Metaphorically, Mike Kelley was a big noise, an artist showcased at every biennale, written about in every art mag, yapped about at every curatorial gathering. Unfortunately, he was also a big noise physically, and Tate Modern’s retrospective tribute to him is so relentlessly and unpleasantly loud, with grunts, bangs, sighs, slurps, giggles, throbs and screams, that I scarpered out at its finale with the alacrity recommended by Meat Loaf in Bat Out of Hell.
Born in Detroit in 1954, Kelley spent his teenage years soaking up the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, exploring “alternative realities” and inhaling clouds of the wacky baccy that swirled across the era. As a student at the California Institute of the Arts — the notorious CalArts, a den of conceptual adventure — he was encouraged to think first and make stuff later, and embarked on the unsettling psycho-artistic journey traced by this jumpy look back.
The show’s first room is its most telling. It unveils a twitchy all-American mind that has gained its education by going to horror films, flicking through 1960s comics, dipping into popular psychology books, and inhaling. Lots of inhaling.
The Poltergeist is a tribute in words and pictures to “energy made visible” and spirits that go clunk in the night. Monkey Island is a sprawl of words, lines and caricatures that giggles at monkeys with red arses and shows them dumping brazenly in the street. As you squirm from scatological cartoon to scatological cartoon, the suspicion grows that what we are really looking at is us, not them.
In his poltergeist texts (written in some of the messiest and least elegant handwriting in art), Kelley pays tribute to the “spirit of adolescence”: the way the adolescent mind remains unformed and liminal, suspended between the states of childhood and adulthood. It is, you feel, a description of his own preferred condition, and the show ahead is set in a rich array of no man’s lands suspended not just between childhood and maturity but between dream states and waking, the body and the spirit, the real and the unreal, the serious and the comic.
Among the more entertaining of these ambivalent stretches is a section devoted to a character called the Banana Man. Originally a favourite of children’s TV, the Banana Man wears a yellow suit filled with many pockets into which kids are encouraged to dip their hands and search for goodies — which they never find.
Kelley had the yellow suit refashioned for him and wears it in a wonky film in which the story wobbles towards a climax. He smiles, he pirouettes, he gets groped. Is this a tale about the illusion of choice and the unfulfilling nature of too many options? Or is it a tribute to a spooky kiddy character who belongs in a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street? As always with Kelley, you can toss a coin for the answer; nothing at this event is crystal clear.
Except, perhaps, that we are in the presence of a deeply unhappy and troubled spirit. There’s something genuinely sad about the lack of joy that Kelley derives from any of his many madcap adventures. In the 1980s he began collecting children’s toys purchased in thrift shops, ripping them out of their innocent contexts and involving them in dark adult games of stare and scare. It could be a pop at the American innocence industry: a critique of American infantilism. But it could also be a fetishistic interest in the comforts of childhood.
Working with every medium available in the sweet shop of contemporary art — drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, ready-mades, performance, photography, video — Kelley skips like an angry jumping bean from topic to topic, focus to focus. What never shifts is the bleak mood of all this frantic skipping about — the sense that it betrays an unhappy soul.
In a particularly creepy stretch he returns to the establishments in which he was educated — the art school, the university — and remakes the buildings as eerie metal mobiles hanging in the air, or horrible chipboard recreations with Fred West basements. If I had been his dad I would have stopped him watching all the horror films that seem to have soaked into his being, and sent him to summer camp for some healthy trekking. Instead, his dad really was a school janitor who looked after exactly the kinds of dark basements little Mike went on to imagine.
In an unexpected detour he gets interested in the story of Superman and especially in the fate of Kandor, a city on Superman’s home planet, Krypton, which the baddie Brainiac reduced to a size so small it could be stored under a bell jar. An assortment of glowing models of Kandor in a bell jar tiptoe on to sci-fi territory and investigate, not very convincingly, issues of displacement and loneliness. In a ludicrous moment Kelley recites passages from Sylvia Plath’s depressing masterpiece The Bell Jar while dressed as Superman. It’s a particularly uncomfortable moment at a generally discomforting event.
Kelleydied in 2012 aged 57 in an apparent suicide. I mean him no ill when I write that it did not come as a surprise. His art was many things, but happy or balanced were never among them.
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is at Tate Modern, London SE1, to Mar 9