SOME AESTHETIC HIGH POINTS

MK Written in lieu of a biographical statement for inclusion in the monograph Mike Kelley, edited by William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh (Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press. 1991). pp. 54-59 (which also published my interview with the artist and critic John Miller, conducted on March 21, 1991), this is probably my most misunderstood text. It has often been cited as a serious commentary on my aesthetic concerns. In fact, it was designed as a humorous jab at the impossibly difficult assignment to write a thumbnail encapsulation of my artistic practice. To evade the problem, I chose instead to depict primarily juvenile "aesthetic" events that predated, or ran parallel to, my artistic career. I did not, however, intend the text to function as an antiart manifesto. This does not mean that the situations it describes were not important formative events in my artistic life; but they are obviously not the most significant. For each of the events recounted in the text, I could substitute more aesthetically influential events from my adult life. Such influences are given longer and more studied attention in my essays collected in the companion anthology. Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 40

Something Done in Bad Faith Can Be Successful (c. 1968-69)

When I was in junior high school there was a contest sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to design a patriotic poster.' Along with a guy in my chemistry class lab station, I decided to enter the contest. From the very beginning we meant it as a joke. First of all, we agreed to collaborate on the poster, so that neither of us would be responsible for the final outcome. Secondly, we were not close friends, so we didn't care about making each other look talentless. We couldn't have spent more than fifteen minutes on the poster. We each took turns painting it. And we picked the most insipid subject matter and caption we could think of: a portrait of George Washington in front of the American flag with the motto, "Your Land and Mine." We used the cheapest materialsposter board and elementary school poster paintand painted as poorly as possible. The flag was depicted as a crude series of stripes with one sloppy star and a totally unrecognizable Washington was painted in a garish combination of chartreuse and green. We won.
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Detournement (c. 1970-71)

In high school, I went with several friends to a dance at a rival schoolthe Catholic school I had attended before switching to a public school at the end of the eighth grade. We were friends of the band hired for the event, and we hung with a small group of other "freaks," glowering against the wall. On this wall was a collage composed of various uplifting and happy photographs cut from popular magazines. These images formed the phrase "Everything Is Beautiful," taken from a sappy pop song.' 1 rearranged the letters to form the phrase "Vagina Is Beautiful." We were thrown out.
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Role Playing

Around the same time, I was getting quite a bit of pressure from my father to "act more normal." He wanted me to engage in group activities more appropriate for a boy, namely sports. To spite him I took up sewingnot because I had any interest in it, but just to piss him off. I sewed a very crude doll, which I laid on my bed. 1 also collected a group of prissy dolls from garage sales and arranged them around my bedroom.
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Brechtian Theater Techniques (1973) After hearing psychedelic music, I became a rock music fan and went to many concerts. In the early 1970s, the general trend was for pompous, self-involved rock theatrics. The beatnik notion of "poet-is-priest"'' became "rock star-is-priest," and the rock concert audience was transformed into a hedonized mass, generating a group consciousness orchestrated by the rock singer. As at a church service or football game, the audience was enticed to sing along or raise lit matches in unison. Two concerts changed everything for me: one by Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the other by Iggy and the Stooges at a small biker bar in Wayne, Michigan." The two shows were quite different. Sun Ra's shows at this time were huge, showy, and spectacular. The stage was filled with tons of equipment and many musicians, his "Arkestra," as well as dancers and props. The aesthetic was a mix of African music, exotica, big band, science fiction, Greek chorus, and political rally. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard. The audience would be excited into a dancing frenzy by throbbing, African-style drumming, and then Sun Ra, or Mr. Mystery as he sometimes called himself, would start to fuck with your head, shifting at breakneck speed from schmaltzy big band arrangements, to strange neo-Egyptian poetry and long nonsense chants, to weird skits about "outer space employment agencies." You were constantly being asked to shift gears abruptly. At one point, you might be swept up bodily, only to be dropped on your ass by twenty minutes of harsh electronic white noise. It was the most intellectually and physically demanding show I have ever seen." Afterward, I climbed a fence, got backstage, and met Sun Ra. He was very approachable. When I asked him how he felt his show differed from James Brown's equally elaborate but more pleasure-oriented performance,' Sun Ra replied, "James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need." During an intense winter snowstorm, I braved hitchhiking from Ann Arbor through a particularly redneck rural area outside Detroit to see the Stooges. When I arrived at the "club," I found it was a small biker bar. I was the first one there. Passing the time, I asked the bouncer, a huge, fat biker, whether he had ever seen the Stooges. "No," he said, "But if that prick throws up onstage, I'm going to kick his ass." When the Stooges arrived, Iggy was dressed in a ridiculous jazz-dancer's outfit, a kind of leotard with spangled skirt. His eyes were sloppily ringed with eyeliner, and a cigarette drooped from his lips. His whole demeanor said, "Fuck you." I could feel the current of hatred
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spread through the bikers. Iggy was the total front man; the rest of the band barely moved. They stood stiff and erect like store window dummies, their faces blank. They were the perfect foil; all eyes were focused on Iggy, a master of body gesture. Every move was charged, and his moronic, contorted dancing seemed inspired, like an acrobat possessed by the spirit of an epileptic Jerry Lewis. The show started off simply enough with a few upbeat rock tunes that got the crowd going. Iggy incited the audience to respond to him, got them heated upthey want Iggy. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped, singling out a girl pushed up against the stage, one of the fans to whom a second earlier he had been gesturing and enticing. The room went silent. "Get this bitch out of here. She tried to touch me! We won't play unless she is removed." The tension started to build. She moved out of sight. Then Iggy asked, "What do you want to hear?" The crowd yelled back an incomprehensible roar of song titles. "Oh . . . 'Louie, Louie.'"" So the band launched into "Louie, Louie." It is hard to explain now what "Louie, Louie" meant at that time, when rock music was trying to be important. It was the first song a hillbilly rocker would learn on his guitar to impress the girls at a school dancea throwback to an embarrassing time when rock music was entertainment for fraternity boys, not an instrument of social change. It was a slap in the face to the audience. But they politely suffered through it, even goodnaturedly hoopin' and hollerin' a little bit. Then Iggy asked again, "What do you want to hear?" The same roar came back. "Oh . .. 'Louie, Louie.'" And the band tore into "Louie, Louie" for a second time. "Louie, Louie" was played three times in a row. The audience was starting to get antsy. The band did another rocker and the audience regained its faith, only to have Iggy pull some other disruptive stunt. He was an amazing performer. I have never seen better. He played the audience like a fish. The crowd was in the palm of his hand. They would suffer insult after insult, have their faces rubbed over and over again in their own complicity, and come running back for more. This doesn't sound like much after fifteen years of punk music, in which these stage antics are the norm. But Iggy invented this stuff. After about five or six songs, a big biker shouted, "Hey, Poodle Boy," and hit Iggy with an egg. The next thing I saw was Iggy doing a belly flop into the audience; and then a riot broke out

