mettaartlove

loving mike kelley & the gagosian gallery(ies) and/or the spectacle of loneliness

a purple room
in purple gloom
a distant voice
will echo forth
dimly toning bell
like the muffled cry of a kitten
drowning in a well
Oh it’s you I crave
encased in amethyst

-sang the teenage witchy girl sitting in the dark beautiful purple satan/satin velvet living room

@ DAY IS DONE/ Mike Kelley @ Gagosian Gallery/Chelsea  November 11 - December

THE WOODS

Mike, I have been fighting loneliness lately.   I am always fighting loneliness, it is just that sometimes I am lucky enough to fight it with someone.  Then it feels like love and all it is all about us and them and it doesn't really feel like loneliness inside.  It is all lit up and on the edge of hallucinatory and the big cliff we are hanging over feels exciting and we stay a long time, to see just how far we can hang over.  Sometimes we are drunk on our outsiderness and it feels quite lovely.  That is not how I feel right now.  Not lovely today, but sad and full and a little bit brokenhearted.  But that's not your problem.

I remember the first time I got stoned in high school.  No it wasn't the first time actually, it was the second but it was in the same weekend as the first.  It wasn't the first time I smoked of course, but it was the first time I figured out how to inhale and got high. 

It was winter and it snuck up on me through the cold.  The first time was bright sunlight and I was tobogganing with my friends and the speed came crushing through my forehead and the whole field was white inside me, laughing.  I remember standing up at the bottom of the hill, feeling like the beginning of evolution, like I was growing from some kind of  one celled organism into just one cell of the mass arbitrary teenagedness that seethed around me, stoned, in the snow.   I tried to let go. 

The second time was two days later, still cold and still outside – we were always stoned outside – in the woods of the Palisades Cliffs over the Hudson, walking, looking for a waterfall we had heard about.  I was exponentially stoned.  It was overcast, not  as startlingly sunny as the day with the toboggans, and we started way too late.  We trudged single file, hooded against the black trees, into oblivion, no one speaking as we got more and more lost.  I was freaking out inside my hood, spinning out with barely a tether to anything.  I didn't know how to be high.  I wanted to go home, but being stoned only reinforced that the home I craved was just a dream.  It was a dark long time before we found our way.

It’s hard to be a teenager groping around in the dark, you almost need to be high or pretend really, really hard to be someone else.

NOT BELONGING TO

In Day is Done, the room was filled with cold high school tableaus, towered over by large (often empty) video screens and the room was filled with pretty much indecipherable screaming.  The room filled me with a proportionate degree of reverse calm and familiarity: the empty couches, the still, unadorned fireplace (also empty), the empty bleachers, the flat home with carport (empty) and the window filled with black and white static.

You know all the signs of belonging, Mike, but I know you are lonely too.  It is so great that you could make your spectacle of loneliness and separation, and I mean that in the most genuine way.  I actually had very little envy of you when I visited your show at Gagosian.  I had expected to have my usual rage over the economic inequity of the art world but I didn't, not really.  Like I said before, it helps when I’m not that moved by the work and I don’t say that to be mean.  I had fun and everything, there was a lot to look at and I love the pit that stays inside, like after the roller coaster.

The girl at the desk was particularly dismissive when I tried to buy one of the the tshirts on the racks, the ones that were really part of the exhibition and I felt like being mean to her, but I wasn't.  Of course, I kind of knew that the shirts were probably a piece of art by their proximity to the other spectacles included in the show, but really these days, how can you ever know for sure?  It could be a trick or just some coded information and who wants to be tricked or shown to be out of the loop, so I took a chance and asked the question and I was proven wrong – tricked and so uncool.  Luckily, Mike, I've finally developed some resources around the uncool thing and I can handle it, even if it stings.  The t-shirts on the racks were so much cooler than the ones really for sale, and I wanted them so much, it was worth it, to be patronized by the pretty girl behind the computer.

I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING

Not too far away from her, all alone and abandoned, was that one little blond boy on the screen, the one who cried “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!”  over and over again while being chased and I actually felt shame and loss that I couldn’t help him.  It was my favorite moment.  I thought maybe that was a piece of you, or many pieces of you. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to art.

Where are you Mike? I longed to be closer to you.  The guards, all cool and all black, black as in suit and tie and black as in African American, elegant and super cool, not the usual museum guard uniform, kept strolling popping up, raising a finger or a whole hand and stopping me from loving you as much as I would like.   What’s with these black guards anyway?  They’re all over Chelsea . . . to say it's awkward and loaded when everybody looking at art is pretty much white is a gross understatement. What is going on?  I couldn’t wait to get out of there, the timing was all off and I couldn’t find my way in, so many things I felt I had no access to, standing in front of portals, screens, waiting for them to open.

PINK CURTAIN

The only place I could love you, and by love I mean, photograph your work and own a little piece of you and take you home with me, was in the little dark amateur stripper room in the front of the gallery, near the pretty girl and the t-shirts and to the left of the altar of puke (guess that’s a story for another day) . . I had a truly yummy moment of privacy with you there, like locking the door in the bathroom at a party -- inside the sculpture room of PINK CURTAIN, the material rotating and whipping slowly, pink theatre curtains around a stripper pole, circling in a black redness, actually impossible to photograph, no matter how hard I tried.  The silhouettes of sexy dancing girls, hard to make out, vulnerable, the sound of the whipping fabric.   No one came in for a long, long time. I loved it in there. 

