Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (Bourse de Commerce)
Catherine Wood, Fiontan Moran, Jean-Marie Gallais, Marie de Brugerolle, Hendrik Folkerts, Jack Halberstam, Laura López Paniagua, Cauleen Smith, John C. Welchman
Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection & Éditions Dilecta, 2023
€39,00
This retrospective dedicated to the American artist offers a new look at his work, through his most important pieces. From his years of study in Los Angeles, Mike Kelley (1954-2012) took up the genre of performance, drawing inspiration from militant feminist practices to put forward an innovative approach to creation, destabilizing the canons. He participated in several music groups throughout his life, including the proto-punk formation Destroy All Monsters from 1974, and regularly worked in collaboration with other artists. His most famous works are hand-made sculptures with a grating humor, then installations made from plush toys highlighting the gendered and commercial conditioning of the youngest. Traumatic memory and the dysfunctions of education are ideas developed throughout his career which culminate in the exhibition “Day Is Done” (2005), partially reconstituted at the Bourse de Commerce.
“Ghost and Spirit” presents a sequence of different bodies of work or immersive environments by the artist, among which are presented the spectacular Kandors, cities of the future under glass bells. Also emerging throughout the tour are the “minor stories” – as he called them – of his own practice: drawings, photographs and preparatory writings enlightening the visitor on his thinking.
Mike Kelley’s work has always been nourished by subcultural references and a tension between the depth of critical thinking that he developed and the apparent superficiality of a pop aesthetic sometimes playing on seduction, or a trashy aesthetic. He also continued to highlight the role of the artist and the way in which he appears or disappears.
Mike Kelley was a great explorer of notions that are still relevant today in the heat of contemporary debates: collective and individual memory, gender relations, social classes… The artist from Detroit (Michigan) is particularly interested in how individual subjectivity is shaped by familial and institutional power structures within postmodern capitalist American society.
In a note for a performance never performed in the early 1980s, Mike Kelley wondered about the difference between a ghost and a spirit: the first ends up disappearing when the second persists. He thought he was a ghost, and yet his spirit still lingers, particularly on younger generations of artists. It is this “persistent influence” (“A spirit has a lingering inluence”, he writes) of the spirit of Mike Kelley which runs through the exhibition. IN FRENCH!
ISBN: 9782373721843