a real traditional biker bar fistfight. Chairs and tables overturned, the place was cleared within fifteen minutes. The lights were turned up, the band had run out the door, and I was left standing there babbling, "What happened?" It was the best piece of theater I have ever seen.'
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Everything of major importance that I know about performing, I learned from these two concerts.

Grassroots Aesthetics (1974-76)

In 1974, fellow University of Michigan art student Jim Shaw and I ran into two people we knew slightly at a party. Their names were Cary Loren and Niagara. Loren was a photographer and filmmaker studying at Eastern Michigan University at Ypsilanti, and Niagara had dropped out of the U of M art department. We were talking about the sad state of current music and the evils of country and arena rock. We decided right there and then to start a band, which we called Destroy All Monsters, after a Japanese monster movie. It was a very democratic affair. No one knew how to play an instrument except Cary, who played guitar a bit. My solution to this problem was to go to garage sales and buy any old piece of electronic equipment with a speaker, and set it up to produce feedback. I amassed quite a pile of noisy, industrial suburban waste. We didn't get to play out very often. Our way of getting gigs was to crash parties, set up, and play. We were always thrown out. Our first gig was a comic book convention. We crashed it and asked the Trekkie band if we could use their PA system. We played one song: two lines from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"' repeated over and over against a wall of feedback. We were thrown out.
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Group Dynamics (1978)

The year I graduated from Cal Arts, I moved to Hollywood. Hermann Nitsch came to town to do one of his elaborate Orgies Mysteries Theater rituals,''' and a call was put out for volunteers to work on it. Based on photographs I had seen, I was interested in his work, and ended up playing in the noise orchestra. I was very impressed with Nitsch as a director. He was able to take a large group of people and, in a very short time, devise a system for them to work together: simple hand-cues triggered various sounds or activities. The performance was very tightly choreographed. As a lapsed Catholic, I had great reservations about the symbology of Nitsch's work. I was worried that it might just

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5. a: "Poster contest winners," Westland Eagle, April 23, 1969, p.10. b: A dance at St. Mary's gymnasium, Wayne, Michigan, circa 1970-71, Mike Kelley tar right, half in frame, c: Mike Kelley with a hand-sewn doll, Westland, Michigan, 1970. d: Sun Ra and his Omniverse Jet-Set Arkestra, New Year's Eve, 1980, at the Detroit Jazz Center. Photo: Leni Sinclair. Courtesy Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, Michigan, e: Iggy and the Stooges at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit, 1968. Photo: Leni Sinclair. Courtesy Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, Michigan. f.'Some of the Destroy All Monsters circle annoying Andy Warhol during his book-signing tour for The Philosophy ol Andy Warhol, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975: left, Andy Warhol; center, Niagara and David Keeps; far right, Jim Shaw. Photo: Cary Loren. g: Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theater, Venice, California, 1978, Mike Kelley second from left with face obscured. Photographer unknown.

be a primitivist version of the Catholic mass, and I was staunchly opposed to any kind of mystical artwork. It is true that his blood rituals are very similar, symbolically, to the mass, but after my participation in the piece. I was won over by its sheer physicality. I enjoyed being involved in a group activity for an extended period of time and being confronted with such intense material on every sensory level. The only group ritual I have ever found satisfying, it was a perfect materialist industrial urban mass.'
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