Kelley’s Shed
by Zed Dean
(Note: All quotes are from Isabelle Graw’s, “Dedication replacing appropriation: fascination, subversion and dispossession in appropriation art.” In Louise Lawler And Others. Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG, 2004. Artworks mentioned include: Orgone Shed, 1992, Colema Bench, 1992, Lumpenprole, 1991, and Blackout (Detroit River), 2001).
Viljam awakes with a square of blue light igniting his chin, his Cashmere collarbone, his drowsy drunken heart. Memories of a shrill alarm that starts and stops, restarts and stops as he jumps back and forth amongst playground objects in a large white room, come back to him wrapped in a shroud of migraine. The blue light reflects up from his shoulder to illuminate, though bleakly, the inside of a radiation-proof bunker construction seemingly erected around him. No light is allowed in through the joints. But some words, words he’d thought, written or copy-and-pasted, slowly seep through. “Postmodernism” is, was, is, was, “a quotation culture.” Is, was. “The disregard of a context that accompanies cultural appropriation.” Context. Catalogue. Wall text. How did he ever end up with just a three-page slot to write. These walls had been promised him. How had he ever wound up with the chapter of the catalogue that was doomed to be scrapped. How had he ended up amounting to nothing at all?
If he turns now to look outside through the little door, he knows he’ll see the dreaded bucket. So many arguments about that damned bucket. Designed by the artist, –possibly backdated– as a stale joke about the brand name of a plastic manufacturer that no one remembers. Viljam was now complicit in its re-engineering into a health-and- safety-standards compliant work of art, insured against a five-digit figure. “The possibility that the appropriated body would activate its powers of resistance and fight back was, with hindsight, incredibly overrated”.
The good thing about opening receptions like Mike Kelley’s is that one can leap from tipsiness straight into performance art. He’d crept into the Orgone Shed last night holding the first bottle of champagne from the third batch–guests had been invited according to social status, carefully slotted into three different one-hour long tours. He’d fled there, partly avoiding the aggressive flirtations of the head of Education, partly hoping to close a deal that he’d slowly built up from half-smiles and knowing glances with the guest curator. Instead, the wrong faces would all look in through the shed door from time to time. He would respond with dialogues from a play he’d half-written about Wilhelm Reich while waiting for a reply to his Amsterdam application letter. It all suddenly seemed so appropriate. Even if Einstein’s lines came across as the weakest…so sexless.
Halfway through the night he’d made his way down the hallway to crawl underneath the carpet with all the other corpses. No, no, he must have dreamt that. The security system would have never given him the leeway to get that far. No, it must have been somewhere else. Maybe the river of broken china. But the only safe place, he’d decided quite correctly even in his inebriated state, was the radiation-shielded orgone accumulator. The movement detectors had no access to him there.
He thought of Freud, Anna Freud, and how she had hounded poor Wilhelm Reich out of the field of psychoanalysis. While Anna re-shaped the twentieth century’s sense of self on the capitalist basis of accumulated sexual repression, W.R. had propelled the sixties with orgasmic energy and utopia. A historian he knew had come up with a small thought that provided him with some minimum comfort: after all, what could the twentieth century amount to without the sixties? But this all seemed very far away, before feminist PC, before self-help and DIY.
In a sense, the shed was a mise en abyme of the whole retrospective. It tried in vain to absorb all the energy that was supposed to radiate from a monstrous accumulation of hedonistic pleasure embodied in fifty years of postwar pop products. “To allow the appropriated material even a minimum of own momentum would have meant falling back on modernist premises”. Maybe, he thought, as the last non sequitur before the lights came on and the Sunday morning shift started, masturbation had an intrinsic value beyond its possible exploitation for humanist causes. Somehow, Viljam concluded, as he tucked his shirt into his Comme Des Garçons taper trousers, masturbation was the one thing he hadn’t thought of doing that night, alone in the Orgone Shed.