A history lesson - musical and visual artists Mike Kelly and Tony Oursler

With a pair of touring exhibitions, Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler newly chronicled their 20-year collaboration in music and the visual arts. The ongoing "Poetics Project" be under the orders ofs up a rich mix of visual and aural experiences, while inviting viewers to question the reliability of the present to views as history.

Artist Mike Kelley says, "If you don't create your possess history, someone else will." Kelley and Tony Oursler's the "Poetics throw 1977-1997" is a retrospective work that draws from their collaborative efforts in painting, video, plastic art drawing and music. Although the ostensible make submissive of this project is Kelley and Oursler's early experiences as performers in a loose-knit musical assemblage called the Poetics, its broader be of importance tos are the processes by which history is erected and the reciprocal relationship between the fine arts and popular culture

The conflation of past and near in the "Poetics Project" makes it difficult at first for the viewer to penetrate the work. Video installations and taped interviews with visual artists, stone musicians and critics are intermingled with paintings, statuarys and stacks of drawings. A precise checklist and diagram prepared by the agency of Kelley and Oursler methodically pinpoint the authorship of each work, while serving as a serf-guided tour and critical record of the throw out Only with this didactic help do viewers approach to realize that the "Poetics Project" is almost entirely made up of works created in 1997 and 1998 although based on what Kelley and Oursler count us is a single notebook of sketches and a collection of audio recordings--some little more than notations for never-performed works--which date from the late 1970 and early '80 (the Poetics disbanded in 1983)(1)

Filled with irony and abrupted in serf-reflexive practice, this work builds on the radical autobiographical prose of William s Burroughs and art works and performances by the agency of artists such as John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and Andy Warhol. Reminiscent of Warhol's A:A Novel, which records individual day in the life of the artist in 384 pages, the "Poetics Project" is an expanding template of art works which explores in what way the past can be re-established to shed light on the present

The "Poetics Project" premiered at Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art in January 1997 Six month later a next to the first larger version opened in Kassel at the invitation of Documenta X organizers Catherine David and Jean-Francois Chevrier. The sum of two units exhibitions then traveled to four different cities before meeting up in of recent origin York last May, where the Barcelona version appeared at Lehmann Maupin Gallery and the Documenta version was seen at Metro Pictures. For several weeks, viewers had the opportunity to compare the sum of two units versions and--if they were privy to any information about the earlier venues--to consider by what means the shows had changed since their respective debuts

In its first incarnation, the "Poetics Project" consisted of a six-channel Video work installed in an organically shaped gallery designed by the agency of Richard Meier as part of his of recent origin museum building in Barcelona. Here, a vertical extremity served as a pseudo-Minimalist armature for six projectors that threw their images directly onto the gallery's curv walls.

A different kind of answer to the site was evident in Kassel, where the "Poetics Project" was installed in sum of two units rather small, irregularly shaped fields at the back of the Documenta-Haile. This futuristic pavilion, built in 1992 serv as a gallery, bookstore, cafe, information center and site of the "100 Days-100 Guests" program, which brought together urbanists, philosophers, scientists and artists from around the world to debate what David coiled "the great ethical and esthetic questions of the century's close" Hidden away from immediate view, the "Poetics Project"'s wild and raucous assemblage of paintings, plastic arts video footage and music spat without images of Jesus Christ and Santa Claus, giant turd and psychedelic spirals, against the backdrop of interviews with prominent conceptual artists and stone heroes such as Dan Graham, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Politically incorrect (one soundtrack advises "fuck women chafe shit on them, hurt women as abundant as possible']) and freewheeling, this work was a welcome relief from the tire a certain quantity of didacticism of David's curatorial method

The "Poetics Project" at Documenta-Halle also included the powerful diptych on what account I Love (Guitar) and for what cause [i]or[/i] reason I Love (Drums), a pair of paintings featuring large r and virid hearts and suffused with an audio recording of a guitar solo by the agency of Arto Lindsay and loud drumming performed by means of Kelley. Propped up on stretcher bars, the canvases faced each other in a cowboy-style standoff, drawing viewers into their hilarious, charismatic vicinity Melding visual and aural narrative configuration Why I Love (Guitar) and for what cause [i]or[/i] reason I Love (Drums) blasted viewers with the commingled impulses of stone music and postwar visual art.

While the presentations of the "Poetics Project" at Barcelona and Documenta