"I tend to use writers and theories for my own ends.
And generally they’re poetic ends. I tend to use
psychoanalytic writing or psychological literature that
way."
"Psychoanalytic writing tends to be about people’s
daily problems, it’s more rooted in reality and daily
life. I’m more drawn to it than abstract philosophical
writings."
"I think what I make is beautiful. I think it’s
beautiful because terms, and divisions between terms, are
confused and divisions between categories start to slip.
That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it
produces humor. And both things interest me."
"For me psychedelia was sublime because
in psychedelia your worldview fell apart. That was a sublime
revelation, that was my youth, and that was my notion of
beauty."
How much do psychological
theories factor into your work?
KELLEY:
I don’t think it’s
something that’s there all the time. In certain projects
it is. In the "Uncanny" project it’s there
because Freud wrote, really, the only essay on the uncanny,
so I
used that
as a reference point.
I can’t say that I’m particularly
invested in Freudian ideas, though I do really like Freud’s
writings, I think they’re really beautifully written.
A lot of psychoanalytic writings are just not very interesting
to read, and Freud really is interesting to read. So I like
him as a writer, but in terms of the theory, so much of that
theory’s been absorbed in the popular culture. To get
into the nitpicky little details about all the squabbles
between the analysts and all those different psychological
theories, I don’t want to get to that. That’s
far too complicated and that’s not my focus really.
I tend to use writers and theories for my own ends. And generally
they’re poetic ends. I tend to use psychoanalytic writing
or psychological literature that way.
I’m actually
a big fan of the writings of Ferenczi who’s a contemporary
of Freud, and also Reich and Lange, whereas Lacan doesn’t
interest me very much. I just don’t find the writings
speak to me as literature. I tend to really like that psychological
and psychoanalytical writing tries to tackle basic human
motivations and problems. Also the way that those people
write about sublimation...how do I describe this...the fact
that one idea can be substituted for another or block another.
That’s very much like metaphor and that’s very
much, to me, like art. I really think art’s about representation.
And I don’t believe in nonobjective art, I don’t
think there’s such a thing. That’s not to say
that I’m a realist but I think all things operate on
multiple associational levels. That’s how people look
at the world. So I’m drawn to discourses that are interested
in that. Psychoanalytic writing tends to be about people’s
daily problems, it’s more rooted in reality and daily
life. I’m more drawn to it than abstract philosophical
writings.
For example in my paintings, I was thinking of just taking
random quotations from Ferenczi as if that explained the
paintings. Ferenczi has a lot of fantastic little snippets
that could be taken out of context. It’s not serious,
it’s just meant to throw the whole thing into some
kind of light. It provokes the viewer to project into it
in a more controlled way than they would naturally. I’ve
also been reading recently, oh, what’s her name, the
British psychotherapist who did a lot with children and play
theory? Melanie Klein. I’ve been reading a lot of Melanie
Klein and thinking of making some sculptures particularly
related to her ideas of play therapy—but in a musical context.
That genre of
writing is one of my favorite genres. In fact it’s
taken the place for me in my reading over literature, because
I don’t find much literature that interests
me nowadays. When I was younger I was really a bookworm and
read a lot of literature. But I don’t get pleasure
from it anymore, whereas I still get pleasure from reading
"shrink" books.
ART:21:
Can you talk about your own
writing?
KELLEY:
When I was younger, all my writing
was generated for performance work. So it was writing that
had to have a kind of flow. I was very much influenced by
writers like Raymond Roussel, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein,
and Thomas Aquinas. There’s always a sense of presence,
but at the same time, things shift—like in Aquinas’ "Proofs," or
how reiteration is used in Beckett or Stein. A lot of my
writing at that period was very associational,
but trying to be structured in a way where ideas could be
a stream of consciousness but be simple enough to flow one
to the next. Where you could flow and contradict yourself
but the audience—because of the durational aspect of
the performance—wouldn’t remember. They’d
remember the content, but they wouldn’t remember that
things change, and that really interests me about older forms
like
oral forms.
I started doing more critical writing in the ’80s when
I was very unhappy with how my work was being written about,
and how other artists that I respected or had some association
with and were being radically misrepresented in the art press.
But now I’ve tired of that. I don’t feel like
I need to be the voice of my generation or my group and I
don’t care so much about art world politics. So now
I’m much more interested in getting back into creative
writing. This project is very much a way for me to get back
into writing, and because I don’t have the time just
to do it, I have to work it into my work, somehow—like music.
I didn’t have time to play music anymore so I had to
make a project where I forced myself to make music. That
was the reality of it, otherwise I wasn’t ever going
to get to do it. But I still on occasion write catalog essays
or things like that. When I remounted the "Uncanny" exhibition,
I had to write a new preface for that because the art world
had changed a lot in fifteen years and I needed to update
my thoughts. But it wasn’t something I really wanted
to do, it was something I had to do.
