The suburb of Westland, Michigan, where Mike Kelley grew up, may be one of the only cities in the US renamed after a mall. In the early 1960s, when its neighboring city of Livonia planned to annex Nankin Township, as it was then known, residents voted to incorporate it as their own city. They looked to the new mall set to be built in town for a namesake: the Westland Shopping Center. Spanning more than 1.2 million square feet—with over eighty stores, including a Kohl’s, a JCPenney, and a Sears—it was once one of the largest malls in the US. It is still open today.
Westland is otherwise an unremarkable suburb. It is one of several in the greater Detroit area built to service the employees of Ford Motor Company, among them Kelley’s mother, who was a chef for the company; his father was a janitor for the local public school. Westland reminds me of the suburbs I grew up in, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. When I look up pictures of it, it is as if I have driven through the same sidewalk-less neighborhoods, the same ugly highways, the same endless green lawns, even though I have never been to Michigan. I can think of few things more suburban than to name your town after a mall.
Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Westland is a subconscious presence in Kelley’s recent retrospective, Ghost and the Spirit, at the Tate Modern. But the show focuses more on the spiritual thread in Kelley’s work, which is more likely to appeal to a European audience, rather than his background in suburban America. The first two galleries foreground his early, enigmatic performances. Wooden props that resemble drums, loudspeakers, and ritualistic objects are shown next to video documentation, followed by drawings and installations from his Monkey Island series (1982–83), where he imagined another world based on the monkeys at the Los Angeles Zoo. These materials are presented as the bedrock on which his later works—the stuffed-animal sculptures, Educational Complex (1995), the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series (2000–2011)—are built. But is it possible to understand Kelley’s spiritualism without accounting for the ways the suburban experience shaped his work? Does favoring one over the other offer only a partial view?
The most explicit evocation of the suburbs appears in his series Photo Show Portrays the Familiar (2001), installed about halfway through the exhibition. Kelley drew the title from a local newspaper headline, and the project depicts various sites around the Michigan towns of Wayne and Westland that were significant to his teenage years. Unlike almost anything else in the show, or even in his oeuvre, the photographs have a straightforward documentary approach: Halloween decorations, a sculpture in a mall, his family home, his grandmother’s home, works at the Ford Museum, and religious sculptures at the entrance to schools, presented unremarkably in black and white. They give you the facts of the suburb where he grew up—working class, Catholic, white.
Like most children in the suburbs, Kelley wanted to escape—through radical politics, experimental music, and eventually, art. In interviews, he often cites his encounters with the White Panther Party, a white spin-off of the Revolutionary Black Panther Party, and the psychedelic music of MC5, the Stooges, and the Mothers of Invention, as the formative references of his suburban years. The physical suburbs also appear as a frequent motif in his work—as a physical site in Photo Show; as an imagined site in Educational Complex, an architectural amalgam of all of his schools and his family home; or as a reference in Mobile Homestead (2010), his largest, and only, public-art project that is a one-to-one replica of his parents’ home. But Ghost and the Spirit does not mention Mobile Homestead, and it includes only a slideshow of Educational Complex. It does not single out Kelley’s suburban background as uniquely formative; instead, the exhibition text frames it as part of his broader interest in “the role that institutions have in shaping identity and behavior.” The show’s didactics also—rightly, I think—convey the idea that Kelley was critical of autobiography in art, that he wanted to trouble the idea of any singular heroic origin.
Mike Kelley, Sublevel, 1998. Collection of Eric Decelle. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
But I nonetheless found myself looking for Kelley’s suburbia. Why? Because I, like many others, also grew up in a suburb and moved to a city. I recognized that psychology in Kelley and wanted to name it, to understand how he navigated it. The suburbs imbued him with a complicated desire to stitch together the culture of his upbringing with the culture of his adult life. For me, this is a relocation across class and space that is almost diasporic. Because more than an influence or a formative memory, his background in the suburbs, I want to suggest, shaped his aesthetic position. It imbued him with a fascination with the sublime, and the horror, of American domesticity—what I call his suburban unconscious. This intentional, and spiritual, current in his work does, as the exhibition text claims, bridge “the real and imagined,” but the “real” is a very real kind of American place.
