of photographs in their entirety was titled PROPO’.
– Paul McCarthy

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McCarthy’s debased and dirtied photographic subjects have a unique history. They began as props in McCarthy’s early performances, and in the early Eighties, they were packed into suitcases and trunks, which were then stacked on a table and re-invented as the sculpture ‘Assortment, The Trunks, Human Object and PROPO Photographs’ (1972 – 2003). The lids of the cases remained unopened until the early Nineties when McCarthy individually photographed each of the props, creating ‘PROPO’, a collection of documentation-style photographs and a record of his dark humour and subversive social critique. Set against vividly coloured backgrounds, these grimy objects line the walls of Hauser & Wirth’s ground floor gallery, presented as proud emblems, despite their sodden and soiled appearance. The ‘PROPO’ photographs highlight McCarthy’s on-going re-visitation of his prolific oeuvre and his distinctive approach to his works: they are in a constant state of transformation.

McCarthy began his live performances in the late Sixties. Seen initially by only a handful of people, these were raucous, riotous parodies of society, relationships, sex and pop culture, which tested the physical and mental boundaries of both the viewer and the artist.

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text and images via hauser & wirth

DOUG AITKEN / SOMA / 1999

DOUG AITKEN / ELECTRIC EARTH / 1999

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In many ways the process of my work is an ongoing experiment to see how I can open myself to a larger field of experience and information. At times I live nomadically, wandering, going from project to project and city to city. I find myself moving through space and responding to experiences in a way that’s very different from the way you do if you stay in one place. A moment that might ordinarily just flash by now makes a deep impression on you. Your sense of time expands or contracts, and you become extremely sensitized to things you might not have noticed before. As I found myself in constant motion, I became increasingly attracted to in-between places, places that were not destinations, places that were somehow in limbo or were outcast and passed by.

Electric Earth is a compendium of these in-between places and neutral spaces. It’s structured around a single individual, whom I imagined as being the last person on earth. He is in a state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, and he is traveling through a seemingly banal urban environment in the moments before nightfall. As he moves, the world around him–a satellite dish, a trash bag spinning in the air, a blinking streetlight, a car window–begins to accelerate.

I wanted to see if I could break open the linear trajectory of his journey, which I imagine as a kind of walkabout, and unlock a different perception of the environment he moves through. Taking a walk can be an uncanny experience. Propelled by our legs we find rhythms and tempos. Our bodies move in cycles that are repetitious and machinelike. We lose track of thoughts. Time can slip away from us; it can stretch out or become condensed. Sometimes, the speed of our environment is out of sync with our perception of it. When this happens, it creates a kind of gray zone, a state of flux that fascinates me. The protagonist in Electric Earth is in this state of constant flux and perpetual transformation. The paradox is that it also creates a perpetual present that consumes him.

Electric Earth appears to be situated in a single time and place, but it’s actually a constructed, hybrid landscape composed of material gathered over time. In making it, I specifically experimented with treating each element, no matter how small, as if it were as important as every other element, and I tried to give every detail equal weight in the overall narrative. I wanted to see if I could create an organic structure–like a strand of DNA, where every bit of information, every chromosome, is critical–through accumulations of small events and actions. My goal was to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Time is also a critical subject of this work. I broke up Electric Earth into a sequence of spaces because I’m not interested in constructing something linear. Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving images on a strip of emulsion or tape. They create a story out of everything because it’s inherent to the medium and to the structure of montage. But, of course, we experience time in a much more complex way. The question for me is, How can I break through this idea, which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand, so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?

Electric Earth is composed in a way that I hope doesn’t predetermine its meaning. It’s important to me to preserve the enigma of actions and events. I am not interested in illustrating or making a statement about a specific place. The landscape doesn’t refer to a city like Los Angeles or New York. Rather, it’s an amalgam of different places that have one thing in common: They’re all in a state of continuous motion. The landscape in Electric Earth is stark and automated, but the electricity driving the machines is ultimately more important than the devices it drives. It’s what the protagonist responds to, and what puts him in motion in turn.

