Mike Kelley - KANDORS
29.9. - 22.12.2007 ----- Jablonka Galerie, Berlin/Cologne.
Mike Kelley’s installation KANDORS is the 3-dimentional representation of the graphical depiction of the only remaining city of superhero Superman’s exploded hometown, Krypton. According to the comic, Kandor is enclosed in a bottle. Kelley has created 10 different versions of the bottled city by transferring the imaginary imagery of it in the comic panel to a 3-dimentional context and a human scale. The cities co-exist in the Jablonka space, completing an extraterrestrial Universe of different living mechanisms that protrude intangible energy mostly in the form of light and sound. Entering the space, the viewer is put in the position where he/she is able to watch the processes of those bottled cultures, hear their breathing and compare themselves to the sci-fi, technocratic reality of the space that is very well achieved by the vivid phosphorescing maintaining colours. The eye and sense of physical existence gets accustomed to facing glass containers of different sizes and content in every second step. Bottles, large scale jars, tubes and lenticular surfaces, video screens and illusive projections. This doubtful vision develops the stylistic context in which the artist identifies the work. A strong element of Kandors is the use of sound composed by Kelley and spread throughout the space as well as selectively emerging from Kandor units as detailed processes of a wider one. Not quite surprisingly sound is used as such by the artist, taken under consideration that Mike Kelley is also known for his discography and especially his involvement with the anti-rock/art-rock band DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. Emerging from a musical scene with strong artistic background, post-punk chronology, experimental progression and sophisticated audio evolution, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS was a band formed by art students in the mid 70’s mostly to express an artistic statement with underground ethics.
The band’s relationship with art and especially performance art in combination with their unromanticised Velvet Underground influence and the participation of Stooges and MC5 members as well as their broken rock riffs and Sun Ra - ish inarticulate solos should be enough to keep the band standing out from the no-wave scene but at the same time embracing the anti-art and anti-rock attitude of the times and the times to come in the following decade. Rid of the hopeful spirituality of the 70’s, already progressing to the cynicism of the 80’s the underground scene in America created a solid base for artists like Mike Kelley, Thurston Moore, Niagara and Kim Gordon to establish their work in musical, conceptual and visual terms to the present day with significant progression.
Subsequently, Kelley’s relationship with sound acquires a psychoacoustic behaviour found in his audio and installation works. In addition, his collaboration with various other artists of that acoustic and artistic scene such as Sonic Youth, Jim Shaw (also a member of DESTROY ALL MONSTERS) and Paul McCarthy, compile a solid body of avant-garde works in which can be identified a certain progression - from naïve, teenage angst socio-political and stylistic aggression to studied, mature and selective sound and imagery compositions. Kandors is an installation clearly rooting from the comic graphic culture’s aesthetics but with certain superior physical strength rather than subject-matter strength.
--- chrisaphenia danai /
