Superman Recites from The Bell Jar

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

“Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath” from l999 is one of the video installations in the Mike Kelley exhibition which just closed at MoMA PS1. Along with the Kandor pieces devoted to Superman's preservation of his childhood world on Krypton--a series of bell jars in and of themselves-- this piece contains two central elements of Kelley’s iconography: fatalism and popular culture.  Actually the exhibit was an iconography party filled with self-annihilators like Plath and Pasolini (one of the works from a series called Banners from College Campus Flyers is an advertisement for an “Actor to Play Pier Paolo Pasolini…age not important, noacting experience required.” Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone boxes and Marx’s lumpenproletariat all makes appearances, though in a very telling intersection between art and chance, Kelley’s “Lumpenprole and Ageistprop,” an afghan covering a series of found objects was removed from the exhibition, leaving only the memory of something that once was. Which is really the point. Kelley's work explores the interior of the psyche, mining repressed memories of childhood, of trauma, of sex. His paintings of pre-op transsexuals are perhaps the most obvious manifestation his edgy sexuality, but there's an evanescence to much of Kelley’s work, as if the fate of "Lumpenprole" were prophetic. Kelley was also fascinated with schools (MoMaPS1, a former school, was the perfect venue for this show). One of his works is titled “Educational Complex” (1995) and here is the writing one finds on the wall of another piece, "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 (l968), and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room (Office Cubicles), 2002,"  “say fellows watch it when you force ol' Horseface to suck you off. His buck tooth overbite will cap off your dick just as easily as the top off a beer bottle.” Who doesn’t remember the study of jottings like this being interrupted by a wad of wet paper towels thrown over the stall of a high school toilet?

Times Obit Hits Grand Slam

The Times obit page hit a grand slam on February 2. The following obituaries appeared. “Dorothea Tanning, 101, Surrealist Painter of Dream Images.” Tanning was the wife of Max Ernst. Grace Glueck, the Times art critic, who wrote the obit remarked, “in the mid-1950’s Ms. Tanning broke from the mirror like precision of narrative Surrealism to take up what she called her ‘prism’ paintings later renamed ‘Insomnias.’ These are enigmatic canvases in which bodies and body parts, barely discernible visages and biomorphic forms float in dream spaces generated by fractured planes and diaphanous scrims.” The obit of Mike Kelley (“Mike Kelley, an Artist With Attitude, Dies at 57”) was written by another Times art critic, Holland Carter.  Commenting on "a series of sculptural pieces using children's stuffed animals," which Kelley had done, Carter said, “On one level the pieces were sardonic send-ups of trends like Minimalism, which Mr. Kelley despised as elitist. On another, they took aim at the strain of too-easy sentimentality he found repellant in popular culture. At yet another level, these pieces, with their martyred dolls and ruined promise of warmth, were innocence-and-experience metaphors, suggesting the trauma of hurt and loss that underlay the juvenile delinquent antics that surrounded them.” “Don Cornelius, ‘Soul Train’ Creator, Is Dead at 75” was written by James C. McKinley, Jr, the Houston Bureau Chief of the Times, whose piece about the gang rape of a ll year old girl back in 2011 had created controversy.  Describing “Soul Train,” McKinley said, “In its heyday, it was a formative experience every Saturday morning for young people of all backgrounds and afforded some of the most important soul and R&B acts their first national television exposure. It was also a platform for white rock musicians like Elton John and David Bowie to reach black audiences.”  “Wislawa Szymborska, 88, Nobel Poet,” was written by Raymond H. Anderson who contributes to the ArtsBeat blog at the Times and wrote the obit of Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky back in 2010. “The Nobel announcement surprised Ms. Szymborska, who had lived an intensely private life, “ Anderson commented.  “She was kind of paralyzed by it,” Anderson quotes Clare Cavanagh, one of her translators as saying. “Her friends called it the ‘Nobel Tragedy.’ It was a few years before she wrote another poem.” "Anthony J Bevilacqua, 88; Led Philadelphia Catholics” and “Ian Abercrombie, a Boss on ‘Seinfeld’” were the two other obits which rounded out the page that day.