Mike Kelley and Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's connection to Mike Kelley stems from his long-time association with Kim Gordon. The pair met in the 1970s, when Gordon was studying at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles (after briefly attending York University in Toronto, where she started her first noise band as a class project). When she chose to relocate to New York City, they drove cross-country together, cementing their friendship.

"I met Kim Gordon in the late '70s when she was still a California girl, still an artist, and still a 'librarian type". Now Kim's the hot and steamy female member of Sonic Youth," said Kelly in the early nineties.

In her 1985 Artforum article “American Prayers,” Gordon praised what she described as the “juvenile energy” of Kelley’s work, as well as his use of “structuralist devices to make fun of the myth of rational thought which led to the myth of progress.” In 1991 Kelley interviewed Gordon for both Fama & Fortuna Bulletin 8 and Warhol’s Interview magazine. He spoke with the entire band for another Interview magazine interview, in 2004. In ‘93, Gordon contributed an essay titled “Is It My Body?” to the book published on the occasion of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s mid-career survey exhibition Mike Kelley.




Sonic Youth provided incidental music for a Mike Kelley performance piece staged like a rock concert titled Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, performed at Artists Space in New York in 1986. Kelley recited an hour-and-a-half poem he wrote and dramatized with the help of actress Molly Cleator, with Sonic Youth providing sound effects and instrumental backing. Extracts from this performance appeared two years later on the Tellus audiocassette compilation #18, which can be heard here.




In 1994 Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label released a three-CD box set of the “anti-rock” noise band Destroy All Monsters. Formed in 1973, Destroy All Monsters consisted of University of Michigan art students Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Niagara (Lynn Rovner) and filmmaker Cary Loren. The band was influenced by the Velvet Underground, Sun Ra and monster movies (their name comes from a Godzilla film). When Sonic Youth curated the inaugural All Tomorrow’s Parties event at UCLA in 2002, they invited Destroy All Monsters to play, alongside more conventional acts such as Wilco, Cat Power and Stereolab. Their encore/finale consisted entirely of sounds made from squeak toys.




The best-known collaboration between Kelley and Sonic Youth is the cover design for their 1992 LP Dirty. Gordon suggested Kelley’s work from the previous year, titled Ah…Youth, which consisted of eight cibachrome photographs, produced in an edition of ten. The photographs depict seven home-made and well-worn stuffed animals, and a young portrait of the artist. The cover reproduced one of these photographs, and a fold out insert featured the remaining, including the picture of Kelley. Hidden underneath the grey CD tray (of the initial run of 50 000 copies of the disk) was an image of performance artist Bob Flanagan and his wife Sheri Rose committing foul acts upon other stuffed animals.






A number of versions of the record exist, some including posters reproducing the Kelley image. Toronto collector and writer Bill Clarke owns this rare promotional mobile, which he liberated from a record store he worked at in the nineties.



Kelley’s original Ah…Youth was auctioned at Christies in 2006, and sold for $688,000, more than double the high estimate. Manipulating Mass-produced Idealized Objects, the 1990 photograph that the inner tray image was based on, sold two years ago at Christies, for $86,500", more than four-times the high estimate.







Late last year Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore announced their break up and the band is on extended hiatus. Mike Kelley was found dead in his apartment two days ago, of an apparent suicide.




Update: Lee Ranaldo has posted a tribute on his site, here.

Micah Lexier & Kelly Mark | Head-to-Head

Micah Lexier and Kelly Mark, two of my favorite artists, had remarkably never shown together before their two-person exhibition at Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, last fall. Both have multiplicity at the core of their practice - both in their use of repetition, and in their dedication to the production of artists’ editions and ephemera. Both artists have produced posters, wallpaper, shopping bags, neon, tattoos, buttons, and bookworks. Both have made works featuring text, typefaces, counting, and found materials. The history of conceptualism informs both practices, and both make use of exhaustive processes to explore the passage of time. They are both graduates of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. They have collaborated together on more than occasion. Their commercial dealers share a street, and they live only a few blocks apart, but they somehow had never shared a gallery space before.

Tonight the Saint Mary’s exhibition travels to Oshawa, to the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Called Head-to-Head, the show thoughtfully pairs up a number of works by the artists, which illustrate how their individual practices echo each other. For example, Mark’s Lines Interrupted is a series of photographs of painted lines on pavement that have been disrupted – by a rotated manhole cover or grate, or by repairs to the asphalt. The works are paired with Lexier’s Touch Down Drawings, a series of attempts to draw a straight line while the plane he is in is landing. Lexier’s Note To Self series feature enlarged silk-screened texts based around self-improvement, often about his practice or better relating to family and friends (“Use less words”, “Ask Others About Themselves”). These large canvases are paired with Mark’s audio work I Really Should, a to-do list litany of regrets.

A nicely designed catalogue accompanies the exhibition and will be launched at tonight’s opening. The half-assed scans below do not do it justice.

Jon Pylypchuk | Small Log

Late last year Paul + Wendy Projects released this bronze sculpture by Jon Pylypchuk, in an edition of ten.

The artist recounts the work's origin in a recent interview: "I was sitting around with my friend Andrew and he was urging me to think of something for the facade of the New Museum in New York. I had these logs sitting around and I had been drinking booze too often. I was thinking about how stupid it is to drink so much, and sort of thought that I was like this drunk log.

