Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit
Moderna Museet, 2025
“Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit” at Moderna Museet is the first retrospective in Scandinavia of the pioneering American artist Mike Kelley. The exhibition, curated by Hendrik Folkerts, spans his entire oeuvre – from his groundbreaking performance works of the early 1970s to his provocative multimedia installations of the early 2000s.
Mike Kelley developed his oeuvre through distinct bodies of work that were often exhibited as discrete installations, the singular quality of which is highlighted in each room of this exhibition. As a whole, the exhibition shows how these works exist in a continuum of practice and inquiry. To emphasise this aspect, Formafantasma has developed a unique exhibition architecture, inspired by Kelley’s work My Space. The design features a metallic wall structure, slightly lifted off the floor, that forms the labyrinthine skeleton of the exhibition. The walls offer multiple viewpoints from one room into another, ultimately suggesting that Kelley’s work is a total work of art to be immersed in. At the heart of the exhibition is a velvet-covered room. There, the visitor is introduced to the artist’s journals and writings in an intimate encounter with Kelley, before venturing further into the expansive worlds he created.
The performance of Language
Language sits at the heart of Mike Kelley’s work. He created scripts for early performances, introduced language in The Poltergeist (1979), and paired his Birdhouse sculptures (1978) with titles and diagrams suggesting alternate meanings. At CalArts in the 1970s, he resisted what he saw as “austere minimalism,” favouring play and performance. He described the Birdhouse works as “working-class minimalism,” seeing them as prompts for conversations and live actions.
In The Poltergeist, Kelley challenges what the camera can observe as “truth,” an interrogation of his claim that “all history is fiction.” Staging himself as a spiritualist medium, ectoplasm oozes from his ears and nostrils, echoing the staged photographs of the 1880s that used fabric or smoke to suggest spiritual presence. Here, language appears as quasi-scientific explanation for phenomena that defy explanation, revealing how words shape belief.
Language sits at the heart of Mike Kelley’s work. He created scripts for early performances, introduced language in The Poltergeist (1979), and paired his Birdhouse sculptures (1978) with titles and diagrams suggesting alternate meanings. At CalArts in the 1970s, he resisted what he saw as “austere minimalism,” favouring play and performance. He described the Birdhouse works as “working-class minimalism,” seeing them as prompts for conversations and live actions.
In The Poltergeist, Kelley challenges what the camera can observe as “truth,” an interrogation of his claim that “all history is fiction.” Staging himself as a spiritualist medium, ectoplasm oozes from his ears and nostrils, echoing the staged photographs of the 1880s that used fabric or smoke to suggest spiritual presence. Here, language appears as quasi-scientific explanation for phenomena that defy explanation, revealing how words shape belief.
More Than One Mike Kelley
“I’m often working ‘in character,’ so if there is a psychology, it’s a fractured, schizophrenic one,” Kelley said. His first video, Banana Man (1983), shifted from live performance to complex narratives. The character, based on second-hand accounts of a children’s cartoon, became a vehicle for exploring how identity is constructed through memory.
In the 1980s Kelley adopted multiple personas – teenagers, janitors, Banana Man – to complicate the idea of a fixed identity. He called adolescence “a dysfunctional adult, and art a dysfunctional reality.” Youth subcultures he embraced – underground music, B-movies, comics, pulp novels, psychedelics – challenged social norms.
Kelley’s interest in language expanded into symbols and signs. In Pansy Metal / Clovered Hoof (1989), he subverts caricatures and cultural emblems of identity, suspending them in space to expose a politics of failure and the collapse of authority.
“I’m often working ‘in character,’ so if there is a psychology, it’s a fractured, schizophrenic one,” Kelley said. His first video, Banana Man (1983), shifted from live performance to complex narratives. The character, based on second-hand accounts of a children’s cartoon, became a vehicle for exploring how identity is constructed through memory.
In the 1980s Kelley adopted multiple personas – teenagers, janitors, Banana Man – to complicate the idea of a fixed identity. He called adolescence “a dysfunctional adult, and art a dysfunctional reality.” Youth subcultures he embraced – underground music, B-movies, comics, pulp novels, psychedelics – challenged social norms.
Kelley’s interest in language expanded into symbols and signs. In Pansy Metal / Clovered Hoof (1989), he subverts caricatures and cultural emblems of identity, suspending them in space to expose a politics of failure and the collapse of authority.
Monkey Island
Monkey Island (1982–83) marked Kelley’s move from performance to installation. Inspired by a Los Angeles Zoo enclosure, he treated it as structural anthropology – a study of group relations and the making of knowledge.
The work began with a folded sheet of paper forming an X. Along its lines Kelley noted opposites – life/death, water/land, above/below – expanding into drawings resembling insects, hourglasses, or landscapes. The X became the installation’s geography, a diagram of how thought separates and categorises.
For Kelley, Monkey Island was an unstable formula: endlessly proliferating into drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. By refusing finality, it undermined scientific and structuralist claims that reality could be fixed in language or image. He described it as “an epic poem […] a sailor’s tale,” a work where explanation collapses into contradiction.
