“When I learned of his suicide, it was the same shock as for Kurt Cobain; I remember where I was, what I was doing, it shocked me… » Thus the Bordeaux sculptor Laurent Le Deunff evokes the memory of Mike Kelley. On January 31, 2012, the American visual artist ended his life in his home in South Pasadena, California. He was 57 years old. With him disappeared the idea of an incredibly free art, agitated like rock’n’roll.
In four decades, he had been revolutionary, as demonstrated by the vast retrospective (the first in France, worthy of the name) devoted to him by the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, since October 12. A revolution of the bizarre, of the“uncanny”, to use the title of the exhibition which revealed him, in 1993, in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where he exhibited dolls, mannequins and terrifying robots… Uncanny ? “Bizarre, abnormal, fantastic, supernatural”, translates the dictionary.
Uncanny, therefore, that the life of this man born into a working-class family in Detroit, Michigan, to a father responsible for maintenance and janitor in a school and a mother who was a cook for Ford executives and who spent his adolescence in listening to punk and heavy metal, then moving to the West Coast and becoming an artist. Uncanny as his work which mixed sculptures, photographs, installations, videos, drawings, music, performances and paintings. In short, all possible mediums.
A cacophony
His art was a block of enigmas, a complex whirlwind of patterns and thoughts, riddled with the paradoxes of our world. Zealot of popular forms, at once intellectual, porno, scat, prole, Kelley was an aristo of thought. Master of the installation like big bang, he presented knitwear and buried memories, ugly fountains and poltergeists, kitsch and semantics, stuffed toys and buttons, Plato and the delusions of consumer society.
A cacophony which continues more than ever to mean and detonate, for those who deign to let themselves be caught up in it. “He who thought he was a ghost, his spirit still strikes, particularly younger generations of artists, thanks to his relationship to music, politics, memory,” assures Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the Bourse de Commerce retrospective, entitled “Ghost and Spirit”.
Rarely has a visual artist been so close to rock, in its most aggressive version. With a few friends, he founded a group in Detroit, Destroy All Monsters, at the crossroads of punk and metal. For years they had toured and released albums.
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