Since the late ‘70s, Mike Kelley has produced a body of work that takes as its target notions of taste, morality, authority, and social responsibility and addresses the American social and psychological condition. The artist grew up in a working-class community in the suburbs of Detroit, where he became involved with the counterculture scenes of rock and free jazz, from Iggy and the Stooges to cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra, that became ideal critical tools for subverting ideological orders.
By Efi Michalarou Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
“Mike Kelley: Kandors 1999-2011” at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Los Angeles is the first comprehensive survey of the late artist’s “Kandors” series. For the series Kelley took the story of Superman’s shrunken home of Kandor to create a dialogue between artistic styles while musing over concepts like home, identity, and escape. The expansive work walks around, into, and through the bell-jar encased mini-metropolis, popularized in comics to transport viewers to a place that only exists in our minds. In the late ‘90s, Kelley was invited to participate in a group exhibition in Germany, which focused on the impending millennium by exhibiting contemporary art and historical objects with “a special emphasis on the ‘new media’ of the past”. As the artist wrote, “In response to these themes, I decided to create a project that centered on an out-of-date image of the future re-presented through recent technological developments. I chose to focus on the fictional city of Kandor from the Superman comics series”. The exhibition begins with “Kandor-Con 2000” (1999-2007), the first work in the Kandors series, a densely layered installation that includes animation of the comic book city, architectural models, renderings, and a video of an actor dressed as Superman reciting passages from Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. On view for the first time in the United States, “Kandors Full Set” (2005-09) comprises 20 large-scale, glass bell jars or bottles and 21 cast resin miniature cities, the series is presented in total darkness in accordance with Kelley’s focus on the light-scattering properties of the glass vessels. The exhibition also includes the 2007 works “Kandor 1”, “Kandor 3”, “Kandor 7”, and “Kandor 17”. Each of these sculptures includes an illuminated miniature version of the Kandor city on a plinth, encased in a glass bell jar coupled with faux gas tanks and hoses, which intend to evoke the life sustaining vapors that Superman used to keep the citizens of Kandor alive. Video projections, depicting the bottles with swirling atmospheric and light effects inside them, feature an otherworldly soundtrack composed by Kelley. The video installation “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35 (Dour Gnomes)” (2010), links to the series through a narrative that transports the viewer inside the city of Kandor. Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles is one of the final works of the Kandors series, “Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude)” (2011), that contains a dimly lit cave-like environment surrounded by fragmented boulders, a gas tank, hoses, a buck, and chains, which evokes a haunting sense of unease and menace.
Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, Duration: 21/10/17-21/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
Since the late ‘70s, Mike Kelley has produced a body of work that takes as its target notions of taste, morality, authority, and social responsibility and addresses the American social and psychological condition. The artist grew up in a working-class community in the suburbs of Detroit, where he became involved with the counterculture scenes of rock and free jazz, from Iggy and the Stooges to cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra, that became ideal critical tools for subverting ideological orders.
