The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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The Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s world-renowned museum for  modern and contemporary art, is hosting two exhibitions while in the process of a major renovation to the building, which is scheduled to be complete in the later part of 2011.

The Temporary Stedelijk, a short-term program of exhibitions of international artists from August 28, 2010 through January 9, 2011. Stedelijk director Ann Goldstein did not want  to waste the singular opportunity of utilizing the unfinished historic building in the period prior to the reopening.

Taking Place is a group exhibition of international artists who address the museum’s history, the spatial and temporal conditions of the unfinished building and how artists use, occupy and animate museum spaces.  Commissioned site-specific works, pieces from the collection, historical reconstructions, video projections, audio work, architectural interventions, performances and graphic design will address the distinctive conditions of the building at this moment in time.

Monumentalism—History and National Identity in Contemporary Art Proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2010 will occupy half of the ground floor galleries and feature the works of artists living and working in the Netherlands.  The Municipal Art Acquisitions jury selected 20 artists whose work addresses the subject of national identity and history beyond nostalgia for a mythical past.  The works selected offer various insights and perspectives on cultural artifacts, language, politics, labor and capitalism through the artists’ individual explorations in a variety of media.  Participating artists include Americans Zachary Formwalt and Melissa Gordon; Swiss artist Marianne Flotron; Job Koelewijn from Germany and many native Dutch artists: Iris Kensmill, Lonnie van Brummelen, Kieke Van de Vroot, Rachel Koolen and others.

In addition to these two temporary exhibitions, American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner has been commissioned by the Friends of the Stedelijk Museum to create a work that will be on display during the renovation of the museum and will remain after its completion.  Weiner‘s text-based work consists of language plus the materials referred to, wherein language is also considered a sculptural material.   The piece joins some 70 other works by Weiner in the Museum’s collection.

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