I made a much larger one with the intention that if the project got green lighted that I would make a bunch of drunk logs walking around the Bowery. I liked the idea and thought that it would make a nice edition. When I got the logs back from the foundry I intended to make them holding a little airplane bottle of Jack Daniel's but it looked better without it."

The piece is 8.5 by 5.5 by 3.5 inches and is signed and numbered by the artist. There are still a couple left, and they sell for $800. Click here to purchase.

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley reportedly took his own life yesterday, after suffering from depression. Kelley was born in Wayne Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) and moved to Los Angeles in 1978 to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied under John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Douglas Huebler, and Nova Scotia artist David Askevold. Best known for his sculptural installations (which Jerry Saltz described as "Clusterfuck Aesthetics"), Kelley also produced several artist books, multiples, records and periodicals, and the cover design for Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty.

His 1991 artists’ book Why I Got Into Art is a favorite. Published by Walther Konig and attributed to ‘anonymous’, the book details what attracted Kelley to the world of contemporary art – naked women. Subtitled Vaseline Muses, the book features 22 black and white photographs (some rare, some classic) of naked female artists, including Lynda Benglis, Karen Finley, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export and Yoko Ono. The photographs have been manipulated to look as though they were photographed with Vaseline on the camera lens, an early soft-core porn trick.

With two foil embossed covers, the double sided volume has a text in both German and English. The photographs are reprinted on the English side, but blacked out as full page monochromes. Published in an edition of 1000.

More on Kelley’s work later this week.

Mike Kelley, RIP

The Something Else Press

The Something Else Press was one of the first dedicated publishers of artists’ books, and still remains one of the most significant and influential. Founded by Dick Higgins in 1963, the imprint published works by a staggering number of important artists of the day, including John Cage, Claes Oldenburg, Brion Gysin, Ray Johnson, Mercer Cunningham, Al Hansen, Marshall McLuhan, Gertrude Stein, Daniel Spoerri, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and dozens of others.

Fluxus impresario George Maciunas had promised to publish Higgins’s “complete works” as a Fluxus edition, but the four-hundred page manuscript proved too costly an undertaking for Maciunas, whose previous publications had mostly been small boxed works. Higgins became frustrated by the constant delays and “went home reeling” one day, announcing to his wife Alison Knowles that they had founded a press. When asked its name he replied “Shirtsleeves Press”, to which Knowles balked, and implored that he call it “something else”.

The goal of the press was to publish primary materials (texts, graphics, scores, poetry, etc) by established and emerging artists. But unlike the dominant artist-book of the day - if the word dominant could be used to describe such a (then and still now) marginalized art form – Higgins eschewed alternate bindings and experimental formats in favour of high production values and traditional methods. This approach served as a Trojan horse of sorts, allowing the titles to gain access to libraries and bookstores, something few artists’ books had achieved at the time. Today the books are rare, but not impossible to find. Often the ephemeral material surrounding the titles (press releases, business cards, newsletters, etc) are more valuable than the books themselves, presumably because few bothered to collect them at the time, but the books remained on shelves.

The press published over sixty titles, including The Great Bear pamphlet series, mostly artists affiliated with Fluxus (Higgins, his wife Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jackson Mac Low, Emmett Williams, Wolf Vostell, etc.) but also important and influential texts and bookworks from the world of contemporary dance (Cunningham), music (Cage, Philip Corner, Henry Cowell) and poetry (Giorno, Ruth Kraus, Toby MacLennan, Bern Porter).

Artist and poet Emmett Williams was the early Editor in Chief, and Fluxus artist and scholar Ken Friedman, acted as general manager for Higgins from New York and California in 1970 and 1971. The publisher and editor eventually had a falling out. In his 1991 autobiography My Life in Flux and Vice Versa Williams recalls numerous relatively unimportant moments from his life in great detail, but almost entirely omits his time at the Press. The omission is not explained, though I was once told from someone else close to the situation that Higgins had “tried to fuck Emmett’s [adult] son” and he never forgave him.

Higgins later blamed Williams’ successor, Jan Herman, for the demise of the press. In a letter to Harry Ruhé, he accused Herman of spending his days wrapping books for the mail and not fundraising from foundations and wealthy individuals. Herman disputes this account, noting that he was hired as editor, not publisher and that the press went under when the IRS came after Higgins for $300,000 in back taxes. The organization was filed as a Subchapter S status corporation, which can be revoked by the IRS if they deem a project to be a hobby, which apparently they decided was the case – given that the press lost money each of the eleven years that it was operational.

But few subsequent publishers can boast as strong an influence or track record. The ratio of good to bad titles is surprisingly in favour of the former. Over the course of this blog I’ll endeavor to write briefly about each title.

Jan Dibbets

"ON MAY 9 (FRIDAY) AND MAY 30 (FRIDAY) 1969 AT 3:00 GREENWICH MEAN TIME (9:00 EST) JAN DIBBETS WILL MAKE THE GESTURE INDICATED ON THE OVERSIDE AT THE PLACE MARKED X IN AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND"

Jan Dibbets, New York, 09.05.1969, postcard A6, published by Seth Siegelaub