Mike Kelley. Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999 (film still); 7:19. Art © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

A little over a year ago, MOCA curator Bennett Simpson arranged the Los Angeles iteration of Kelley’s posthumous retrospective, Mike Kelley, at the Geffen Contemporary. First organized by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and curated by Ann Goldstein, the exhibition included a number of Kelley’s major installations. There, his video works were part and parcel of a larger whole, submerged into hilarious, exploded altars to the American ritual. In its entirety, the exhibition was loud, stimulating, and messy—and rightly so. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Mike Kelley was a chaotic assemblage whose sensitive eloquence gained psychic strength from the dissolution of the singular, rather than a distillation toward the sublime. There is no way to neatly separate and isolate light and sound within the box of a building that is the Geffen, and there is no reason to pursue that kind of purity with Kelley’s artworks, which are so much about the uncanny—how near-familiar images and objects can push their fingers into our psyche, beyond the clean boundaries of conscious control.

Nonetheless, at REDCAT’s presentation on December 14, 2015, curator Bérénice Reynaud framed the screening as arising out of Kelley’s MOCA retrospective, her idea being that the video works necessitated a theatrical screening so that they could be experienced in a facility specifically built for viewing films. As promised, REDCAT provided a space that enhanced the innate qualities of the medium, which in effect changed the experience of the six presented video works in varying ways. In the organized darkness of the theater, I could see the moving image projected in front of me, but I couldn’t see my hands. The sweet boozy scent of my neighbors became all the more palpable. The theatrical seating and its positioning of bodies created a sort of nonconfrontational, gentle sense of community—one unified by a common focus and consolidated by sharing a point of reception and reaction in space and time.

Mike Kelley. Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene), 2000 (film still); black and white; 29:44. Art © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

In this way, I enjoyed the strange intimacy of knowing the range of laughter that Kelley’s 100 Reasons (1991) elicited from my tipsy, unseen companions. My happy, drunken neighbors were brought to a new height of hilarity each time Kelley’s voice read aloud another one of the hundred names for a spanking paddle, while Mistress Rose swung her paddle, slapping Bob Flanagan’s ass and swelling his flesh into a plum hue. By the time Kelley read “board of education,” I was tearing from laughter, too.

The histrionic dialogue and melodramatic framing of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene) (2000) brought out a similar set of communal responses. Laughter bubbled up throughout the exaggerated overtures of the simplified, dramatized dynamics of two figures whose relationship is marred by oppositional forces—desire and guilt, empathy and torture, acceptance and repression, among others—in the nearly thirty-minute act. Laughter stopped in a caesura of seriousness when the two actors looked toward death—an open oven with a tiny dancing ghost of Sylvia Plath inside—until the dialogue broke through the veil of austerity with a sharp return and reminder of the overplayed power dynamic of sexual dominance and submission. After a descent into a romanticized narrative of suicide, the submissive character is reminded that even though he may be Sylvia Plath’s in death, his ass is still his partner’s in life; at that moment, laughter burst out in the theater.

Likewise, in Bridge Visitor (Legend–Trip) (2004), the juvenile incantations of power in projections of the satanic touched upon childlike ideations of the occult. The resurgence of faith in the unknown exploded when the audience realized the orb of bubbling liquid in the video was a skillfully shot point-of-view take of the speaking figure pissing into a toilet, prompting the theater to burst out laughing once again.

With the freedom to move at one’s own pace, walking through an exhibition is a much more isolated experience than sitting in a theater. Though the body’s individual relationship to the chaos and scale of objects was heightened in other presentations of Mike Kelley’s work, REDCAT’s theatrical screening of his video work opened up another kind of productive confusion in being a part of a collective audience, and in unraveling reactions in real time.

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Mike Kelley: Single Channel Videos was screened at REDCAT in Los Angeles on December 14, 2015.

Pope.L. Desert; installation view, Steve Turner, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist. © Pope.L.