ART:21:
What about your books?
KELLEY:
I’ve just published—in
the last two years—two books of my essays and informational
writings about my work. What hasn’t been published
are all the performative texts and writings for video. That’s
the project I want to do next, but that’s massive because
I’ve written a lot more of that than I have critical
texts.
ART:21:
Is there a limit to what you
would include?
KELLEY:
Oh, for sure. There are certain
kinds of things that I wouldn’t publish, like song
lyrics, because they’re just so stupid, they don’t
make any sense outside of the musical context. But I would
rework the performance texts for publication. I think they
can function as a kind of poetry.
ART:21:
Are the titles of your projects
important?
KELLEY:
Very much so. Often my titles
are quite lengthy, and they’re meant to be descriptive.
They’re trying to be clear, trying to say what it is,
but at the same time they reveal aesthetic clashes or their
wordiness gets to the point of incomprehensibility. I like
poetry, for example, in which the language can fall into
pure sound. Yet there’s always this tension between
the musicality of the language or the fact that it falls
into rhythm, into something you find in really complicated
language like theory or legalese. And I’m drawn to
that kind of language. A title like "Extracurricular
Activity Projective Reconstruction"—that’s
what it is. When you say it it’s hard to take it in,
it’s
a mouthful of words. But it’s not meaningless—that’s
what it is. Not all the titles are complicated like that,
just some.
Some are really simple.
ART:21:
How have critics understood
your work?
KELLEY:
I was associated with this so-called “Abject
Art” movement, in which notions of failure came into
play in the discussion of art. And because a lot of my work
looks towards so-called low forms, like folk art, or lower
end mass culture, critics of my work tended to confuse my
use of that with some kind of investment. That this is some
kind of “blue collar” aesthetic. Well, I might
come from that, but I have no love of it.
The art world’s changed a lot because recently such
things have found a place in the art world, when fifteen
years ago you’d never see in every gallery in New York
some kind of mass culture referent. Now every gallery has
such things and this discussion of slackers has become a
positive term rather than a negative term. This kind of discussion
doesn’t interest me whatsoever because who defines
these things? I can’t talk about it so abstractly,
it’s meaningless. So I don’t feel like getting
into specifics about that relative to other artists’ production.
ART:21:
What about the idea of beauty?
KELLEY:
This was a really big topic
in contemporary art. The so-called “new beauty” camp—art
becoming beautiful again. I think they’re talking about
conventional ideas of beauty and I’m more interested
in the sublime. I think it’s a kind of neo-conservatism
that fits right in with Republican ideology. It’s backwards-looking
and I’m not interested because the New Beauty is old-fashioned
beauty as far as I see it.
ART:21:
What do you think is beautiful?
KELLEY:
I think what I make is beautiful.
I think it’s beautiful because terms, and divisions
between terms, are confused and divisions between categories
start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime
effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me.
When you use the word sublime, traditionally it’s associated
with metaphysics. It’s a nineteenth century usage,
like the sublimity of a mountain that becomes like nature
and God. I don’t mean to evoke it in that way. I’m
interested in a less elevated beauty.
ART:21:
Can you say a little more about
the sublime?
KELLEY:
Well, like I said, I think that
kind of discussion of the sublime is a nineteenth century
metaphysical discussion, like Edmund Burke or the American
Transcendentalists. And of course, that’s not where
I’m coming from. For me psychedelia was sublime because
in psychedelia your worldview fell apart. That was a sublime
revelation, that was my youth, and that was my notion of
beauty. And that was a kind of cataclysmic sublime. It was
very interiorized, it wasn’t about a metaphysical outside,
it was about your own consciousness. That’s my starting
point of the sublime and I’ve had to take that into
a more conceptual sphere, which is perhaps an analytical
sublime, like how do you produce a sublime effect? Preaching
is a production of sublime effect. Poetry is a production
of sublime effect. Hypnosis is the production of sublime
effect. And those are all examples of it produced through
language. I think you can also produce it through image—image
clash, image resonance—things like that.
ART:21:
When did you know you wanted
to be an artist?
KELLEY:
I knew by the time I was a teenager
that I was going to be an artist, there’s no doubt
about that. There was nothing else for me to be. I didn’t
even want to be the other things that at the time were outside
general culture. I didn’t want to be a rock musician;
I wanted to be an artist. And I think the reason I chose
it was that at that time it was the most despicable thing
you could be in American culture. To be an artist at that
time had absolutely no social value. It was like planned
failure. You could never be a success. And the fact that
I’m now a professional artist? At that time it seemed
like a contradiction of terms. I came from a milieu in which
artists were despised, whereas rock musicians and drug dealers
were—you know—hipster culture heroes.
