Exhibit of the week: Mike Kelley 1954–2012

The Watermill Center, Water Mill, N.Y.

Through Sept. 16

Mike Kelley made a career of “channeling his blue-collar Catholic guilt” into “assaultive” performances and installations, said Ben Davis in ArtInfo.com. Found dead in his Los Angeles home seven months ago, the Michigan-born artist left behind three decades’ worth of often playfully transgressive work that today is “lit by the terrible mystery of his suicide—you can’t help but return to it looking for clues.” That’s what ends up happening at this exhibition, which pairs one of Kelley’s late projects with several of his earlier videos. The show “makes a kind of tragic hero of Kelley,” suggesting that this onetime punk-rock musician was ultimately defeated by the compromises demanded of an artist who has found serious commercial success. It’s a “chilling” premise.

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The centerpiece of the show hints at Kelley’s professional anguish, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. The“Kandor”series, which he was still working on last year, is based on a story in the Superman comics about a city on Krypton that is shrunk by Superman’s nemesis Brainiac and preserved in a bottle by the hero, who hopes to one day restore it to its normal size. Kelley created his own glowing version of Kandor, its elegant spires shut inside a tall bell jar and immersed in purple-tinted water. Surrounding it are oversize pictures of individual bottles whose liquid contents are bubbling and swirling, evoking imminent chaos. Viewers inclined to see the work as a commentary on cultural history will readily see that Kandor is “the crystal city of modernism, the utopian culmination of enlightened reason.” Kelley seems to have wanted us to recognize that modernity “represses awareness of its own traumatic history.” But you can’t help thinking that Kelley, who admitted being terrified about the responsibilities of having to forever produce fresh work and of keeping a large studio staff employed, was trying to tell fans that he was himself a superman manqué.

The final video Kelley made suggests that he never lost his youthful touch, said Priscilla Frank in HuffingtonPost.com. Like the show’s older videos, Vice Anglais doesn’t just “mess with the norms surrounding sexuality, family, and art etiquette.” The 2011 work, which features costumed actors engaging in a ritual of sexual humiliation, does so with gusto. Visitors to this show watch most of the videos while being bombarded by recordings of Kelley’s noise-rock band the Poetics. The videos, with their “flagrant displays of taboo behavior,” could easily come across as trite and puerile, if not simply monotonous. But Kelley always seemed to manage “the perfect cocktail of playfulness and perversity.” His “punk vision” remained “spot-on.”