A Fan’s Notes – Diedrich Diederichsen
on Mike Kelley’s Writings
Mike Kelley, Foul
Perfection: Essays and Criticism.
JUDD AND JORN, NEWMAN AND
GRAHAM, Asher and Smithson—when the writings of a visual artist are published,
the question that immediately arises is how the texts relate to the larger
oeuvre. Explanation, expansion, justification—do they constitute an entirely
separate project, as with Judd? Or should they be seen as an extension of the
work, as was the case with Smithson and, even more so, with younger artists
close to Mike Kelley like Frances Stark, Jutta Koether, and John Miller. The
first volume of Kelley’s writings, Foul
Perfection—essays and criticism (poetic works, texts as parts of art-
works, lectures, and more will appear in two forthcoming volumes)—seems
initially to have been assembled not by
the author but by the editor, John Welchman, who comments on and annotates some
of the texts as if this were an exhibition catalogue rather than a collection
of writings. Should we consider Kelley’s texts first and foremost as artworks?
Not really. Mike Kelley’s artistic praxis has always been marked by the fact
that it is neither limited to specific genres, media, or materials nor
arbitrary in its focus. Instead his work is situated within a ramified or
networklike thematic field, one that is structured and clearly determinable.
And when certain themes require additional information or discursive precisian,
he simply extends the visual work into the field of the essay. I believe this
to be the rationale behind most of what is included here. Some contributions to
this volume, such as those about artists David Askevold and Öyvind Fahlström,
the feminine in rock culture, or the cartoon Baby Huey, are already convincing on the most basic level—they provide
information otherwise unavailable. As a member of the Arbeitsgruppe Berlin, I
at some point asked Kelley to contribute to our collective project “Cross
Gender/cross Genre” in
Since the texts do not
follow a particular formal program but function in the service of various
projects, they lack stylistic unity. At certain points Kelley addresses us as
if we were an auditorium full of students; then he suddenly directs his words
at the art establishment from the position of an antagonistic speaker—a fan, a
poet—while in the next breath he speaks from within that establishment, though
not without placing demands on it. Very often there is an autobiographical
moment: All the themes, artists, and movements he deals with crossed his path
at a decisive moment and influenced him. Kelley’s insertion of himself into the
text is a personal yet humble act in which, rather than draw attention to the
influence that, say, Broodthaers, Bataille, Sun Ra, Douglas Huebler, and Paul
Thek had on him, Kelley names them as witnesses to a common historical project;
this is the actual object of these writings. We know from the cultural grammar
of fans’ testimonials—and Kelley declares on several occasions his position as
that of a fan (of Huebler, for example)—that the accumulation of mere names and
themes into a larger whole can take the shape of a manifesto. We have seen it
as well in the self-positioning of several younger artists who not only deploy
names and references to identify and present themselves but also hold such
elucidation to be sufficient. Kelley serves as an example of these procedures,
with the decisive difference that he provides arguments for why particular
figures inhabit his pantheon.
Kelley also articulates the
larger relations among these various decisions, sometimes by implication, at
other times openly and pragmatically, as in his attacks on what he calls the “critical
establishment,” in particular the Journal October
and Rosalind Krauss. “Official art culture is much more effective in its
control of history than Republican strategists, for it knows that the best way
to treat contradictory material is not to rail against it, but simply to
pretend it didn’t happen,” he writes in “Death and Transfiguration,” his 1992
Thek essay.
In the final paragraph of a
similarly appreciative essay on Fahlström, the enthusiast’s connection between
the names—Kelley relates the artist to Sun Ra, who produces an effect rather
than an argument—is just one of many poetic forms identifying these overarching
relations. More or less hidden, the links point toward a type
of cultural struggle engaged in by Kelley, which gives many of his works (not
only his texts) their succinctness as well as their edge. Different
instantiations of the rejected-the psychologically abject, the culturally low,
the sexually unacceptable, the artistically gone-wrong, exaggerated, Cheap, as
well as the clumsy American I cat (as opposed to the cosmopolitan European-New
Yorker universal)—form not just a source of cultural truth ex negativo the
truth of the other, dark side, but an artistic-political program, as Kelley
fuses this material with the countercultural aspirations of the ’60s and ’70s.