I really love that you got the opportunity to make something so big, so epic, and I have to love Gagosian for making that possible as much as I spit at his conglomerate when I’m feeling sorry for myself, not that I really know anything about him really.  I know the money’s got to come from somewhere.

I get it, like making a movie underwritten and financed, where you can conjure up anything you could possibly imagine . . let’s go!  Hold my Hand and We can fly together across the Land!  Higher and Higher!

That's the thing about a level of prominence in the art world, at the point that your work can call such a high price, you can make work that pretty much defies objectification but can still be sold as objects because the collectors at that level can afford to design their house or warehouse around the piece, thus freeing the artist from the constraints of what is feasible, what is conceptual, what will support them.  It all becomes so fluid, this imagination, this landscape.  I am so happy for you, Mike, that you have this freedom.  I am so happy for you that you have the freedom to make this big work and let your imagination run wild and be made real.   

THE LONELY POOL

I have compassion too, for the isolation that comes with this.  I don’t know you at all, but I can imagine and I can be so codependent.

We can float above the abyss as long as we believe that there is something that will save us: beauty, sex, god, athletic prowess . . we can float and sleep . . . protected by belonging.

The relationship between loneliness and money cannot be avoided.  Of course, money really, really helps in the precise moment of being lonely, because it can be so distracting.  You can always try something else, buy something, some opportunity or someone else, when things don’t work out.  It just doesn't stick.  At the bottom of the lonely pool we are all together.  We really are. Let’s stay together.

For a little while or a long time.

love you, me

ps I don't know who was in the bunny suit outside the gallery, I didn't go to their website and I didn't mean to exploit them, but the guards wouldn't let me take any pictures inside and they wouldn't let me sit on the floor to pray and meditate, so I had to do it outside with the bunny.  S/He was sweet.

NEXT LOVE: Robert Rauschenberg "Combines" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

loving tracey emin or fucking like narcissistic oblivion or more importantly how can fucking be really good and worth it

  

 

 

The artist, Emin, was dancing in this sort of drunken stripper way. It made me feel sort of lesbianish. I wanted to kiss her so I tried coming on to her by telling her she looked great and I liked her dance moves. She sneered a Billy Idol sneer at me -- my send off for the evening.

                                            ELIZABETH HAYT,  AUTHOR OF "I'M NO SAINT"
                                                         

WANT TO BE WITH U

OK, Tracey, what I really want to know is, who is U, who is you, who is you, you and U and I don't mean I want to know the identity of your lover, or everyone you have ever slept with, I want to know who is U, when we are in love, who is U, the lover or the audience or is U just the haze, just that stuff the sun burns off, that fuzzy narcotic red in morning or at dusk . . I want to know, Can I Be U?

I can sit in bed, just after deep sex, and then smoke and then eat something fabulously sweet and then get on the computer and check my email and then watch something fabulously decadent in my bed with my lover and then, and then and then I'm still scratching the sheets, still sniffing, hungry still and empty spot, me . . U

Marion Woodman, Jungian Psychoanalyst once said, "The body knows the lover is never, never, never going to return."  She used that fact to illustrate the roots of addiction, specifically at that moment, feminine addiction to food, food related trauma and, as she put it,  "The Addiction to Perfection".

Everytime I press my thumb into the 8 key twice in a text message, I see that U like a cup and I love how easy it is to just hit that U, no spelling. I get the immediate pleasurable gratification to finish that loving sentiment, love U, C U, thinking of U.

Tracey, I am writing to U today, today I am thinking of U, I love you.

THE BED

The ridge of my back is bristling Tracey, but I have to remind the two of us of how long hatred and contempt can stay in the body.  My contempt of you is not in the present, it comes from long ago, and, as mentioned before, the body does not forget anything. I don't know if we are actually speaking hatred here, anyway. I use hatred to juxtapose with love but it is all love, isn't it, this attention, this compulsive attention, running my tongue along a nagging empty space in my mouth -- this attentiveness to pain is a form of care. 

It is often said that where there is an extreme negative reaction coined as hatred, it is just another veil of love, for the opposite of love is not hatred or contempt or jealousy or bitterness -- all forms of love in their intensity -- but indifference.

Tracey, can I say this right now -- with love, without seeming mean --  it is easier to love you more directly when your work is not as strong, then I can eliminate my covetousness from the work, if not from your rock star London lifestyle – the friends, the home, the cash .  It shows I am getting better, healthier, now that I can soften my heart when the work is not as good, it shows that, although competitive, at least I have my values in the right place.

In 1999 I stood in front of your bed at Lehmann Maupin and I was consumed with possessive love/rage at your audacity and How Come I Didn't Think of This First.  That and the pages from your journal framed, Shit, What A Good Idea.  I wanted to both have you all to myself and eliminate you, terminate you, like that maniacal rage that caused Sleeping Beauty's Stepmother the Evil Queen to send The Huntsman out to kill Sleeping Beauty and bring back her heart.

