Breaking Free from the Bell Jar: Mike Kelley at Tate Modern

Nihilism, that despairing feeling that all is meaningless, fuels much of the work of experimental artist Mike Kelley. For some, seeing his life’s work staged together may be all too much. “Ghost and Spirit” at Tate Modern is the first major British retrospective of Kelley (1954-2012) in more than 30 years—one that offers a very adolescent viewpoint portraying a disturbed and distorted America.

Sculptures, canvases and photography are some of the mediums the artist explored—or, more accurately, exploited—in his art. It was Kelley’s desire to corrupt the gallery space with undisciplined artworks and warped everyday trappings that can, admittedly, make him a challenge to show. He often perverted found objects—innocuous playthings like stuffed animals and woolen blankets—to stress the suffocation and strangeness that such beloved objects carry beyond childhood.

This exhibition, which runs chronologically from the 1970s to before his death in 2012, goes from sad to sinister to almost intolerable. Defaced presidential portraits make way for miniature cities engorged in green amber before a hit of primal audio sounds assail the ears as if an exorcism is underway. Trauma, memory and disturbance connect these many twisted and uninhibited artworks.

SEE ALSO: Painting History’s Forgotten Women – An Interview With Anita Kunz

With both deadpan humor and an anarchist attitude, Kelley always wanted to be confrontational. But Tate Modern’s soundtracking and staging are confounding here, with its decision to score parts of the show with screeching excerpts from Kelley’s video works alongside the gallery’s own abstracted analyses. Wall texts clutch at academic ideas—on identity politics, especially—to vainly discipline Kelley’s chaos and elevate his often immature point of view.

There are punchy profanities memorialized in colored banners (like 1994’s F*ck You … Now Give Me a Treat Please) and pictures of U.S. Presidents defaced with “Grunt!” or “Barf!” To Tate Modern, these works and his The Banana Man film (1983) have Kelley complicating deeper identity issues, “refusing to accept the privileges of the way whiteness function.” Trying to reconcile the profanity and provocation with whiteness is a stretch here—one of several puzzling texts hammered throughout.

“We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde,” Kelley once said. “So, all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it—because popular culture is really invisible.” Mass media, Pop Art, teenage subcultures and even Halloween costumes are the aesthetics Kelley warped in countless deranged, deadpan and dark postmodern pieces. Ironically enough, the leaps many wall texts make (like on repressed memory) feel almost postmodern themselves—that is, meaning is relative, and language is arbitrary.

Kelley, who grew up in 1960s Detroit, had his trademark antiauthoritarianism ferment in his youth—and it ultimately never dulled. There, he witnessed the city’s economic erosion and social transformation, cultivating his own rebellious desire to stay different. He decided to become an artist because “at that time, it was the most despicable thing you could be in American culture.”

Vestiges of teenage life, like coming-of-age events and high school yearbooks, are his fantasy world to corrupt again and again. Day Is Done (2006), a feature-length “musical” of various video performances shown here, takes the school play, Halloween trick-or-treating and childhood dress-up to thread together thirty-two video chapters on the theatrics of such teen performances. Kelley’s own education was an obsessive pet project to interrogate in his art. Restaging these extracurricular activities—ways for kids to escape—for their ritualism here just reads like textbook unresolved adolescent angst resurfacing.

“Ghost and Spirit” highlights the countless toys Kelley famously cannibalized for his art. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) features countless stuffed animals sewn unevenly to a canvas, forming a chaotic literalization of the rejection that these formerly adored objects now hold. Kelley’s nods to abstract painting here are a sly distortion, taking the venerated aesthetic style and repositioning it in a discarded and even dirty world. The effect is hypnotic and beguiling amongst the gallery noise, evan as Tate Modern’s text again insists on connecting his practice suspiciously to feminist discourses.

Mugshots of dirtied toys make up Ahh…Youth! (1991), a group of eight incriminating shots of such playthings and a young teenage Kelley. It has remained one of the artist’s best-known creations, thanks in part to Sonic Youth’s use of one still for their 1992 album cover, Dirty. Kelley, filtering a photo of himself from his own school yearbook, is, appropriately enough, the most innocent looking. Set against Kelley’s clean-cut appearance, these adored keepsakes are now criminals imprisoned by the camera.

Kelley’s work can swing between extremes of adolescent energies—over-confidence and despair—to evoke a strong sense of arrested development. His Kandor (2005-09) series takes this approach first to Superman, using original sketches of the superhero’s home of Kandor to create model cities now encased in melted radioactive coatings. There, the fantasy of all-powerful superheroes and their exaggerated masculinity is set against the alienation and melancholia charted by writers like Sylvia Plath. Suffocation and stasis are apparent in such sickly green and shrunken displays, where bell jars entrap Superman’s city of hope from the outside world. A separate looping video has Superman read selections from The Bell Jar, a bizarre pairing that registers as prosaic versus anything more ponderous.

The nothingness that runs through Kelley’s art, presented in this sanitized gallery space, makes “Ghost and Spirit” one dispiriting experience. There are brief jolts of clarity, particularly in his stuffed toys works and poltergeist photography, but the sickly green coating that encases Superman’s home registers like a metaphor for the entire experience.

Plath, in her 1963 eponymous novel about a teenager’s mental breakdown, wrote, “the bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head.” It’s a line we see dutifully recited by Superman on screen. Not unlike the glass enclosures Kelley produced, this retrospective threatens to stifle near its finish. Between harrowing shrieks and defaced objects, “Ghost and Spirit” attempts to ensnare you in a dull world of disillusionment and boredom. Make sure you break for air.

“Mike Kelley, Ghost and Spirit” is on view at Tate Modern, London, until March 9, 2025.