This programmatic operation is the great alternative to the tidy, academically
safe, European—New Yorker modernism and its attempts to monopolize
political-emancipatory culture. Counter to the belief today among aficionados
of trash culture, one is therefore not forced on principle to work always and
only with what others reject but can actively attack the circumstances leading
to such rejection and integrate the work of the rejected. For Kelley, the
countercultural program of the ’60s, with its psychedelic, anarchist, feminist,
and sexual submilieus, represents not just a beautiful political past but also
a notoriously underrated link between politics and art, part of the Surrealist
legacy and an alternative to American high modernism and its bloodless high
descendants: “Radicalism and art are a contradiction of terms to American
museum culture (academic Puritan agitprop of the Hans Haacke variety
notwithstanding). It will be a cold day in Hell when you see a major American
museum a show of the cultural production of the Weather Underground or Black
Panthers. The situationists are OK; they’re French.”
In an essay about the
writings of his friend John Miller (“Artist/Critic”), Kelley identifies the
program of the writing artist and relates it first of all to Dan Graham, to
whom he attributes an inclusion of themes “worthy of critical consideration
within the bracket of artistic discourse,” repressed by the critical mainstream
and ‘‘academic art history.” Kelley is “dismayed by the choice of figures
deemed worthy to represent’’ the periods familiar to him: “Most of the artists
that influenced me are absent from these accounts.’’ It is, according to
Kelley, the task of the writing artist to provide a balance. For example,
Miller had been calling for a new reading of Serra via Bataille well before the
established critics did-predating by years Rosalind Krauss’s examination of the
connection between Serra’s film Hand
Catching Lead, 1968, and the abject and anal. Kelley claims implicitly that
his other line of tradition, from Bataille to bad acid, produced not only more
interesting art but more interesting criticism. Psychedelic stands not only for
a counter- cultural other, ignored by an establishment fetishizing “criticality”;
in the long run, psychedelic results in a better criticality. But the type of
criticality at stake here-at least as signaled by most of these texts—comes in
the form of an artist’s project. Its entrance into discourse can thus be
mediated only by artists’ writing.
In my opinion, this fight
between artists and critics, which is said to force artists into a self-defensive
need to write themselves, is a pseudo- antagonism.
This is a conflict not between artists and critics but between two positions,
which are rather coincidentally on one side formulated largely by critics and
on the other represented by artists or by critics who are not necessarily at
home in the discipline of art history. The dispute turns on the question of
whether leftist political art can be claimed as a monopoly of high modernism
and justified theoretically with a tradition beginning in Frankfurt and New
York with Adorno and Greenberg and leading via the (post)structuralist Paris of
Lacan and Foucault to (at best) French radicals such as Debord; or, on the
contrary, whether there is a second and just as important line of oppositional
twentieth-century art that is not recognized as a properly critical force but rather as a phenomenon of decadence
and social particularity: the line leading from Surrealism to the
countercultures, their art and music. It is in the service of this battle that
Kelley collects arguments, methods, and souls in this volume, mobilizing not
only the grammar of a fan but biographical data as well.
Indeed, his intellectual
biography is the biography of this cultural struggle, which logically demands
to be fought in the arts (since it is literally being waged in the name of the
politics of a subcultures and “subreal” art) yet also always results in
arguments and positions that need to be presented in written form, because the
official archival discourses and lists that exclude, forget, or misrepresent
Paul Thek and Öyvind Fahlström take the form of writing themselves.
By now, Kelley has achieved
a few victories in this cultural struggle, even though the circumstances might
not always be to his liking. Not only his own work but that of an artist like
Raymond Pettibon, whose political-artistic background is similar, has been
accepted by the very art-historical establishment he railed against. Still, the
sanctioned reference to this ‘‘other,’’ anarchistically desperate and
nonacademic tradition consists in isolating their leaders and bestowing on them
the honors of canonization yet never in recognizing what Is radical about their
art. Which would be exactly the result if they were read from
a subculturalist perspective. Mike Kelley doesn’t dare hope for that
latter reading any longer. But even his minimal demand for a different writing
of the history of the relation between art and politics—beyond art history and
various sociologisms—has yet to be taken up. Still, John Welchman is right to
remark that Kelley can no longer define himself as someone who doesn’t write
history. This collection proves that he has not only helped write history but
has had an effect on it.
Diedrich Diederichsen is a critic based in