Last chance to see Mike Kelley’s art in New York!

I’m using this post as an opportunity to remind everyone about the Mike Kelley show at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea as well as recap some of the ideas discussed in class today. First, the Kelley show will be on view through Saturday, Oct. 24, the first New York show dedicated to Kelley’s Kandor series. And if that weren’t enough reason to go, a set piece from Kelley’s film, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais) (2011) has been installed with the film projected on a nearby wall. Click here for a clip of the film (warning: NSFW!) and check out some installation shots of the exhibition from Hauser & Wirth’s website:

Read more about Kelley and the exhibition, as well as get info about location and gallery hours, at the Hauser & Wirth website.

As mentioned in the first part of today’s class, Kelley’s art and Elektra are examples of works that extremely evocative to the point of perhaps being disturbing. Elektra might disturb at the level of the subject, a woman so intent on murdering her mother as revenge for the murder of her father that it borders on obsessive or even psychopathic. (Also disturbing might be the Cersei and Jaime Lannister dynamic between Elektra and Orestes but I digress.) Kelley’s art may disturb people on the level of form; the architectural models of Kandor seem to double as both buildings and references to other objects, thereby imbuing something many associate with childhood (and therefore innocence) like Superman with elements of … well, stuff that might not be so innocent. This piece titled Estral Star #3, though not on view at Hauser & Wirth, is also a good example of Kelley’s approach.

In class Prof. Minter contextualized Strauss’s Elektra when he explained the Decadent movement of the late nineteenth century in which new conceptions of beauty were explored via subjects with violent or sexual themes. Concurrent with, and closely related to, the Decadent movement was the Symbolist movement that began as a literary movement in France. Symbolism’s significance lies in its insistence that, above all else, the work of art should express the artist’s personal or emotional states rathe than function as a vehicle to teach or moralize, the dominant paradigm for art in Europe. Also mentioned in class was the connection between Elektra’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud, and I need to correct my earlier statement: it was Freud’s student, Carl Jung, who came up with the term Elektra complex, not Freud! However, I think the key takeaway from both mine and Prof. Minter’s comments still stands: works of art can still fascinate despite being grotesque or “ugly” or provoking disturbing feelings in the audience – and even form the basis of its appeal! Freudian psychoanalysis assumes an individual’s behaviors stem from their (repressed) memories of trauma; in other words, there is an emotional reason for their seemingly-irrational or pathological behavior rather a medical condition. Considering demonic possession or humanity’s inherent sinfulness were also seen as valid reasons at certain points in history, Freud’s approach was considered quite modern.

Freudian psychoanalysis, Strauss’s Elektra, and the Decadent and Symbolist movements point to broader changes in cultural, intellectual, and artistic attitudes in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, underlying these shifts is an investigation into connections between an individual’s inner psychological makeup and any seemingly-irrational or disturbing outward expression whether that outward expression manifests in literature, art or as Elektra sang, in deed.