Mary McIntyre and Robert Anderson: Reconstructions – A Room for Mike Kelley
The Mac, Belfast★★★☆☆
It’s a familiar scenario: you’re attending a performance, a concert, a reading or a gig, yet the primary spectacle before you is a sea of phones. We’re living in an age of documentation when little to nothing evades the lens.
In the final decades of the 20th century the camera was distinctly less pervasive, which adds a wonderful fugitive aura to the handful of existing photographs that capture the seminal early performance works of Mike Kelley.
An American artist of immense sensitivity who died by suicide in 2012, Kelley produced, over five decades, a remarkable body of work characterised equally by playfulness and pathos. His practice ranged from sculpture to video and installation, but his earliest works, from the late 1970s and early 1980s, primarily took the form of performances where he utilised both found and self-made objects.
Working from fleeting images of these early performances, the photographer Mary McIntyre and the sculptor Robert Anderson have collaborated to produce a thoughtful and generous exhibition that is equal parts installation, re-creation and speculation on the status of the performance participant.
The Mac’s sunken gallery space features a precise reconstruction of one of Kelley’s studio environments. It is minimal in appearance, an irregular life-size plywood room with a desultory rug on the floor and a replica of Kelley’s smiling diamond face banner leaning in the corner.
In another, larger galley space a series of objects are presented on a snaking angular plywood workbench construction. These are re-creations of a selection of Kelley’s idiosyncratic wooden performance props: birdhouses both conventional and unconventional, with perspectively skewed proportions, and a cartoonish bullhorn (Kelley called it a perspectaphone) stamped with the words “near” and “far” on each end.
Around the walls are a number of carefully composed photographs of studio interiors strewn to various degrees with prop objects. A small, flat display cabinet presents original catalogue documentary images of Kelley’s performances. The exhibition is rounded out by a room devoted to further reading and study materials.
Conspicuous within the entire presentation is the absence of figures. Nowhere in McIntyre’s and Anderson’s reconstructions do we see people appear or use the objects, either as Kelley did or otherwise.
This is of course by design, as the artists ask us to consider exactly what it is that the presence both of the artist and of the spectator brings to such work.
In posing this question in the particular manner they do, however, McIntyre and Anderson run the risk of fetishising the objects that Kelley created for his performances, detaching them too much from the lived context in which they appeared and rigidifying them into discrete sculptural pieces.
In the end, the inclusion of another of Kelley’s banners in the show is telling. A white sheet with gold tassel fringing, yellow paint spilling from the empty eyes and mouth cut in it, it’s like a strange, comic Shroud of Turin pointing in some way to the ghost or the residue of Kelley himself. The artist is present, even when he is absent.
Reconstructions: A Room for Mike Kelley is at Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, until Sunday, October 18th