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REVIEWS BOOKS
MIKE KELLEY:
DAY IS DONE
Gagosian Gallery/Yale University Press
$125/£65 (hardcover)
As well as commanding huge prices, major
artists today are increasingly able to command
huge budgets for the production of enormous
‘masterwork’ projects whose scopes demolish
the habitual bounds of art presentations,
absorbing sculpture, installation, video, music and
performance. A case in point was Mike Kelley’s In his introduction Kelley writes about
vastly ambitious exhibition Day Is Done, at Day Is Done in the now-fashionable terms of
Gagosian New York in 2005, which gathered his 32 contemporary victim culture: ‘My purpose
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions in refusing to differentiate between personal
video-musicals in a common setting of stage- recollections and the narratives of mass media is
set installations, photographic document and to make these works not only representations of
sculpture. How to document, catalogue or my own abuse, but also ones of culturally shared
preserve such a show – something big and group abuse.’ Whether you go along with this
costly enough not to stage twice – becomes a or not, the book-of-the-exhibition forces you to
tricky question. Day Is Done is an amalgamation perform your own reconstruction: more than 400
of extant but dispersed smaller works; and the pages of video and installation stills; copious and
traditional printed monograph isn’t adequate to informative notes by Kelley on the origins of the
the task of representing video and music. videos and, more particularly, the often brilliant
You never saw the show, now read the musical scores and lyrics by artist-collaborator
book. Day Is Done does its best, and that’s not Scott Benzell; a solid, entirely reasonable but
too bad. Kelley’s obsession with the repressed somewhat uninspiring essay by John Welchman;
violence and perversity of American culture is and not one but two CDs of the music and songs
at its most acute in the suffocating conceptual of the project.
structure of Extracurricular Activities – found All of which doesn’t quite manage to
photographs of high-school pageants and fancy- justify this slab of a book. If Kelley’s project here
dress entertainments form the basis for Kelley’s revolves around repressed memory syndrome
fictionalising reenactments that careen into camp, and the absence of the original event, there’s an
burlesque, parodic song-and-dance numbers. unforeseen Freudian irony in this monumental
These all inhabit a common narrative universe, attempt to fetishise the original – not to reveal it,
in which ‘institutional workers’ are engaged in but to conceal it further. The crux of Day Is Done
various ritual performances at an unspecified, is its combination of video, stage-set and song
probably educational workplace. Kelley’s thesis and dance in the form of the video sequence, and
is that, through these often generic cultural that is the one thing missing in this book. It would
offerings, conformist Middle America taps have been easy enough – demotic enough – to
itself into a collective unconscious, which Kelley reproduce the videos of the exhibition rather
gleefully uses as the gateway to its apparently than this fancified fiddling with indexes, sleeve
darker, more unpleasant side. notes and screengrabs. Artists are too precious
when suggesting these total-artworks can only
work in their original configuration. And Kelley’s
work is too interesting to be confined to such
coffee-table mausoleums. Give me the DVD
box set any day. J.J. Charlesworth
ARTREVIEW one.linfour.linzero.lin
p138-141 Books AR Jul07.indd 140 6/6/07 03:09:31
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