Mike Kelley: Mobile Homestead videos at Tate Modern

Another project curated by yours truly at Tate Modern:

Mike Kelley: Mobile Homestead

Tate Modern
Wednesday 22 May – Sunday 26 May 2013

Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, 2010. Courtesy of Artangel © The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Photograph by Corine Vermuelen

This UK premiere of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead videos, presented in collaboration with Artangel, coincides with the opening in Detroit of Kelley’s last major project. Before his death in 2012, the artist had begun work on a new public commission for his native city, based on a life-sized replica of the suburban home in which he grew up. The new ‘homestead’ has been relocated to the city centre, outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in a reversal of the ‘white flight’ to the suburbs that followed the 1967 Detroit riots. Kelley envisioned the ground floor of the house as a site for community activities, while a labyrinthine basement would provide space for what he described as ‘private rites of an aesthetic nature’.
The videos document the homestead’s journey from downtown Detroit to ‘the mother ship’, the Kelleys’ former home in Westland, and back again. This expedition is presented alongside interviews with an array of local residents, including bikers, church officials, strippers, social workers, heroin addicts and representatives of the automobile industry to which the Motor City owes its name.

Mike Kelley: Mobile Homestead – Launch Screening

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Wednesday 22 May 2013
£7/£5 conc.

Première of Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland (see below for details). The screening is introduced by a keynote lecture by John C. Welchman, Professor of Modern Art History at the University of California, San Diego and Co-director of The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. James Lingwood, Co-director of Artangel, then joins him on stage after the screening for a brief Q&A.

There is a 15-minute break between the lecture and the screening.

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Mike Kelley: Mobile Homestead – Screenings

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Friday 24 May – Sunday 26 May 2013, 15.00 – 18.00
FREE

Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland
Mike Kelley, USA, 2010–11, 76 min
The first of the Mobile Homestead videos follows a full-size replica of Kelley’s family house front as it travels from downtown Detroit to its original location in suburban Westland, encountering and documenting urban decay and deep socio-economic disparities along the way.

Going East on Michigan Avenue from Westland to Downtown Detroit
Mike Kelley, USA 2010–11, 76 min
In the second part of the documentary, the Mobile Homestead journeys back to its final location in downtown Detroit, outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), as interviews with local residents cast a bleak but revelatory picture of life in the Midwest.

The Mobile Homestead videos are an Artangel commission, with LUMA Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).
Tate Film is supported by Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation.

Oursler’s “The Influence Machine” at Tate Modern

Coming soon at Tate Modern, a project I am currently working on:

The Influence Machine
Tate Modern, River landscape
15–16 and 18–19 February 2013, 18.00–22.00
Free

Tony Oursler, The Influence Machine, 2000 Courtesy Artangel, © Tony Oursler

Ghostly presences haunt Tate Modern’s riverfront landscape in an immersive installation by American artist Tony Oursler. A large scale multimedia séance playing on the double meaning of ‘medium’, The Influence Machine was recently donated to Tate, along with several other works from the Artangel Collection.

Oursler conceived The Influence Machine as a kind of ‘psycho-landscape’. From the radio to the telephone, from television to the internet, the ‘influence machines’ of modern media have been deployed as tools of communication and information, but also interpreted as conduits for otherworldly voices. Delving deep into the history of media, he created an historic sound and light show which invoked the spirit of the phantasmagorias of the late eighteenth century to investigate what Oursler called ‘the dark side of the light’, an alternative history of disembodied communication.

Monologues by several figures, projected onto trees, walls and smoke, make references to key names from media history such as television pioneer John Logie Baird and Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who founded the first moving image theatre in a Paris crypt in 1763. The haunting soundtrack, performed on a glass harmonica, was composed by musician and expanded cinema pioneer Tony Conrad.

On Saturday 16 February, Tate Film also presents a one-off screening of Oursler’s single-channel videos in the Starr Auditorium.

Presented in collaboration with Artangel.

The Influence Machine by Tony Oursler was commissioned and produced by Artangel with The Public Art Fund, New York, and Beck’s; the project was first presented in Soho Square in London, W1, in November 2000.

Tate Etc. Issue 27 out soon

Keep an eye out for the next issue of Tate Etc., soon available from Tate Publishing. It contains my article on Mike Kelley’s Channel 1, Channel 2 and Channel 3, currently on display at Tate Modern within the Poetry and Dream wing, Room 9.

The brief article was originally titled “Unidentified Plywood Objects”, and even though the editors have decided to change it, this remains my title of choice…

On the subject, I also recommend Kelley’s text “On the Aesthetics of Ufology” (1997, as republished on Minor Histories and here on Blastitude, n.13, August 2002, “ETERNITY BLAST SPECIAL”, ed. Cary Loren).

More about my work on Mike coming soon…

Tom Trevatt, “The Atelic Affect” (2011)

I would like to signal this text, written by a friend but frankly spot-on in terms of my own research on object-oriented aesthetics. This may have something to do with the fact that Tom is at least partly responsible for igniting my interest in Speculative Realism and OOO in the first place…

It is published on his website, The Exhibitionary Complex:

http://theexhibitionarycomplex.tumblr.com/post/16866771078/the-atelic-affect-paper-for-rosascape-conference

Tom is also one of the organisers of the series of events/workshops/symposia collectively titled The Matter of Contradiction, mentioned in a previous post. The next instalment, War against the Sun, will take place in London on 1-3 March 2013 (a future, more detailed post is of course in order). So watch out for Trevatt – his name is usually associated with quality stuff.