The first room of the exhibition, titled “Performance,” features two of Kelley’s birdhouse sculptures under a glass vitrine. There is Gothic Birdhouse (1978) from his MFA thesis show, a white birdhouse with a truncated, stacked roof, extending a simple architectural feature into space; and Birdhouse for a Bird That Is Near and a Bird That Is Far (1982–83), a structure that looks like two square megaphones stacked on their wider ends. Part of Kelley’s joke here is that the “empty boxes” of Minimalism, a discourse so present during his art school days, could be found in the most unsuspecting places: suburban backyards. Kelley wanted to pervert the pristine surfaces of Minimalism, drawing out their classed origins. “At present, the cooler aesthetic dominates—and is more critically sanctioned,” Kelley wrote in a 1989 essay, “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature.” He argued that Minimalism’s high-art status was “a legitimizing facade, concealing what is, in effect, a secret caricature—an image of low intent masquerading in heroic garb.”
Mike Kelley, City 13 (AP 1), 2011. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.
Ironically, the exhibition raised his sculptures to a status Kelley perhaps wanted to avoid: locked away behind glass vitrines, untouchable. As the exhibition text recounts, Kelley described the birdhouse sculptures as “working class minimalism.” This sensibility partly arose from a desire not to “lift” the aesthetics of the suburb, or the folk, into high art, but rather to keep them where they were, or to take them lower. “Here’s a structure that’s loaded with pathos,” he said in a 1992 BOMB interview, referring to the birdhouses, “and you still don’t like it, you don’t feel sorry for it, you want to kick it. That’s what I wanted out of the thing—an artwork that you couldn’t raise, there was no way that you could make it better than it was.” Kelley’s approach to the birdhouses, and his provocation of “working class minimalism,” revealed a broader suburban undercurrent to the revered art movement, but also critiqued Minimalist artists’ aesthetic embrace of the materials of their upbringings without an embrace of their psycho-social-class dimensions.
Minimalism, as it manifested in the US Northeast, was deeply indebted to the cultures and aesthetics of the working class. Following Kelley, we might track a “suburban unconscious” in the most famous of the Minimalists: Donald Judd looked to industrial working methods, Robert Morris to the aesthetics of carpentry, and Carl Andre to bricklayers. Robert Smithson (who grew up in Rutherford and Clifton, New Jersey) used the term nonsite to describe the artworks he made using New Jersey’s earth and rocks. There is also that urtext of Minimalism, when sculptor Tony Smith (who grew up in South Orange, New Jersey) drove down a freshly finished New Jersey Turnpike and experienced “a reality there that had not had any expression in art.” These artists were, with Kelley, united by their shared upbringings in the segregated housing developments of the 1950, ’60s, and ’70s. The architectural features of the suburbs—garages, boxed homes, seriality—coursed through their urban minimalism, even if they were never acknowledged as such, as writer David Salomon suggests in a 2013 essay.
Jim McHugh portrait of Mike Kelley as The Banana Man, c.1983. Photo © Jim McHugh.
Another way of thinking through “suburban unconscious” in Kelley’s work is as his way of dissecting his whiteness. In a video work like Banana Man (1983), featured in a gallery at Tate aptly called “Role Play,” Kelley surreally narrates his own conception, birth, and adolescence while wearing a yellow janitorial suit with small cloth epaulets that resemble banana peels. “He makes no decisions,” he says, as he moves in a circle, speaking to a group of performers who walk with him and seem to exist primarily to prove that the banana man has an external identity. “The children have already made them. And they want want want so he must give give give.” The figure in Banana Man appears so uncomfortable, so alienated, from the social and existential demands placed on him as a human being that the work to me felt almost queer in its critical denaturing of the components of his sexual and racial identity. Cauleen Smith, in her essay for the exhibition catalogue, argues that Kelley was looking to “push against and resist” or at least “dissect and disrupt” the suburbs he came from: “It seems to me that Kelley was keenly aware of the body that he was in, in relation to others and the world through which he moved,” she writes, noting that he used his “raced and gendered body” to push “the iconography of ‘the American white man’ very deliberately and consciously toward an ‘abject disorientation’”: in his work, characters suffer from various forms of myopia while stumbling into scenarios that reveal subconscious tensions in society.
