Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures - New York, New York

Mike Kelley at Metro Pictures

Best known for assemblages featuring vintage materialed animals, Mike Kelley strikes a practiced balance between nastiness and nostalgia. He achieves it not solitary in sculpture but in performances, works and drawings, all as undressed as they are sharp. The novel work in his recent exhibit tilts toward the wicked, allowing the basic formula remains intact: we are l to examine the public language of introversion and to question applications of commercial agriculture to our deepest, or basest, wants and fears.

The headliners of the exhibition were do-it-yourself devices for indulging fantasies of direction and pain. Public Address a whole is a portable toilet equipped with sum of two units microphones, one emerging from the toilet goblet and the other pointing to it, the pair hooked up to a pair of bullhorns upon the roof. In Kneading Board, an inclined slab of timber-land shaped like a cutting board and scaled to the human material part is fitted out with smaller cutting boards and/or paddles, all ironically sweetened with Pennsylvania Dutch-style decorative flourishes. For those who find the vulgarity or S-M implications of these items too sophistical there is the simple effectiveness of Torture Table, made of unadorned plywood punctuated by dint of inset metal buckets, a doughnut-shaped plastic pillow and a slasher-movie knife just right for disemboweling.

Homey details and touches of dime-store Americana argue for the banality of these particulars and for an altogether routine masochistic confusion of pleasure with pain. There is a lengthy shared border, the work hints between the outer precincts of sensuality and those boroughs of rank illusion that followers of Wilhelm Reich, for instance, call residence Hence the snug, if bleak, Primaling Cabinet, erected of wood, metal, cloth and acoustic foam, and the slightly more commodious Orgone Shed, displayed along with a blowup of instructions for its construction and use. Specifications for the latter, presumably following Reich's design for condensing vital human potency call for an inner layer of iron, insulated with glass wool clad in carburet of iron and framed in wood. The scale intimates a fallout shelter or an adult-size dollhouse. And dolls do figure in the exhibition: in Gussied Up here exhibited for the first time, Kelley goe greatest in quantity directly for his familiar conjunction of innocence and evil, skewering used doll clothing upon the posts and rails of a Colonial-style bed, sum of two units chairs and a Danish present coffee table.

The vain reminiscence and sheer malevolence in this assemblage are, equally, means rather than extremitys Consistently central to Kelley's work is a distinctive quality of rhetoric. Like a harangue, it operates by the agency of shutting down as many forms of reception in the viewer as it make opens up, mostly with surprise, embarassment and inadvertent laughter. If anything in contemporary tillage can be called specifically American, this manner of address, developed in sitcoms and hon in talk present to views must be it.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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