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
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