Mike Kelley, Kandor 16B, 2010. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.
We can see this also in Kelley’s Kandor works, where he likens the tortured psychology of Superman’s famously invincible body to his own “abject disorientation” toward the mythology of American male whiteness. When the supervillain Brainiac destroys Superman’s home planet, Krypton, he shrinks his home city Kandor into a tiny glass jar. Superman stores Kandor in his Fortress of Solitude, hoping that one day he might be able to make it big again. Some of them are gleaming pink cities, like Kandor 17 (2007); others are crystalline aggregations, like Kandor 16B (2010). In Lenticular No. 14 (2007), lenticular frames materialize this shifting relationship to particularly good effect, as the images shift depending on the angle they are viewed from. Kelley saw his relationship to the suburbs in Superman’s relationship with Kandor: a tortured, shifting subconscious that nonetheless motivated his actions.
Another key technique Kelley uses to defamiliarize the suburbs is repetition, a Minimalist favorite, in the service of a sincere attempt to understand the psychology of his upbringing. Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #10 (Group Portrait) (2004–5), juxtaposes a black-and-white photo, drawn from a yearbook, of a group of children dressed up for Halloween. Kelley’s color reproduction, above the portrait, is similar but slightly different: The lighting is flatter, and some of the figures are now adults, rather than children. Their expressions are similar to but not quite as candid as the originals. Kelley described these EAPRs (as they are often abbreviated) as exploring the “socially accepted rituals of deviance.” The repetition makes you reconsider the oddly pagan nature of this ritual (“It’s so pagan!” he is quoted as saying in a wall label), but it also makes one wonder if (a) these are the same people grown up, (b) these were the people waiting inside of the people in the past, now made manifest, or (c) if these are entirely new people, strangers, inhabiting this memory and reanimating it. It turns out that this last option is the right one.
One of the funniest reconstructions is the video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles’ Mixer) (2004–5). Evoking YouTube-style videos of the early aughts with outsize acting and flat lighting, it records an argument at a singles mixer recreated from a photograph Kelley found in a yearbook, in which a woman is dressed as a “farmer girl” holding two large bananas. Behind her, another woman wears Gene Simmons–style face paint. For Kelley’s reconstruction, a three-channel video and installation, he imagined that each character brought a painting of their ideal male type, and they proceed to argue about who is the hottest. For example, the woman with the painted face holds a photo of Gene Simmons with his tongue sticking out, arguing that his provocative persona represents desirable urban-class characteristics, while the farmer girl embraces Garth Brooks, her favorite, as a rube, a hick. At the climax of the argument, the farmer girl tells a story about a civilization trapped at the bottom of a cesspool, inside of a bubble. The people inside believe their city to be the pinnacle of civilization, yet all the while they are actually at the bottom of a sludge pile, protected only by a little bubble. It might be an apt consideration of the denominations of high art and low art but also a callback to the miniature cities of Kandor and, more broadly, the suburbs.
Installation view of Untitled, 1983 at Monkey Island exhibition, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, 1983. Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Ultimately the work I returned to the most after I had done two loops of the exhibition was Kelley’s most enigmatic series, the Monkey Island works. The Tiny Insect Magnified Becomes Its Own Farm (1982–83) is a drawing of a microscope reflecting what looks like moon craters on the surface of a flea. Another way of analogizing the relation between the city and the suburb is through scale, the feeling of becoming “big” after a “small” existence. Kelley’s work returned so often, psychically and critically, to his adolescence, giving us suburban-urban transplants a model for contending with dislocation. The tiny glass container we keep in a locked room of our hometowns, or our home countries, wondering if we might want to make it big again someday is like The Tiny Insect. It’s a small thing made very big.
