The Sound of Return

BWJ: You bring up some things that I think are really important. One is that a lot of Mike’s music was out of time. He talks about that—how the reception for Destroy All Monsters couldn’t come for twenty years, and the same with The Poetics Project. Detroit is sort of inevitable with Mike and his music. He talks about receiving avant-garde art practices through the performances of, on the one hand, Iggy Pop, and, on the other, Sun Ra—two figures who, for him, represented strategies of bringing the audience into the performance, letting them lose themselves and then sort of pushing them away and bringing them out of it. Detroit is a signifier of a certain musical culture, as Houston and Seattle and New York and Eugene, Oregon, have been at different times. But I think that Detroit thing is strong for him.

WE: Absolutely. I was just there on a tour. I talked with people about the various ebbs and flows of musical culture in Detroit being facilitated by the idea that the city is always being left, that things are being left behind. So if you’re going to do something minimalist, and you’re coding it by saying that it’s Iggy, and then you’re going to do neo-Dada collage, you kind of have both, because you have the space to contend with a minimalism that’s very natural in a city characterized by decay. And the collage element is made even easier because there’s so much stuff around, even though you’re in a kind of spaced-out place. It’s a very catalyzing place to play because the people who live there won’t come out to see you for the first two years of you going there, if you’re not a local. They’re very self-protective and know what they have. Then you find out that the singer [Caroline Crawford] on all those legendary Bohannon records in the ‘80s works in the record store right next door, and you can talk to her about this whole historical thing. And you find out that what she does now almost sounds like Kelley’s Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile performance with the actress Molly Cleator and Sonic Youth [at Artists Space in New York in 1986]—she will do a stream-of-conscious vocal over a long sequence, and you’re like, “Holy shit! You were on those Bohannon records, and now you’re doing this!” As the bearer of a kind of Detroit Motown history, she becomes like a collage because she has that space and all this stuff from . . . not a “fallen” city, because the city is incredibly strong, but a city that was once the site of a specific kind of life that now no longer exists. I see that in Kelley’s art. It’s not as if he’s saying: “I’m working really hard to get something.” It’s more like, “I have all of this stuff around me. What am I supposed to do with it? Where does ritual fit in? What’s the memory of the things that are all around me?”

MF: I’ve never been to Detroit, but the city you’re describing sounds a bit like Houston. The locals won’t just come out for everyone, and so finding that club down the street where people were actually paying attention was like something out of a book for me. It became the most important thing, for me to get up on that stage and be part of it, even though I couldn’t see any path to actually doing it. Before that kind of punk stuff happened, the idea of music was that you had to be Neil Young or somebody like that just to get in front of an audience. And then suddenly, it was very accessible, if you had the nerve. So I jumped up there. But it was not natural to me like painting and making art were. It was a whole other thing.

BWJ: This makes me think of the Plato’s Cave performance, too, because it seems like the moment when Mike became a sort of art-rock star. Mike takes on the persona of the rock star and undermines it at the same time. He’s coming out and confronting you but then falling down and being your dog, in a sense. It’s a good example of utilizing not just the music but the rock concert as a format, the stage presence. He brings the audience in while also appropriating the whole cultural construct of the “star.”

MF: I feel like when you destroy a tradition, it also eases your entrance into it. That’s what I hear him doing. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m up on a stage, but I don’t have that pressure, because I’m negating the tradition that takes place on this stage.”

WE: Yeah, he’s subverting a ritual, which is a constant throughline in his work. Even his fixation with titles, where he focuses on something that stands in for its cultural association: Plato’s Cave, for example. Very rarely do we think of Plato without thinking a little bit about the cave. There’s a part of Kelley where he’s asking, “What is the thing that the ritual of being a rock performer does to the world?” That’s probably why he didn’t just do all of his music as a band that people would later rediscover. Sonic Youth was huge at that point. They were advocating and drawing people in to see this very important artist by providing the sound for his performance poem, but some people probably just went to see Sonic Youth.

BWJ: That’s what he expected, because they’d just had their breakout record. He’s definitely playing with audience expectations.

BWJ: This makes me think of the Plato’s Cave performance, too, because it seems like the moment when Mike became a sort of art-rock star. Mike takes on the persona of the rock star and undermines it at the same time. He’s coming out and confronting you but then falling down and being your dog, in a sense. It’s a good example of utilizing not just the music but the rock concert as a format, the stage presence. He brings the audience in while also appropriating the whole cultural construct of the “star.”

MF: I feel like when you destroy a tradition, it also eases your entrance into it. That’s what I hear him doing. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m up on a stage, but I don’t have that pressure, because I’m negating the tradition that takes place on this stage.”