That's it Tracey, like two slutty girls that always go out together, who obsessively groom and provoke each other, who cannot party without the other, who have to end up making out with each other just to wrench the other out of circulation, I wanted to own you in that divine possession -- a different kind of love than the divine proposed here, the metta love, the love I am trying to learn, the new love I am practicing.  I wanted to own you in the old way I used to know how to love, using my love to stop my lover from doing anything that does not reflect or benefit me. 

The bed and it's evidence of how much sex you had, I just couldn't handle it, how could I ever keep up with you?

WHY DID YOU STOP ME FROM LOVING YOU   

I love your sheets, Tracey, the faded faded flowers, the white. My sheets, now always white, used to be baby roses, peonies, cabbage roses.   

As I began to haughtily raise myself up the other day @ "I Can Feel Your Smile", me all in black and high and mighty, rising over the precious beauty of your objects themselves, the exquisite and expensive framing, I was struck by this simultaneity, the sheets, just one more simultaneity – another, along with the loss of dignity around the deep need and sadness and loneliness that comes when we connect (or not), and then sex itself and then the pure hurting.

How can we stand coming up with the same ideas all the time, any of us?  I guess it makes a difference if the work is selling and who is paying it, but even still . .  we're all born on the same planet at the same time, are we not -- sisters, lovers, ufo abductees . . isn't the object of this metta love to prove that we are probably the same person even, are the molecules really all that different, just a different organization, differing concentrations of slightly differing DNA . . .

So does it not make any difference that we make similar art, that we have such simultaneous impulses . . does it make any difference who is first?

I did find it strange that not one art writer, in all the press I read around your show, mentioned the similarity to Jack Pierson's work, I guess it doesn't really make any difference after all, who is first, because we are all lonely together, oh I'm not sure if I can believe it but I'm truly trying to work it out, for I know I must love if I'm going to survive, and I must believe we all deserve to find ourselves, at our own pace.

INSANE REFLECTION

And who am I to judge anyway -- the fucking, the repetition, the intriguing (a new verb a sexually addicted lover introduced me to – intriguing: when you are pulling someone in and virtually fucking them with your mind and words while maintaining a certain chasteness or celibacy), the addiction to loneliness, the manipulation of the world through your own despair . . . I still play, and play and play all those game, my motives are still suspect. 

This is how I can love you.

I couldn't just throw away the sheets as too pretty, too well framed, too much of a Jack rip-off, I was to busy copping to my most recent simultaneity, the evidence of my own power-art-fucking-sex-gamesmanship, one I claimed as my last, my most recent last, but one nonetheless, a minor infraction at best, in the last couple of months, nothing too spectacular, just a online flirtation with a young, cocky curator that got really personal really fast, even though it was clear from the beginning that he had a serious girlfriend, neither of us cared, we played quite readily, a very explicit truth or dare game that went on for days while both of us were at work:

(my response below to one his dares –
describe in detail your last sexual encounter)

you did rock my world baby, she texted him as she left

he was dancing in just his jeans to Shaggy, a CD
he stole from his daughter, the music
was old but pretty naughty and she laughed and
danced too. She told him he had to keep all his
clothes on for at least the next three hours and
she was going to as well . She kept laughing, her
hands over her head and grinding her ass into him
he was delirious begging, renegotiating the
clothing rule, but she held firm. In spite of
this, she ended up in just her underpants, she kept
laughing til he was out of his mind, the shaggy record
repeating

they didn't make it to three hours but by the time
he laid her down she didn't remember anything
other than the compulsion to be fucked and that
didn't matter anyway because his whole self sunk
into her in an osmosis kind of desire that caused
a sort of blackout that was unfortunate cause it
all was incredibly yummy, she kept coming back out
to pull his hair back and look into his eyes to
make sure he was still with her. sometimes once
the fucking began he became only cock and his
eyes only black, which was to be expected. she was
cerebral at heart, as sensual as she may
seem, and these kinds of psychic withdrawals or
disappearances threw her off her rhythm.

The riffs would come and go, they laid under the
open window even though the rain outside was damp
and cold. she woke to find herself on top of him,
naked, no blanket. he reached around her back,
flipped her over and pressed himself down on her,
darling, darling

she never told him that sometimes she fantasized
that he was her father, not her actual father, but
some father somewhere, it was the way he said
darling when he came . . .maybe because she kept
telling herself she didn't care . . 10/12/05


Later that week, when he dared me to send him a love letter complete with a scandalous gift, I ripped a tiny corner off the white sheet of that unmade bed, stapled it to a piece of color xerox of my tattoo and mailed it to him, the young cocky curator, not the daddy.  I wasn't thinking of you, Tracey or your sheets, at that time, honestly.

I dared him to call me. He didn't. 

I didn't really care, I didn't, Tracey, but I will admit it here, to you -- I hate to be left alone and empty-handed. 


NEXT LOVE:  MIKE KELLEY "Day is Done" @ GAGOSIAN