History, trapped, bubbles up in each site and in the space and time between them. Do you know how forests became deserts? The driving tour answers, but only after a voice warns that while there aren’t any tricks in the physical artwork, the audio portion of this exhibition might have some. Continuing on S. Cochran Ave, the guide finally divulges, “Forest is just oil in another lifetime … a forest will become a desert and.” The audio stops mid-clause.

Pope.L twists gaps and opens up fissures. Sentences stop mid-meaning. Logographic texts, such as “& – ,, +,” line the walls of Desert at Steve Turner as isolated interpolators of written language. Words are pushed in and out of near-identity—destiny becomes “dustiny” becomes destiny—simultaneously signaling a boundary and a connection. There is total removal: an erasure haunted by another erasure, a package never opened. Desert is populated by Pope.L’s pristine sculptures of eraser heads, pink and propped up on stands or tilted on the floor, punctured with holes. Nigger Eraser (1998–2002), a deodorant container, modified with marker, chocolate, and cellophane tape, is the oldest piece of Pope.L’s work shown in Desert.

Pope.L photo-bombs history, interjecting his likeness into 19th-century photographs of black caretakers in Servants, a series of manipulated photos. Pope.L’s likeness peers out of a window, merges with a donkey’s face, replaces a white child’s face, and multiplies as donkey droppings among other transformative infiltrations.

Pope.L. Desert; installation view, Steve Turner, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist. © Pope.L.

Obi Sunt (2015) is a 35-minute film that weaves images from a rare photo album of the 1906 Gans–Nelson fight, recent footage from Goldfield, Nevada, and poetic text. Screen-gazing in an air-conditioned gallery, the viewer sees Pope.L walking through the desert alongside a road. He is walking with a single-socked foot dragging along the blacktop, one shoe on his left foot, one shoe in hand, a backpack over his shoulder, and a boxer’s towel on his temple, shrouding his face from the sun. RVs and automobiles careen around the artist and his stilted gait. In the dry heat of Goldfield, Nevada on September 3, 1906, Joe Gans fights 42 rounds against Battling Nelson, and in that desert, in these United States, there is an unseen ceiling—a ceiling that was felt by Joe Gans that came down and crushed him in a cycle of opportunities with regressive gains. Our Icarus never gets to fly up off the dusty ground, but he remains the greatest lightweight boxer of all time. The film is framed by painted bleachers, and lies behind a velvet-curtained stage-like apparatus, making viewers a spectator in this blood sport. The title Obi Sunt is a play on ubi-sunt (where are they?)—a Latin phrase meaning “those who came before us.” “Forest is just oil in another lifetime.”

Peanut-butter-covered stuffed animals are mounted on wood like sticky trophies in Forest at Susanne Vielmetter. They hang above lush green curtains that divide space and act as passageways. One curtain opens, not to another room, but to a large, seated portrait of a 19th-century African American woman. The portrait is a mash-up of cultural signifiers: A ceramic pot shaped as a head holds a giant sunflower sitting on an intricate rug. The sitter leans her head on her hands, holding a chain that leads to a horseshoe on her lap.

Pope.L. Forest; installation view, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist. © Pope.L.

The clean, stage-like theatricality of Desert at Steve Turner is balanced by the breadth of perishable, body-related materials presented at Susanne Vielmetter: racist cartoons drawn on aging Pop-Tarts, teddy bears covered in peanut butter, O.J. Simpson’s floss. Pope.L’s monochromatic Favorite Painting series twists the logic of racial stereotypes. One of his Skin Set paintings reads, “Gold People Are Black Children.”

Throughout all of these works, Pope.L gathers the everyday material signs of race to turn them on their head, conjuring a subversion of an intangible ideology. In his GPS guide, Pope.L’s narrator thinks, from afar, that the trees of the forest are people, only to bicycle closer and find that they are, in fact, trees. This may be one of those aforementioned tricks: a theatrical misdirection. The trees are people, and the inscrutable forest is the racist ideological structure in between and all around us.