WE: Yeah, he’s subverting a ritual, which is a constant throughline in his work. Even his fixation with titles, where he focuses on something that stands in for its cultural association: Plato’s Cave, for example. Very rarely do we think of Plato without thinking a little bit about the cave. There’s a part of Kelley where he’s asking, “What is the thing that the ritual of being a rock performer does to the world?” That’s probably why he didn’t just do all of his music as a band that people would later rediscover. Sonic Youth was huge at that point. They were advocating and drawing people in to see this very important artist by providing the sound for his performance poem, but some people probably just went to see Sonic Youth.

BWJ: That’s what he expected, because they’d just had their breakout record. He’s definitely playing with audience expectations.

WE: He’s just so committed to that impulse. He’s saying: “Maybe I’m big in my world, but this band is huge, and they’re huge because of their relationship to this ritual that I’m also interested in as an artist who works in performance.” To be successful at it requires an almost pathological interest and conviction. It’s like the Kim Gordon quote: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”

BWJ: And to have themselves abused. In Plato’s Cave, Mike was debased by Molly Cleator.

WE: Which is how it feels to tour.

BWJ: What do you think about The Poetics Project which, to my mind, is so much more conceptual? At certain points they’re a dance troupe and then they’re a radio program and then almost stand-up comedy. It’s interesting to me that he’s doing this while studying at CalArts at the same time as Laurie Anderson is teaching there.

WE: I think about the bands people start in grad school, and I don’t want to seem like I’m dismissing The Poetics Project, but there’s something that happens that tells me this could only have been done by artists. Not because the music isn’t good, or well done—it’s kind of perfect—but because you’d need a sort of baffled approach to come at it like that, which I think true artists have, musical or otherwise. At the same time as Kelley was doing that project, he was studying Conceptual art with the level of focus that one of those defining prog rock geniuses—who are insane shredders—were purported to have. To me, as somebody who’s thought about art at way too intense a level while at the same time playing in basements and bars and sleeping on floors, I hear The Poetics in a kind of high/low way. I relate to it, but also I don’t, because I was also studying how to be that shredder.

BWJ: What you said—about not meaning to dismiss it but about it being a college thing—is kind of perfect for that project. I think it was that, and then it became a much bigger thing when Mike and Tony Oursler did The Poetics Project twenty years later, in 1996. They recovered this minor moment, which was still very important for them. Of course, I’m particularly interested because I saw the installation when it was first done, and it blew me away. I think that high/low thing is really part of the project. Mike was always deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Those dichotomies exist within the work and are also an engine that drives the work across many, many years.

WE: When I encounter The Poetics, I like it. I really like it. But what I love about it as a project in the macro sense is: What artist doesn’t have that relationship with their first band? If something is really important to you and helps you become the thing that eventually gives you access to restage the thing and your work is about ritual and memory, the least and most important thing you could do is historicize it on your own terms. You’re like, “Damn it, remember when I was twelve and playing the stupidest music in the world? What if that was important because I now have this role? Would I go back?” Grad school is different from being twelve, but—

MF: Maybe only slightly.

WE: Right, everybody’s always twelve until they’re a famous artist.

MF: I feel like if you’re aspiring to be an artist, you’re entering a world of coded activity, and you really have to study to keep the pace. And it’s unpopular. But if you’re in a band, the rules are completely different. In the ‘70s, being in a band played out great in the art world, but being in the art world played out terribly for being in a band. I remember people would use “arty” as a derogatory term.

BWJ: The ‘90s felt to me like a moment when a certain segment of the music world caught up. It was the post-grunge, post-rock moment, and noise came in, and I think Mike really felt like: “My people have arrived. I can play out, with somebody like Violent Onsen Geisha [the stage name of Masaya Nakahara, a Japanese artist, writer and director] or others, and we can do this stuff that I was doing twenty years ago, and it will have a different audience.”

WE: I feel like being in a band might be cooler than being an artist, in the sense that it’s more democratically accessible. But Kelley’s music, or sound, kind of goes against that. In the late ‘80s or ‘90s, possibly even through today, if you say “I’m in a noise band,” it probably holds the most cachet for people who also like a certain kind of art.

BWJ: I think about what you said about virtuosity, because noise is sort of this anti-virtuosic thing, and yet some people are better at it than others.

WE: It’s kind of like free jazz. You know if someone is following a credo that they actually care about when they do it, or if their relationship to chance is just so superb that it ends up being better. But it doesn’t matter so much if it’s better. It just matters if it hits you, which I think is what the art world, in a kind of Kelley-ish duality, wants to protect and also defend a viewer from seeing. You can’t be hit over the head with an artwork if you can’t see it, but you also can’t be hit if you’re seeing it in a place that’s completely devoid of context. Either way, there’s a relationship to access there.