The deluge of information we’re confronted with today is inescapable, and I hope this work is seen as a document of its ever-increasing pace. You can’t rely any longer on the kind of perceptions that come built into a specific medium or genre. It’s not really possible to limit yourself to a single language anymore–like, say, the language of abstract painting, or Hollywood, or music, or performance. These have all become rigid systems on the one hand, and totally porous on the other. With each piece I try to work with the language of images and the tools that are available to me, and strive to carve some kind of personal perception out of this endless flow of information we call experience. We all strive for that, I think. Otherwise, like the protagonist in Electric Earth, we can easily become lost, and vanish.

“A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me.” So says the lone protagonist of Electric Earth, 1999, Doug Aitken’s hyperkinetic fable of modern life in the form of a sprawling eight-screen installation that took home the International Prize at last summer’s Venice Biennale. An uncanny cross-pollination of genre conventions sampled freely from music video, documentary, and narrative film alike, the work forged a weirdly precise portrait of urban angst, wedding installation to the vernacular vocabularies of cinema and dance. In Electric Earth as in Aitken’s previous works, the landscape–here an anonymous expanse of urban wasteland–isn’t a passive backdrop for human action, but rather its driving force. The blinking traffic lights, panning video cameras, and automatic car windows create an environment of jerky, accelerating rhythms that Aitken’s young black protagonist begins to mimic, as if involuntarily. Projected on enormous screens in three adjoining rooms, Electric Earth is itself an immersive landscape of motion and fractured information, which viewers are meant to experience as much as to watch.

text source: ubuweb

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http://www.dougaitkenworkshop.com/

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/doug-aitken/

http://www.ubu.com/film/aitken.html

MIKE KELLEY / PAY FOR YOUR PLEASURE / 1988

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The prismatic rainbow of color in Mike Kelley’s corridor of criminality, “Pay for Your Pleasure,” provides a tasty coating of sugar for the bitter pill its several dozen culture-heroes demand that viewers swallow. Lining the installation’s narrow hallway are looming portrait heads of celebrated male artists, poets, patrons and philosophers, all rendered in colorfully graphic style, like so many T-shirt advertisements in the back of the New York Review of Books.

Painted from photographs by a commercial artist, each is paired with a disconcerting quotation by its culturally revered subject, a quotation pointed in its insistence on the outlaw dimension of creativity. A sampling:

* “I think the destructive element is too much neglected in art.” –Piet Mondrian

* “I love the unfrocked priest, the freed convict; they are without past and without future and so live in the present.” –Francis Picabia

* “Men like Benvenuto Cellini (artists) ought not be bound by laws.” –Pope Paul III

By the time you reach the end of the hallway, the dissonance between all those happy-land colors and such dour declarations becomes a full-fledged moral conundrum. For there, taking the place of a heroic summation about creative criminality, you find exactly the reverse: Kelley has installed a work of art made in prison by a convicted murderer, a candid example of criminal creativity.

At the 1988 debut of “Pay for Your Pleasure” in Chicago, a painting by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy was shown in the hall. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which owns the installation, a drawing by “Freeway Killer” William Bonin has been displayed. And, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here, in the compact, 12-year survey of the L.A.-based artist’s work that has been traveling in Europe since April, the corridor leads to a blocky portrait-bust, created in cement in 1977 by Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle. The piece gets made wryly site-specific, as the murderer’s art changes with each location in which “Pay for Your Pleasure” is shown.

Kelley’s provocative installation gaily throws a monkey wrench into all sorts of entrenched assumptions about art. One is the romantic faith in art’s value as a universal gauge of personal authenticity and worth. Another is the blandly sentimental assumption that art’s highest purpose is to be redemptive.

The gooey notion that art should somehow be good for you–Vitamin C for the soul–is very American, and it’s a sentiment Kelley skewers with Catholic wit.

Because the one original work of art in the installation turns out to have been created by an evil villain, he’s placed contribution boxes at the entrance to the corridor, into which visitors are invited to deposit cash for charitable organizations assisting victims of violent crimes. You’re bluntly reminded to pay for your voyeuristic pleasure, as you sidle up to peruse the killer’s aesthetic product. Like old-fashioned religious indulgences, the contribution boxes let you relieve your gnawing cultural guilt.

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image source: n e o g e j o

text source: la times

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http://mikekelley.com/

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/mike-kelley/#_

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324678604578340322829104276

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/02/mike-kelley

http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/2014/05/11/mike-kelleys-killer-clown/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pay-Your-Pleasures-McCarthy-Pettibon/dp/022602606X