day is done: mike kelley
Mike Kelley’s recent installation Day is Done at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, NYC offered a fascinating montage of American suburban preoccupations. It was a chaotic mixture of film sets, video projections, moving sculpture and photographic portraits under the working title Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction. Kelley’s thirty-two ‘reconstructions’ developed the obsessions and rituals of teenage dating and lust, Halloween fantasies about vampires and the Satanic, conventional and arcane religious themes, student plays and celebrity worship. His interest in the lame and abject failure was again in evidence, as was his fertile imagination, sardonic perspective and satirical power. All of which added up to a unique insight into historical and cultural practices.
The installation site looked like a jumble sale, and the accompanying Stockhausian soundtrack of screams and repetitious drumming exacerbated the discombobulating ambience. An array of sets was scattered about, including a sparse brick fireplace and walkway, giant horse costumes, fake office fronts, a model house, a partially complete Nativity scene with a black baby Jesus, a devil’s costume hidden behind a Santa’s chair, a rocket, and a mock-up lounge room where a chair, vase, phone and picture frame, swirled around as if controlled by poltergeists.
The idea of reconstruction or regeneration was a guiding principle in the show and the photographs played a central role in articulating it. Kelley found photos of extracurricular ‘dress-up’ events like proms and Halloween nights from the late 1950s. He then re-cast, photographed and video-taped the scenes. There was thus a strange kind of echoing that provided fascinating perspectives on the relationship between media, human behaviour and history. Rather than fortifying our faith in the accuracy of media, the artist showed that its