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Trauma Club - Mike Kelley - modern sculptor - Interview
ArtForum, Oct, 2000 by Dennis Cooper
DENNIS COOPER TALKS WITH MIKE KELLEY
DENNIS COOPER: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 was generated by two earlier works, Educational Complex, 1995, and Sublevel, 1998. Maybe you can start by refreshing our memories.
MIKE KELLEY: Educational Complex was a model of every school I ever went to, plus the house I grew up in, with all the parts I couldn't remember left out. It's been reconstructed into a kind of new uberschool. It looks sort of like the model of a modernist community college or something. EC has one "underground" part that's located beneath the table and is a model of the basement of Cal Arts. For Sublevel, I took this section of EC and presented it at about 30 percent scale. So it's big enough to walk into, and I lined the parts I couldn't remember with pink crystal. For "Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction," the idea is to come up with a number of scenarios of trauma to fill in these blank areas and explain my selective amnesia. And I decided to ritualize the process and give it a kind of pseudo order. That's why I eventually decided to make 365 pieces, one for every day of the year. Each will have a video component and a conjoined sculptural component--or at least that's the plan.
DC: Was the "EAPR" series planned from the beginning?
MK: I knew I wanted to do something like this, but I wasn't sure what. I'd always planned on having it relate to a modernist utopian architecture. I was thinking about Rudolf Steiner and this idea that there would be a unifying aesthetic system. Instead of being a modernist, essentialist one, or a mystical one, it would all be based on repressed-memory syndrome. I always knew I wanted a central ritual at some point, and that this ritual was going to be a donkey basketball game. That would be the High Mass of this utopian city. Then there would be this immense halftime show. That became the EAPR work.
DC: Is there a why? Why repressed-memory syndrome?
MK: Only in the sense that I think we're living in a period in which victim culture and trauma are the rationale for everything. Especially in pop psychology, childhood trauma is the motivation behind every action.
DC: Your work has always had a developed, poetic association with the idea of psychological trauma, maybe not as explicitly as in this case. Is the explicitness of this new investigation part of an evolution?
MK: I've always been attracted to a variety of philosophical and psychological systems, but always in a poetic and abstract sense. It wasn't until the response I got from working with craft materials like yarn, felt, and cut paper, where people really started to free-associate around those materials and to project all sorts of things onto my own biography. It made me really, really unhappy that no matter what I did with those materials, that's all people could talk about.
DC: That surprised you?
MK: I was very surprised. I thought they were just materials. I knew that on one level they evoked childhood and all that, but I also thought they were about class aesthetics and formal things that were going on and things about categorization. Over six years, I did a number of different shows that really focused on different aspects of those kinds of materials, and yet the critical reception always tended to be about nostalgia and trauma. I finally got so pissed off about this that I just said, "I'll give people what they want." I invented this pseudobiography and started doing "biographical work" That was Educational Complex.
DC: EAPR #1 was, and its 362 future sibling works are to be, derived from pictures you found in high school yearbooks. Specifically, from pictures of semi- or noncurricular activity rather than from the armies of head shots.
MK: Well, I wanted something very ritualized but very mundane. I also just needed a stockpile. It could just as easily have been movie stills. But I liked the yearbook pictures because they're so mundane. I only picked the ones that were extremely carnivalesque, that weren't normative. I didn't pick sports unless they were wacky sports. I chose artsy stuff or Dress-Up Day or hazing rituals. Pictures where, when you look at them, you don't know what's going on. You just know that it's this kind of free moment in an authoritarian system--a moment that transgresses the boundaries but that's completely allowed, even sanctioned by the system.
DC: Why did you choose this particular picture first? [The black-and-white image (top right), rephotographed from the "activities" section of a high school yearbook, shows two young men--one in vaguely dandyish attire, one sporting mildly ghoulish makeup--interracting on what appears to be a stage set.]
MK: Because it was the most difficult. I decided from the photograph that it had to have been a play. A lot of the pictures just capture a moment, and the videos that come of those will be shorter and the sculptural components more minimal. But I knew this was going to have to be a full stage production, so I thought I'd get it out of the way.