“From My Institution to Yours”: a video tribute to Mike Kelley at Tate Modern

Curated by yours truly, Stuart Comer and Catherine Wood.

Don’t miss the new Kelley collection display room either. For lovers of Mike’s variety of psychedelia and droning noise…

Tate Modern, The Tanks

Friday 31 August 2012, 12.00 – 21.00

Saturday 1 September 2012, 12.00 – 22.00

As a tribute to the influential American artist, Mike Kelley (1954-2012), Tate Modern hosts a two-day survey of videos by and with Kelley, to coincide with the opening of a new display in the Poetry and Dream collection wing, featuring Kelley’s 1994 installation Channel One, Channel Two and Channel Three and documentation of his early performance works.

Kelley’s art is rooted in abjection, ritual and cunning ambiguity. It lays bare mechanisms of representation and communication, revealing cultural blind spots through the use of vernacular language and imagery, particularly drawing on American crafts and subcultures. His layered imagery, hijacked from sources as diverse as folk and outsider art, DIY manuals, comics, genre fiction, spiritualism, Ufology, pop psychology, punk, glam and psychedelia, is fused together through the use of a broad range of media, including drawing, performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, installation and writing. These elements are never simply appropriated, nor dissected in the manner of detached social commentary. From his early paintings and performances made while a student at CalArts to increasingly complex sculptures and multimedia installations, Kelley’s work confronts the viewer with unexpected associations and sabotages expectations, often to tragicomic effect.

This attitude is also evident in his video works, from the early The Banana Man (1983), where Kelley poses as the character of a kids’ TV show he has never seen, to the epic Day is Done (2005-06), a stage musical entirely derived from photographs of costumed people found in high school yearbooks and originally planned to have a running time of 24 hours.

The programme equally demonstrates Kelley’s penchant for collaboration, through the inclusion of videos made together with Ericka Beckmann, Tony Conrad, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Anita Pace, Raymond Pettibon, Michael Smith, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and Cary Loren, founding member with Kelley of Detroit’s seminal noise band Destroy All Monsters.

With thanks to the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and Cary Loren.

Friday 31 August, 12.00–21.00

• Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais), 2011, 25:14 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36b (Made in England), 2011, 27:58 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, The Judson Church Horse Dance, 2011, 70 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, 2010, 1 hr 30 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Day Is Done, 2005–2006, 2 hr 49 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, The Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip), 2004, 17:53 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene), 2000, 29:44 min, b&w, sound
• Mike Kelley, Runway for Interactive DJ Event, 2000, 48:23 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999, 7:19 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Sod and Sodie Sock (Vienna Cut), 1999, 17:38 min, colour, sound

Saturday 1 September, 12.00–22.00

• Mike Kelley, Cross Gender/Cross Genre (Parts 1 and 2), 1999, 1 hr 59:06 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Out O’ Actions, 1998, 4:25 min, colour, sound
• Cary Loren with Destroy All Monsters, Strange Früt, 1998, 1 hr, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Fresh Acconci, 1995, 45 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler and Anita Pace, Pole Dance, 1997, 1997, 31:18 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Heidi, 1992, 62:40 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Heidi’s Four Basket Dances, 1992/2001, 15 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, 100 Reasons, 1991, 6:41 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Ericka Beckman, Blind Country, 1989, 19:57 min, colour, sound
• Raymond Pettibon, Sir Drone, 1989, 55:37 min, colour, sound (feat. Mike Kelley and Mike Watt)
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding), 1987, 8:08 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Cultural Soup, 1987, 6:55 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Kappa, 1986, 26 min, colour, sound
• Tony Oursler, EVOL, 1984, 28:58 min, colour, sound (feat. Mike Kelley)
• Tony Conrad with Mike Kelley, Beholden to Victory, 1980–83, 26 min, colour, sound
• Mike Kelley, The Banana Man, 1983, 28:15 min, colour, sound

The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object

As a shameless Graham Harman fangirl, I am hoping to attend this conference at Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, île de Vassivière, Limousin on 8-9th September. Utterly relevant to Aesthetic Bricolage and a perfect excuse to explore corners of Gaul yet unknown to me…

For info, see http://lamatiere.tumblr.com/.

Static 09: Buttons – Call for papers

After years of inactivity, Static (the student-led journal of the London Consortium) is finally back with a new Call for Papers! Check out the Static website for more info… I happen to be co-editing it, so I will probably post about it with ill-concealed pride as the new issue takes shape.

I will also be contributing to the new Static blog, called EcStatic - it’s still relatively new, but expect regular posts on a variety of seemingly haphazard topics by myself and fellow London Consortiumites – including a regular corner dedicated to various vegetables (we are yet to pick a name for this series of posts; perhaps “The Greengrocer’s Corner”, or “The Allotment”…).

And for now, I will leave you to a magic button to effortlessly solve all your problems: http://make-everything-ok.com/