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Lot Essay
Hardly any American contemporary artists have dared to plunge as deeply into the demented darkness at the heart of humanity as Mike Kelley. Over the course of more than three decades, Kelley produced a tremendous body of work across many media, such as music, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting video, and photography. With a probing eye and a cutting wit, Kelley studied the immensely complex systems of identity, faith and control, all the while subverting conventional notions of sexuality, power, popular culture, and art making itself.
The present lot, Early American Landscape, belongs to a rare series of drawings, paintings, objects, and props related to the performance Meditation on a Can of Vernor’s, which took place at a private Los Angeles residence on 10 June 1981. Constituting what the artist described as “essentially… a monologue,” Meditation is rooted in the artist’s fascination with the grinning, winking, gnome-like mascot for Vernor’s ginger ale, a soft drink brewed in Kelley’s hometown of Detroit. Like so much of the artist’s most searching and destabilizing work, Meditation begins with a darkling analysis of a seemingly banal, fairly minor cultural signifier, then quickly expands focus, casting shadows across the collective American subconscious, shadows that do not obscure but rather reveal. Riffing on the disquieting qualities of the mascots leering expression and his manipulative cuteness, Kelley breaks away into a pun-riddled rant about power and subjugation, reveling in the innuendo of references to the “seat of power” and the “hot seat.”
The drawings and paintings related to Meditation feature long, meandering rivers extending out beyond the horizon lines of lonely, unpopulated planes and canyons. The three known paintings feature a full moon hanging over the river’s vanishing point, while the two drawings feature a setting sun. Because both the paintings and the drawings are rendered without color, it is at first difficult to discern between night and day. This sense of temporal uncertainty and the intensely tilted perspective recall the surreal courtyards and train stations of de Chirico, while the subject matter and composition harkens back to the paintings of the Hudson River School.
Early American Landscape shows a thin gray river half-filling an endless fissure extending diagonally across an empty plateau. The horizon line is extremely high in the composition, allowing for only a sliver of sky dotted with white stars and stained at upper left with the pale light of a recently set sun. Kelley has framed the painting with crude strips of cardboard painted dark brown. Curiously, the left half of the frame is considerably thicker than the right: the top of the frame is abruptly truncated at about three quarters of the way across; the bottom at about one fifth. This anomaly may appear to be the result of slipshod craftsmanship, but closer inspection reveals that the shifts in thickness of the frame correspond directly to the edge of a looming black shadow that bisects the river at a sharp angle, creating a dramatic “X” at the center of the painting. The disturbances in the frame amplify the high tension of the composition, injecting a heavy dose of dread and dislocation into the desolate silence.
The Early American Landscapes can be read as psychological portraits of the natural world at a specific moment in time. Kelley evacuates the picturesque beauty and wonder of the Hudson River School and replaces it with a claustrophobic emptiness and connotations of the impending carnage of Manifest Destiny. The viewer must confront an unsettling vision of America before America that seems frozen in the inevitability of its annihilation. This inevitability is made explicit in the recurring motif of the river, which, in the drawings from the series, is alternately crowned by the words “THE FUTURE” and “THE PAST,” conveying a complicated sense of woeful nostalgia and cynical anxiety.
The present lot, Early American Landscape, belongs to a rare series of drawings, paintings, objects, and props related to the performance Meditation on a Can of Vernor’s, which took place at a private Los Angeles residence on 10 June 1981. Constituting what the artist described as “essentially… a monologue,” Meditation is rooted in the artist’s fascination with the grinning, winking, gnome-like mascot for Vernor’s ginger ale, a soft drink brewed in Kelley’s hometown of Detroit. Like so much of the artist’s most searching and destabilizing work, Meditation begins with a darkling analysis of a seemingly banal, fairly minor cultural signifier, then quickly expands focus, casting shadows across the collective American subconscious, shadows that do not obscure but rather reveal. Riffing on the disquieting qualities of the mascots leering expression and his manipulative cuteness, Kelley breaks away into a pun-riddled rant about power and subjugation, reveling in the innuendo of references to the “seat of power” and the “hot seat.”
The drawings and paintings related to Meditation feature long, meandering rivers extending out beyond the horizon lines of lonely, unpopulated planes and canyons. The three known paintings feature a full moon hanging over the river’s vanishing point, while the two drawings feature a setting sun. Because both the paintings and the drawings are rendered without color, it is at first difficult to discern between night and day. This sense of temporal uncertainty and the intensely tilted perspective recall the surreal courtyards and train stations of de Chirico, while the subject matter and composition harkens back to the paintings of the Hudson River School.
Early American Landscape shows a thin gray river half-filling an endless fissure extending diagonally across an empty plateau. The horizon line is extremely high in the composition, allowing for only a sliver of sky dotted with white stars and stained at upper left with the pale light of a recently set sun. Kelley has framed the painting with crude strips of cardboard painted dark brown. Curiously, the left half of the frame is considerably thicker than the right: the top of the frame is abruptly truncated at about three quarters of the way across; the bottom at about one fifth. This anomaly may appear to be the result of slipshod craftsmanship, but closer inspection reveals that the shifts in thickness of the frame correspond directly to the edge of a looming black shadow that bisects the river at a sharp angle, creating a dramatic “X” at the center of the painting. The disturbances in the frame amplify the high tension of the composition, injecting a heavy dose of dread and dislocation into the desolate silence.
The Early American Landscapes can be read as psychological portraits of the natural world at a specific moment in time. Kelley evacuates the picturesque beauty and wonder of the Hudson River School and replaces it with a claustrophobic emptiness and connotations of the impending carnage of Manifest Destiny. The viewer must confront an unsettling vision of America before America that seems frozen in the inevitability of its annihilation. This inevitability is made explicit in the recurring motif of the river, which, in the drawings from the series, is alternately crowned by the words “THE FUTURE” and “THE PAST,” conveying a complicated sense of woeful nostalgia and cynical anxiety.