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In his vast repertoire of sculpture, installation, performance, video work and drawing, artist Mike Kelley presents psychological investigations into personal and cultural memory, the sources of which are often drawn from the artist’s own childhood and adolescence. Since the late 1970s, Kelley has adopted aesthetic forms from underground and folk cultures to conduct these pseudo-scientific inquiries, a transgressive strategy that purposefully undermines purported rationalism of his investigation. Earlier works often employ domestic techniques such as knitting and sewing or handmade craft objects collected from second-hand stores, gestures that are at once anti-heroic and evocative of childhood memories.
A new video installation, Rose Hobart II, arose from Kelley’s recent explorations into his own past, namely his educational experiences. In Educational Complex (1995), the artist constructed a three-dimensional model that fused all of buildings, spaces and rooms of schools that he attended into one enormous architectural assemblage. To produce the piece, however, Kelley relied upon his own memory as a guide rather than maintaining the strict floor plans with the “forgotten” spaces rendered as empty voids in the resulting structure. In a subsequent installation, A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark's Film “Porky's” (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnick's Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull” (1968), and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room (2002), the artist displays floor plans of these various institutions amended with notes of his own memories associated with them.
In both works, Kelley reclaims these spaces through his own memories of them and memories located within them. However, by closely analyzing its title, A Continuous Screening… looks at this once “forgotten” space as an opportunity to imagine new functions, in essence, constructing a new memory of it. Rose Hobart II realizes Kelley’s re-imagination. The installation features a large conical structure through which viewers can peek and see the popular film Porky’s (a comedy the chronicles the exploits of a group of sex-obsessed adolescents) itself re-edited and re-imagined with a new soundtrack. This viewer’s voyeuristic gaze echoes a famous scene in the film in which the protagonists spy on a group of unsuspecting young women though a hole into a girls’ shower room.
The title of the installation, Rose Hobart II, references a 1936 film made my American Surrealist Joseph Cornell titled Rose Hobart, in which Cornell edits down the film East of Borneo (1931) to include only scenes featuring the female film star. A somewhat condensed narrative, the film becomes more an essay on Cornell’s desire for the actress. In referencing this film and employing its strategy, Kelley locks into on the subject of his own desire: a real memory of a formative experience that is often enshrined in popular culture.
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