Pope.L: Desert and Pope.L: Forest are on view through December 5, 2015, at Steve Turner and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects respectively.

Frances Stark. My Best Thing, 2011 (digital video still); digital video, color, sound; 1:00:00. Courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

Stark’s artwork can’t be categorized easily or neatly. Each iteration of her practice looks different from the last. She engages multiple mediums, grappling through the history of literature, art, and philosophy to find new ways of figuring a wide array of subject matter, including such disparate ideas as procrastination, masturbation, poetry, pedagogy, motherhood, and more. In Frances Stark’s artwork, all topics—the banal, the deeply personal, the intellectually rigorous—are fair game. In her process, all of these concerns become conflated, or perhaps they start out that way: mixed and inextricably linked.

Frances Stark. Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free, 2013; multichannel projection with sound, inkjet mural, and takeaway offset posters; 7:20; installation view, Carnegie International, 2013. Courtesy of Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Conley.

In the video installation Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free (2013), stacks of polemical takeaways attacking conceptions of success in relation to art history, Christianity, her son’s love of hip-hop music, and the U.S. prison and education systems all appear on a perspectively infinite checkerboard plane. Stark created the installation around the time when the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design was swallowed by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Academy of Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. Stark eventually left her tenured position at Roski. Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater is a furiously successful installation, presenting an equalized mapping of various forms of knowledge in a critique of the conceptual trappings of class, race, corporatism, and pedagogy.

Experiments in ways of reading and writing reappear throughout Stark’s career and within the exhibition. An early work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1993), is a tracing of T.S. Eliot’s poem from a used book, complete with scrawled marginalia from a previous owner. In Stark’s carbon copy, scribbles of “Eliot quotes Eliot,” “unpoetic,” and “always ends with a question” appear among other didactic reminders and roadmaps for reading this difficult text. In the works My Best Thing (2011), Nothing Is Enough (2012), and Osservate, Leggete Con Me (2012), online sex chats become the raw material for a collaborative form of storytelling, as recurring characters gain depth over time through exposure and incorporation into Stark’s process. The pianist scoring Nothing Is Enough (2012), a silent film continuing Stark’s sex-chat narrative, is one of the characters who populates My Best Thing (2011).

Frances Stark. Pull After “Push,” 2010; mixed media on canvas on panel; 69 x 89 in. Collection of Nancy and Joachim Bechtle. Courtesy of greengrassi, London. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Stark refigures text as shape, form, and landscape in many of her delicate drawings. Words and quotes, often lifted from famous texts, are written and rewritten vertically—rather than horizontally—on diaphanous papers and iridescent tissue, and strung up together with tape. The tiny type is recognizable only as legible characters upon closer inspection, and even then, it takes some recalibration of the mind and eye to read the text that has been stacked and blocked through Stark’s methodology. In another textual turn, autobiography figures into many of Stark’s works, where the artist’s junk mail has been cut up, repurposed, and shaped into elements within her collages. In these surprising digestions of Stark’s everyday life, her name and address remain readable.

Visual and spatial punning and wordplay reveal themselves to the close reader through the structure of the exhibition itself, organized by curator Ali Subotnick in close collaboration with Stark. Without ruining them all, in one corner of the gallery—reading from left to right—a reclining Stark in Pull After “Push” (2010) looks towards a door that opens into Push After “Pull After Push” (2010), which is hung to the left of one of the Hammer’s emergency exits. And to the right of that? A piece titled Emergency Exit (2009). In the same space, a viewer can align their body in relation to the reclining image of Stark in Pull After “Push” (2010) and look back out toward the gallery to face the swirling dresses in each of Stark’s Chorus pieces. Moments like these make UH-OH a fantastically engaging and playful experience.

UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015 is on view at the Hammer Museum through January 24, 2016.

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