Monkey Island (1982–83) marked Kelley’s move from performance to installation. Inspired by a Los Angeles Zoo enclosure, he treated it as structural anthropology – a study of group relations and the making of knowledge.
The work began with a folded sheet of paper forming an X. Along its lines Kelley noted opposites – life/death, water/land, above/below – expanding into drawings resembling insects, hourglasses, or landscapes. The X became the installation’s geography, a diagram of how thought separates and categorises.
For Kelley, Monkey Island was an unstable formula: endlessly proliferating into drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. By refusing finality, it undermined scientific and structuralist claims that reality could be fixed in language or image. He described it as “an epic poem […] a sailor’s tale,” a work where explanation collapses into contradiction.
Through the Looking-Glass
Throughout his life, Kelley wrote extensively – from scripts and notes to texts embedded in artworks. These materials form a stream of consciousness running through his practice, revealing the expansive and idiosyncratic worlds he built.
This room presents a selection of writings, sketches, and diagrams made for specific works, alongside three key pieces: The Power of the Unconscious (1985), Untitled (Pasolini) (1990), and The Solipsistic Landscape (1982). Together they mark coordinates of Kelley’s project – the psychological, the performative, and the systemic – all laced with humour and irony. His writing was never secondary: it was a vital part of how he mapped thought, extended performance, and framed memory in language and image.
Throughout his life, Kelley wrote extensively – from scripts and notes to texts embedded in artworks. These materials form a stream of consciousness running through his practice, revealing the expansive and idiosyncratic worlds he built.
This room presents a selection of writings, sketches, and diagrams made for specific works, alongside three key pieces: The Power of the Unconscious (1985), Untitled (Pasolini) (1990), and The Solipsistic Landscape (1982). Together they mark coordinates of Kelley’s project – the psychological, the performative, and the systemic – all laced with humour and irony. His writing was never secondary: it was a vital part of how he mapped thought, extended performance, and framed memory in language and image.
Half a Man
In the late 1980s, Kelley created installations from stuffed animals, dolls, and blankets, many found in flea markets. His breakthrough series Half a Man used these worn and mended objects, charged with traces of children’s lives.
In More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), Kelley highlighted relations between parent and child through gifts and labour. Viewers often read the discarded toys as evidence of abuse, a response he had not intended. He later remarked: “I have to make all my work about my abuse – and not only that, but about everybody’s abuse […] This is the presumption, that all motivation is based on some kind of repressed trauma."
Kelley embraced these fictions, making biography speculative and memory porous. He continued to explore how memories are formed, recalled, forgotten, and repressed – where imagination blurs with lived experience.
In the late 1980s, Kelley created installations from stuffed animals, dolls, and blankets, many found in flea markets. His breakthrough series Half a Man used these worn and mended objects, charged with traces of children’s lives.
In More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), Kelley highlighted relations between parent and child through gifts and labour. Viewers often read the discarded toys as evidence of abuse, a response he had not intended. He later remarked: “I have to make all my work about my abuse – and not only that, but about everybody’s abuse […] This is the presumption, that all motivation is based on some kind of repressed trauma."
Kelley embraced these fictions, making biography speculative and memory porous. He continued to explore how memories are formed, recalled, forgotten, and repressed – where imagination blurs with lived experience.
Sublevel
Kelley reframed readings of childhood trauma in his stuffed-animal works as a principle: defining his Catholic upbringing and art education as institutional “abuse.”
Sublevel (1998) reconstructs the CalArts basement from memory. Unrecalled spaces are cast in pink resin; a surrounding tunnel, once open to viewers, mirrored a floorplan void Kelley called “a place of nonexistence.” Symbolically, it represented the unconscious, opposing the surface activities of art education.
The work connected to debates around “repressed memory syndrome,” once thought to block traumatic recall. Therapies aimed at recovering memories were later discredited for producing false ones. Kelley staged this uncertainty: the resin-filled gaps as sites of trauma or invention.
“As an artist,” he explained, “the whole drama of the law and the system of justice merges with the territory of aesthetics. The implication is that life at its most ‘real’ also lies in art – in fiction.”
Kelley reframed readings of childhood trauma in his stuffed-animal works as a principle: defining his Catholic upbringing and art education as institutional “abuse.”
Sublevel (1998) reconstructs the CalArts basement from memory. Unrecalled spaces are cast in pink resin; a surrounding tunnel, once open to viewers, mirrored a floorplan void Kelley called “a place of nonexistence.” Symbolically, it represented the unconscious, opposing the surface activities of art education.
The work connected to debates around “repressed memory syndrome,” once thought to block traumatic recall. Therapies aimed at recovering memories were later discredited for producing false ones. Kelley staged this uncertainty: the resin-filled gaps as sites of trauma or invention.
“As an artist,” he explained, “the whole drama of the law and the system of justice merges with the territory of aesthetics. The implication is that life at its most ‘real’ also lies in art – in fiction.”
