Trauma Club - Mike Kelley - modern sculptor - Interview

DC: How did you construct the play?

MK: Well, at first the picture seems simple. It's two men in this seedy-looking room, and they appear to be upset. It looks like a picture from a Tennessee Williams kind of drama, so that's the play I wrote. I wanted that level of emotiveness. But what interested me most was that the stage set made no sense. It has all the pieces from a bachelor apartment, but they're not composed in the right way. The stove's in the middle of the room, and there's a bed in front of the stove. So I immediately realized that the action in the play is built around the stove. That's what told me it was a suicide plot. I'd already been thinking about Sylvia Plath as a metaphor for an earlier work I'd done, so she came into it. She was my excuse. And suicide plots always imply a love affair.

DC: The play definitely has a kind of Boys in the Band, preliberationist vibe. One guy is tormented to the point of amnesia about the nature of his sexuality, and the other is a predatory queen. That aspect is pretty loaded and asking for it. But In the video, you frame it in this early television look, black-and-white and seemingly shot live with three cameras a la I Love Lucy.

MK: That was determined by the image and by the suicide pact, and by this strange, indeterminate black thing in the set that I decided was a sculpture with female genitalia--metaphoric possibilities that I could use to accentuate the schism in the protagonists' relationship. So homosexuality just seemed to be the rationale. Because the piece is about trauma, it goes back to the repressed-memory stuff, about having been raped and finally remembering it. So there's obviously this homophobia operating in the thing in a big way, and that's the running joke. We live in a really homophobic culture, so that's an easy fear to introduce.

DC: How did you get here from the utopian school model? I guess I'm asking about your process.

MK: Through writing. I used writing to figure out the rationale of the structure and realized that it was push-pull theory. Formalism, basically. The way the buildings were composed was only for formal reasons. There was no rationale. It wasn't organized chronologically. It was just, This building looks better next to that one. At one point back in the '80s, I realized that I was developing a kind of negative religion out of my art training and that my formalist painting training was my abuse. So, following on that, for this piece I used self-help manuals as models for writing my own abuse scenarios. I'd use standardized scenarios and fill them with my biography. I always write as a major part of the way I do artworks. It used to be part of the work, but increasingly, with some exceptions, it's become less a part of the work and more a part of my process. It's used to generate ideas and identify themes of the work and figure out how the work will be finalized.

DC: The fact that you're a writer as well as an artist seems key to the distinctiveness of your work. Maybe it's because I'm a writer, but I think there's a way in which your visual decisions come from a language base. The subterraneousness of your work seems literary to me.