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I was not the kind of person who was ever really meant to be a child. I was born geriatric with the sensibilities of a grouchy sluggish man and for a long time I stood out, often in a negative light. I was essentially a loser. Each morning, regardless of whether it’s a sunny and carefree Saturday morning (the warmth of the sunlight hitting my face through my bedroom window and the sound of kind souls laughing in the distance) or it’s a grey emotionless workday with a soggy and hostile commute across London stretched out ahead of me (loudspeakers blaring on the Overground, the android text message alert tone on repeat and the inescapable cry of an infant). I will always be grateful that it will never be a school day ever again. Our days may be long and boring and hurtful, there might be a million disappointments and missed opportunities and bad social connections that make up the muddier texture of our adulthoods, but they are not schooldays, and I am free.
Our age bracket was the first to encounter cyberbullying (now called bullying) and I worked out quickly that it wouldn’t get that much better for any of us. Cyberbullying in the mid 2000s was almost like being bullied IRL but it had the unique ability to make you feel overwhelmed in the silence of your own family computer room or kitchen table. The internet did not live with us or follow us around like it does now, the internet was designated to a specific corner of the house or within certain rooms, accompanied by a veneer pull-out keyboard desk. It was something you had to switch on and wait for patiently, the more you squirmed and became impatient, the longer it took. It was the portal to possibility.
Bullying as a rite of adolescent passage had now become low effort and far more entertaining on the part of the bully but it remained utterly and completely exhausting for the bullied. Circa 2006, bullying was no longer a private act within a set of rusted school gates, it had converted itself into public flogging or a humiliation ritual with a potential audience of the entire school. It was a demonstration of what happens when you are destined to stand out or you happen to be born too old.
Moments of distilled nostalgia are central to the work of the American artist Mike Kelley whose major retrospective exhibition, Ghost and Spirit, concluded at the Tate Modern this March. Kelley was masterful in his practice of interpretation and subversion through installation, photography, music and film and his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000-2011) were a notable highlight of his oeuvre. They became his final long-term project (later forming the bulk of his 2005 musical film Day is Done) and the project was tragically cut short by his suicide in 2012.
Tate’s selection of these works was presented as a “cacophonous high school musical finale” towards the end of Ghost and Spirit, made into art matter by the recreation of found high school yearbook photographs that were chosen for their “carnivalesque quality”. Kelley created film compositions that upended the source material used, swerving them into unexpected territories of narrative. In the multimedia installations, students argue and brawl about their respective chosen fandoms; a catholic ceremony centred around the Virgin Mary becomes a gruesome horror film of Mary’s perceived humiliation and her attempt at revenge and a photo of school dancers pre-performance mutates into a conga line musical interlude, reminiscent of The B-52s with its lyrics laced with opaque, hilarious innuendo.
Many of the video works are housed within their own installations, with added props, physical textures or moving elements. Each ‘reconstruction’ contains abstraction from the image followed by a reinterpretation; Kelley intently gutting the parts that make the image, restaging each one in such meticulous detail and setting them free from their still image prisons, no longer frozen in rigid places until the original paper that they exist on rots away.
The most apt example of Kelley’s dynamic practice, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #9, restages an image of a high school stage play (a hillbilly outfit clad actress within an ‘Oklahoma!’ type performance) to produce an RnB/Pop infused music video alluding to dispersed and disruptive imagery within its choppy lyrics. The protagonist of the piece meticulously shimmies and bops her way around the stage, wearing a rhinestone bedazzled set of dungarees, smirking and flirting with the audience and the viewer with her direct eye contact that never fully waives. She breaks up the lyrics to her song with a series of passionate yodels and diva songstress wails:
“Tijuana hayride. Animal sacrifice. Liberal conspiracy. Pick a mascot. Come strong cutie pie. Peaking through the biomorphic wig. At natures mattress. Organic fuck pit. At Rays Burgers. Two balls in a bag. For a young buck. Empty surface facility. Used to mask the hurt inside.”
Following her initial song, the video cuts into scenes of Kelley’s homeland- a diner and a dilapidated shack within a swamp of asphalt. Our songstress’s performance is followed by her background plant props engaged in discussion, with a southern drawl and timbre of epic poetry or Shakespearian prose:
“Ladybird Johnson on Arbor Day. Command him, plant the tree or bush to stay. The stemming spread of US decay. Bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. Spread the foul across the land. A hand in the bush that planting yearns. Not for water for that which burns. A mystic fire which does not consume. That glows now in the nation’s room. Like video light and TV-side chat. The searing voice of God it spat. In tongues of fire from broadcast ways. In steady speech that ne’er decays. It has firmly taken root. And every citizen is now a shoot. Of ladybird’s eternally burning bush.”
