Canadian Art International: Mike Kelley
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria
Twentieth-century modernist representation largely denied the plausibility of the human figure, until its re-emergence in Pop art in the 1960s. Mike Kelley's latest revision of his 1993 curatorial project "The Uncanny" illustrates this repression. Slighted by abstraction and modernism's generally exclusive aesthetics, the figure and its history in modern art exemplify, for Kelley, Freud's notion that culture itself is a by-product of repression and sublimated desire. The relegation of the human figure to folk art and the human sciences invites reconsiderations of our recent past. Cue, for instance, the prominent appearance of poly-resin, hyperrealist figurative sculpture in the 1990s.
Instead of the calm categorizations of a scientist or art historian, Kelley's project radiates uneasiness. His assemblage of stuffed beasts, medical models, fetishes, modern and prehistoric golems, wax corpses, death masks, photos of ventriloquists with their dummies, the infamous Andy Warhol robot, YBA sculpture and his own personal collection is morphological in its methodology. It would appear contradictory to collect and sort something as subjective and evasive of scientific classification as the uncanny. However, Kelley's seizure of Freud's idea models the museological tendency to categorize and preserve objects for display, arguably suggesting that it is yet another repressive regime imposing limits and meaning.
For Kelley, an entire new generation is potentially unable to experience the uncanny. To put it in terms that parallel the philosopher Fredric Jameson's, the experience of the uncanny is waning in contemporary living as mass culture, in the form of mass hysteria, becomes no more than an experience of a series of, as Jameson put it, "intensities."
In the show, Ron Mueck's sculpture Ghost, a sporty polychrome girl-giant, exemplifies the uncanny. As she leans against the wall, fists formed behind her buttocks, the adolescent's speckled skin and side-glancing, reddened eyes upset the viewer's usual confidence that sculpture is inanimate. The work betrays a barely dormant sexual aggression sublimated into a quiet hostility that appears to be ready to unleash at any moment. In another room, H. R. Giger's alien robot is an idealized Sacher-Masoch woman with a ferocious beauty and castrated genital region. As in Kelley's own oeuvre, elements of kitsch and mass culture reveal these diverse manifestations to be projections of mass desire.
Kelley's project is more wunderkammer than typical museal experience. His arrangements parallel the obsessive-compulsive behaviour found within both individuals and Western culture. Through repetition, such behaviour strives to conceal that which disturbs the psyche, but Kelley inverts the process here to reveal. One should enjoy how a John De Andrea nude female figure seems to watch Duane Hanson's struggling football players—both overseen by the Virgin Mary. Winter 2004
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
