I have to admit that I’ve barely spared Mike Kelley a thought over the past decades. But when I was young in the 1990s, Kelley was the gold standard of contemporary art. His way of pulling from American popular culture and conceptual art while underscoring the suppressed anxiety of the late twentieth-century made him a role model for an entire generation, even in Sweden. His cool underground attitude didn’t hurt either.
Today, as the so-called liberal democratic order is crumbling with the U.S. at its helm, things are different. In his day, Kelley was a master at exposing hegemonic power while confirming that we were all potential victims to repressed truths. Thus, it was hardly a coincidence that he had his major breakthrough in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, NATO-sphere political hubris was in full swing, Fukuyama-style. It was the perfect moment for someone like Kelley to build a career by confirming the creeping suspicion that we were not living in the best of all worlds, after all. Of course, there is always a market for art that makes people feel smart.
But how does Kelley make us feel today? Now that the hidden darkness he made it a shtick to poke at has let the mask fall and gone full apeshit with genocidal violence and far-right governments in more countries that I care to count? Indeed, the low culture and monstrous desires that then could become aesthetic objects precisely because they were considered to be repressed parts of the dominant culture now sit in the Oval Office itself.
So, how does it feel? Not that much, to be honest. Or rather, it feels like works that once claimed to expose reality have now themselves been exposed. Formally, iconic installations like More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Wages of Sin (1987), a quilt made of stuffed animals, or Sublevel (1998), a model of an art school basement, appear rather barren. Thematically, they’ve lost whatever tension they once held. To me, it’s like their lack of actual substance has finally been laid bare. For what are they other than gestures pointing toward trauma and oppression that is never spoken aloud, forms of abstract grievance that has become a bore?
It reminds me of how David Lynch also captured the zeitgeist in a way that doesn’t feel nearly as thrilling today as it did in the 1990s. That said, Lynch’s films show us something about living in the twilight; they are far from empty postures. Yet, both artists share the same dilemma: the rosy-cheeked idealism they pushed against has lost its cultural bearing.
Kelley’s biography is well known. A janitor’s son born in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1950s, he attended Cal Arts in the 1970s, and then, after an illustrious career, tragically ended his own life in 2012. Now, Moderna Museet in Stockholm is showing a retrospective that presents the artist’s work chronologically: from the early performances and sculptural props of the 1970s through the somewhat esoteric works of 1980s (which many will likely rush past) to the aforementioned breakthrough pieces of the 1990s and, finally, his large-scale, operatic multimedia installations of the 2000s.
If Kelley’s breakthrough works haven’t aged as gracefully as some might have expected, the older ones feel even more like fossils from a bygone era. The documentation and artefacts from the 1970s seems to be of mostly historical relevance, while the banners with derogatory lyrics from the late 1980s and early 1990s are cute reminders of the era’s self-loathing youth culture. Even so, the text-based works have an irreverent humour which still resonates. I also appreciate the weirdness of Silver Ball (1994), a huge amorphous ball of crumpled-up aluminium foil suspended from the ceiling paired with speakers transmitting some U.F.O.-related discourse.
Nevertheless, the show does gain momentum towards the end with Kelley’s large-scale works from the 2000s, like Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000–2011), comprising photographs and videos based on college yearbooks, and Kandor (1999–2010), a series of sculptures based on the premise that Superman’s birth city was shrunk and bottled when his home planet exploded. Unfortunately, only small parts of these installations are displayed here, which makes both their scope and their finer nuances hard to discern. Yet, I was struck by how Kelley treats the theme of loneliness in Kandor, the gleaming futuristic city recalling Warhol’s slick aesthetics while conveying a feeling of isolation that seems to speak to the emerging screen-based culture of the 2000s.
Having gotten this far, I was worn down by the cacophony of noise and visual impressions resulting from the exhibition architecture made of perforated metal. Inspired by Kelley’s drawing Diagram of My Space (1978), it’s a creative solution to the dilemma that the gallery is actually too small to house such a large number of works, but it has the side-effect of undermining my capacity to engage with them, critically and intellectually.
Of course, immersing the audience in Kelley’s own space is hardly innocent given that the exhibition is part of an international canonisation campaign with partners like Tate Modern in London and Bourse de Commerce in Paris. On the contrary, the result is a kind of privatisation of the museum – and yet another in a long line of American art stars that Moderna Museet has rather thoughtlessly inflated in large-scale shows during the 2020s.
That said, Kelley probably would have failed to engage me on his own anyway. Today, his work strikes me as a cultural lubricant of the Clinton-era when tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy were paired with artists being encouraged to put lower class culture on display for the new wannabe elites. Indeed, art was given the task of making people affected by growing inequalities rejoice in their cultural difference, eventually transforming the 1990s fetish for the loser into the 2000s reification of the victim. The monster was swept under the rug while artists like Kelley taught audiences to savour the fruits of societal conflict like a fine wine.
Now the monster is back, and Kelley has lost most of the subversive power he once had. It’s possible that a happier time will come, when his work will once again feel more relevant than it does in 2025. It’s also possible that an exhibition focusing on his major installations from the 2000s – from the period after 1997, when he last had a major exhibition in Sweden, at Rooseum in Malmö – would have had more to say to us today. As it stands, Moderna Museet’s show is an historical overview with an unclear purpose, mostly of interest to Kelley connoisseurs – or those who want to be.