The main element of the work is intent on sonically mashing together two cultural iconographies, popular forms of diva music from the 90s/00s and the dusty hillbilly yodel. The overall presentation of high-low concepts throughout the video splices up Americana itself, evoking and admitting the religious and sensational failure of The Great Experiment and, perhaps, by extension the way it raises its young within its high-school paradigm. The work also refers to the Satanic Panic that swept through the States in the 1980s and 1990s as a cultural phenomenon (“Animal Sacrifice!”), linked to the misinterpretation of Kelley’s children’s toy works as manifestations of trauma and abuse. Kelley has in total composed a sample sale of red, white and blue consumption of ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ and of full-bodied indoctrination.
Mark Beasley, when discussing Kelley’s relationship to performed music and lyrics, attests that Kelley’s career suggests an artist who “embraced the popular as something that speaks meaningfully for the times.”But Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (or EAPR) also uses these pop cultural forms as “something to be ripped open and satirised”, a simultaneous celebration and suspicious study of prominent Western staples.
The memories we carry from high school can now become melodramas of the most engaging variety in Kelley’s hands, the brief snapshot of a school play has become subverted into an A-Grade Studio City performance worthy of some of, but perhaps not all, of the accolades up for grabs- a beautiful fantasy of music and lyrics twisted up to the limit of cohesiveness.
When I was at school the drama and music kids (a trope I reluctantly became a part of because literally no one else wanted to be around me) were not the winners in the equation of pubescent social hierarchical mathematics. To be interested in musical theatre or props or compositions was a stark demonstration of difference that we hadn’t developed the language to explain away yet. We were amongst the original expressors of counterculture, unified in spirit and by the school drama troop’s turquoise blue jumper uniform that, when worn around the school during periods of rehearsal, made us tragically easy targets of abuse. I truly hope that current school students know just how important it is to breathe in each moment with as much gratitude and enthusiasm as possible, I certainly didn’t at the time because I hated virtually everything, but I hated performance, music and art the least of all!
It’s notable that Kelley doesn’t linger on or focus on sports teams or STEM lovers within EAPR, the fact that demonstrations of physical or intellectual elitism are brushed away and binned off chimes well with the art academic and curator Dr. Laura López Paniagua’s inference that Kelley, through his work, “wants to fulfil the epic of the victim.” Kelley subscribed to the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theory of ‘historical materialism’, that claimed that history is not “based on the notion of progress” and that the successor and, by extension, often the oppressor retains overall control of the so-called facts of historical knowledge and record.
In his book ‘How to Be Miserable’, the author and psychologist Randy J. Paterson suggests that we should start to view memory and perception as three individual cinema screens: the past, the present and the future. But the present as object truth is ultimately the most boring and under flourished display; it is without interpretation and imagination. The time spent waiting and stalling between activities or interactions is the bulk of the moments that make up a day: waiting for public transport, longing for last night’s date to message you back or impatiently waiting for a washing machine to finish its cycle. Paterson argues that the present screen is “distinguished not by its drama, but by the fact that it portrays the only moment that actually exists” and that it stands as “the only non-fiction feature in the theatre”. It is even more convenient for me to mention that Mike Kelley, when in discussion with The Pope of Trash, John Waters, once regarded God “as a film editor”, the real present was just too boring for him to bare.
These needn’t be extravagant set pieces, just simple and achievable reinterpretations that we can all try at home, I have provided a few personal examples:
The often teased, drama and music student, Andrea who once fell backwards from a stool in the wings of the assembly hall stage with such breathtaking velocity now becomes a heroine, demonstrating physical resilience in the face of the pressure of our school production, Annie Get Your Gun. A production that I now reimagine to be the greatest ever performance of all time in England, one that used its creative licence to full effect and ascended its source material. It features a meticulously acrylic painted backdrop and employs a smoke machine to full affect.
The fight I once started with Jacob, when he grabbed hold of my pencil case to loudly mock its slightly feminine and purse-like quality. This was, in actuality, not a sad and upsetting example of being taunted in front of the class. Instead, it was me insisting on my right to my expression, even if that expression was ultimately buying something moderately ugly from Paperchase. I would later not retire the pencil case until its fibres gave in completely. I had originally chosen it because it had a sheen to it and was patterned with multi-coloured skulls and crossbones. It was also the only pencil case that I could fit a large ruler and calculator into, amongst my other stationery. The accessory fulfilled not only an aesthetic luxury but a practical solution. The fight could be reimagined into a lyrical and theatrical one, a bloody melodramatic brawl between a jock and a wannabe art rocker. The class would divide into their respective sides and the belittled would be triumphant. I make no apology to Jacob.
So- what if the history of my entire high school (or to be more culturally specific, secondary school) is written by the losers?
We cannot trust the antagonists to be up to the task and we certainly cannot trust the overachievers.
Some names have been changed.