BWJ: I think that noise in the ‘90s allowed Mike to just have fun and access an audience that wouldn’t necessarily know who he was. He was sort of playing with the high and low but also with the allowable and repressed—what’s allowable and legible within a certain context and what’s not? He liked not mixing them together but dialectically playing them against each other. Have you heard the 2002 Destroy All Monsters Swamp Gas CD? I’m thinking of “Dexter 1966,” where he riffs on a spate of UFO sightings that took place in Michigan that year.

WE: Yes, and I love it.

BWJ: I love it too.

WE: There’s this sense of homecoming, and of not being able to come home, in his relationship with Michigan. And then, with the UFO sightings, it’s as if he’s touching down from another zone and doing it in a way that sounds to me like his earlier performances. The point is that you can’t really return, but you have this vestige from the thing that you can’t return to. For me, that’s what’s so poignant about that piece. First of all, it sounds like everything I actually want to listen to. And second, I think it’s what it sounded like for him to return. It was him coming back into a specific kind of grace, back into a certain kind of performance. I was really moved by that aspect of it because it seems so rare in his work.

BWJ: That’s a beautiful way to talk about it. The singsong of his voice in that work really is the cadence of his early performances. I hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but you’re right: It’s him coming back. I also love the way he puts a Conceptual art structure on it. He’s going through the top song of every month of 1966, the year of the Dexter, Michigan, UFO sightings, and then parodying and transforming the songs—yet not fully.

MF: It’s amazing to me how intellectual and drenched in theory he is, and yet you don’t have to read the label to understand what’s going on. It just gets to you.

WE: I imagine that, growing up where he did, Kelley felt like an alien, with the massive throbbing brain he had. I’m sure he felt like he had touched down there like an alien, and then went wherever he went to become the person we’re talking about now. Some aliens probably feel like aliens in their native context, too. But this feels to me like he’s making it very explicit: “I was an alien then. Now, I’m an alien from that, but I’m coming back, and I’m talking about that return.” It’s such a multilayered, multidirectional thing. You hear it in the way that he’s playing with time, based on the musical-chart hits.

BWJ: I don’t know if either of you got a chance to see “Day Is Done,” but it was such a monumental installation that involved music in so many ways. It’s a touchstone of the last part of his career, but, in my mind, it looks both backward and forward. I particularly love “Tijuana Hayride,” which mixes yodeling and melisma. Melisma was widespread in pop singing at that point. Mike once described that track to me as “hick Mariah Carey,” which is exactly what it is. “Day Is Done” is also when he started working with the producer Scott Benzel. With Scott’s help, he was able to start playing not just with different musical styles but also with forms of music production. He could mash up whole genres of sounds.

MF: This was also him coming into the digital age, which made that easier. Plus, he had reached a kind of mainstream success and had the resources to make those vast installations possible. He could kind of do whatever he wanted.

BWJ: It was the early 2000s and definitely a step up, production-wise. I was able to go and see the installation at Gagosian, where each of those segments was shown on its own semi-sculptural screen. Instead of hearing one after the other, you actually walked from one to the other and they caught your attention in different ways. He used that interpolative quality that popular music has, that earworm quality, the way you hear it and sort of go to it, spatially. You would hear the Mariah Carey yodeling and be like: “Where is that!?” And you’d wander over. He was using the popular aspect as an attractor and at the same time distancing it and throwing it back at you. Everyone I knew was just blown away. You just got carried along with it, no matter how ridiculous it was, no matter how intellectual and artistic. You were like: “I want to experience that.” That relationship Mike had to experience, not just looking at it and puzzling it out but actually making you feel things—I think music was a big part for him in being able to trigger that dynamic in all phases of his work, including his art practice.

WE: Absolutely.

MF: I admire that drive to go beyond your natural tendencies to stay in one medium and to head instead into the unnatural, out to the limits, on such a massive scale. It’s amazing when an artist casts a shadow so far into the future that they can’t really participate in it. Kelley is like that, along with a few other artists. He was so far ahead of people’s perception of what he was doing. It makes me think of Rauschenberg. People are still getting used to the Combines. He was at least forty years beyond them. Kelley was also carving a mark into culture. I think it’ll take a long time for society to absorb it.

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Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, tenor banjo, synthesizer and voice. She is a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and the trio Squanderers. Eisenberg is also an assistant professor at the New School and has published essays in Arcana, Contemporary Music Review and Sound American.

Mark Flood is an American artist. Mark Flood is a collective identity enacted by a group of international artists, poets, musicians and deadbeats. Mark Flood is somebody, formerly nobody, who did something somewhere, formerly nowhere. Mark Flood was born a while back and will cease to exist when you stop reading this.

Branden W. Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. He writes about crossovers between art and music. Joseph’s publications include Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture and he served as the editor of Kim Gordon’s Is It My Body? Selected Texts.

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“Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit” is on view at the Tate Modern, London, through March 9, and at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, from May 10 to October 12, 2025.

“Mike Kelley: Vice Anglais” is on view at Hauser & Wirth London through April 27, 2025.