Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit Review – Development Stopped | Art

TThe noise hits you first – a plaintive, screeching wail of a slasher film drama. Footsteps come closer, heartbeats pound faster, girls scream against the swirling wind. Ectoplasm flows from the artist's nostrils, poltergeists are conjured up in spider drawings in giant photographs. Halloween is just around the corner.

The world of Mike Kelley (1954-2012) is tied to time and place, particularly the late 20th century USA on a crazy trick-or-treating tour. He stands at your door with his poker face full of joy and tears you apart Sesame Street with sculptures of stuffed animals having sex and scribbled captions – “Barf!” “Grunt!” – in photos of US presidents, with the words “F*ck You … Now Give Me a Treat Please” written in colored felt on a Sunday school banner.

The US high school yearbook is torn apart by graffiti images, live performances and cacophonous films. Eighties MTV is parodied in alarming videos. Kelley is brash, antagonistic and eagerly anti-heroic in any medium, and it's no surprise that he played noise music with successive bands. The most reproduced of all his artworks remains the photograph of an orange crocheted alien smiling shyly and forlornly, which was used on the cover of Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty.

Kelley came from a working-class family in suburban Detroit; His life-size replica of their clapboard house now stands permanently in front of the city's Museum of Contemporary Art. Irish American, Roman Catholic – the Virgin Mary appears in effigy in this show – he was obsessed with UFOs, subversive comics, television and art. “I was part of the TV generation. I was pop… The world seemed to me to be a media facade, a fiction and a bunch of lies. I believe this is the so-called postmodern condition.”

The teenager who never grew up was his modus operandi. There is no sense of evolving experience in Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (although in reality it must have been: Kelley took his own life at the age of 57). In the earliest works here he plays with his handwriting like any child; except his test shots are huge and framed and take place in a museum. He draws the floor plan of his bedroom and has a quasi-existential monologue about whether a houseplant might be trying to influence him or take over his space. There's even a star that can't help but be found in his own cum.

He moves to LA, a city literally made of images. At CalArts, an institution known for its conceptual art, Kelley builds white-painted birdhouses with titles that have more to do with people than birds. Gothic birdhouse has a nine-tiered roof. It's a play on antiseptic American minimalism, tells us a text that accompanies the object in its antiseptic glass display case. It is an obvious problem with this exhibition, now in the third stop of its four-museum tour, that it can never recreate the harsh environments in which Kelley's art was seen and created.

He first gained fame with groups of stuffed animals having sex, being pulled out of the bottom by fellow artists, or piling up in pathetic arrangements. Poor little innocents who were sewn, knitted and stuffed by adults and then forced upon children as forced entertainment now appear discarded and ruined. But what else they are used for (and I don't think Kelley has thought about this: what parent hasn't tried to find the lost bunny or replace the teddy bear's missing glass eye), they provide his groundbreaking work, More hours of love than can ever be repaid and the wages of sin (1987).

A huge screen winds with stuffed animals, rag dolls and knitted blankets; dirty and damaged and accompanied by a table with colorful, gutter-shaped and phallic candles. The title is about adults who make children feel guilty. But stay away from it and you can just about make out the message of another of America's favorites, the gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism.

Kelley gave many performances in LA. Some were never filmed, so you have to make do with the props. But even if they were, it is exceedingly difficult to understand their tone. Here is the yellow sailor suit he wore for the Banana Man (a children's television character he has never seen but heard described), with a waterfall of white fabric pouring from his crotch. And here's the grainy film itself, with a plodding soundtrack that shifts from shaggy dog ​​stories to a balloon debate (literally with a balloon) over who should be saved in a car crash.

If you needed to be there, you certainly aren't there now. One of Kelley's major works, Educational complex – a giant architectural model of every school he has ever attended – is too fragile to display. Instead they have the Tate Modern blueprint, with its obvious jokes about indoctrination rooms and a text about repressed memories. They recall his long-standing obsession with Kandor, the capital of Superman's home planet Krypton, which takes place in magical cities made of colored glass, sometimes under glass domes or in capsules swirling with mist, reworked as cartoons or glowing light box images. Children will love these imaginary memories of a mythical city. But somehow you have to get them through the next gallery.

This is where the show really turns into a cacophonous sorority attack, featuring works from Kelley's epic multi-parter Projective reconstruction of extracurricular activities Series (2000-2011). You're now right in the howling, deafening nightclub where seedy movies fuel after-school activities – the nativity play goes wrong, the Halloween entertainment turns bloody, the musical where all the songs have been rewritten. Art class shots of girls in front of sheer curtains transform into pole dancing projections, accompanied by a rotating curtain that repeatedly blows through the gallery.

Pole dancers and screaming schoolgirls with pigtails: There are hardly any other depictions of women in this show.

In the final film at Tate Modern, a lipsticked skull of swirling blackness stares back at you while a primitive distorted voice recounts a satanic journey through the universe (possibly: it's hard to hear) and rummages through your existential psyche. On the darkened screen, oceans and continents appear to collect from bubbles; but you don't let yourself be fooled. It's just that the artist is literally pissing down the drain.

The irresistible question that arises is whether this art is actually more than just juvenile. In my opinion, Kelley was not interested in deception. When he draws racist, homophobic Republican Senator Jesse Helms with a swastika on his forehead, he means it. When he embroiders “Pants Shitter” on a union flag, he means business. What would be the point of all this disgusting stuff if it was just a performance?

And perhaps he thought he was being taken too seriously by the elite art world whose repressions he mocked? The catalog is full of carefully selected quotes. And the wall texts at Tate Modern do their best to honor his wild instincts with celebratory art history, but Kelley cannot be flattened.

There is no theorizing “F*ck You” or “Bend Over.” There is no escape from the confusion, the anger, the boredom and the noise, no avoiding the deliberate rudeness. If you want to delve into the grubby haze of his clever brain, you'll love this show. And indeed, Kelley is catnip for fellow artists, male admirers and people who can't stand the hypocritical art trade. But he is no Antonin Artaud, no Iggy Pop or Paul McCarthy. The true anarchic freak-out just never comes.