CalArts students at Klubnikin Packing Co., downtown Los Angeles, in Maps, 1973. Happening in Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy. Photo: Susan Mogul.

In this interview Suzanne Lacy offers a thorough discussion of the development of feminism in California and the California art world in the early 1970s. She describes her introduction to Judy Chicago and her subsequent involvement in the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State and later at CalArts. She describes the development of her own performance-based work and discusses the influence of other artists such as Faith Wilding and Allan Kaprow.

SUZANNE LACY: I discovered feminism in ’69. I then applied to graduate school at Fresno State and—

MOIRA ROTH: Why did you single out Fresno State?

SL: I think I had a boyfriend going there. [laughs] Some real profound reason. Fresno had a fairly decent grad program in psychology, and I got right in. At that point, feminist organizing was beginning in psychology. I went to the founding meeting of the Women’s Psychology Associates at an American Psychological Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. I met a lot of women psychologists who were just starting to ask questions about Freud’s attitudes toward women, etc. In graduate school, I taught a course in feminist psychology, which was very new then, for my graduate peers, and rabble-roused as much as I could every time Freud came up in a class, and I was known as “that angry woman.” 
At Fresno, I ran into Faith Wilding, who was there as a graduate in English literature. Her husband was a teacher. She was probably the only other person at Fresno that knew anything about feminism. We proceeded one day to stick up signs all over campus saying, “Feminist meeting tonight.” There must have been over thirty or forty women who showed up. Faith and I sat there dumbfounded and looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” We did what has become, I think, a kind of strategy. We began talking about sex.

Read the full interview here.

Stedelijk Museum view of the original building (A.W. Weissman, 1895) and new building designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, photo John Lewis Marshall.

It’s either complete self-unawareness or ultimate bravery that a museum that has gone through such an awkward moment in time, and which has to deal with the unpleasant consequences of its decisions, chose the current exhibition to start this new era with. The show is, mainly because it was unexpectedly forced into becoming a retrospective after Kelley’s sudden death on the 1st of February last year, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. It takes visitors systematically through the stages of Kelley’s development as an artist and thinker, and displays him, rightly, as one of the most diverse and broadly talented visual artists of our time. Above all, it shows him as a master in dissecting memory and digging up awkward historical moments – themes that reoccur especially throughout the artist’s later work.

Mike Kelley – Bird Houses. Photo GJ.van Rooij

Starting in the bath tub’s basement, the first couple of rooms exhibit Kelley’s earliest sketches made while still at CalArts. Also on view are instruments that were used for his Early Performative Sculptures and Objects (1977-79), referencing his immersion in performance art and anti-establishment punk. His bird houses reveal influences from his teachers, conceptual leaders John Baldessari, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler. But as with many artists, Kelley’s work only began to mature after he finished art school and was left to his own devices. The works in the next rooms, including Pay For Your Pleasure (1988), testify this.

Pay For Your Pleasure (1988) Photo GJ.van Rooij

The starting point of what could later be seen as the artist’s main theme are works like Half a Man (1987-92). This series comprises stuffed animals sewn together in compromising, often sexually provocative positions. For Kelley they were a comment on the commodity discourse and gift culture, on the fact people often end up with pointless and unwanted objects and the herewith related guilt. The fierce reaction these works evoked in American society (it was generally assumed that Kelley had experienced a disturbed, utterly fucked up childhood) is what made him, unafraid and unashamedly, delve into subjects like trauma and memory loss.

Educational Complex (1995) Photo GJ. van Rooij

What followed are works like Educational Complex (1995), a large-scale model of every institution Kelley ever attended as well as his parent’s house. The buildings are pristine white, and the spaces between them to be interpreted as memory blanks – empty places where trauma could have happened, and which were – eventually – to be filled. Works like the John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (1968 -1972) touches on a similar, though less personal vein. The giant sculpture covered in mosaics is part of a larger project exploring the history and neglected remnants of Detroit, the city of Kelley’s youth. Things were to get more extreme.

Day is Done (2005) Installation shot Photo GJ. van Rooij

On the first floor of the Stedelijk, where the exhibition continues, the gallery has been made to display Day is Done (2005), which once filled the entire Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, New York. The multi-faceted multimedia installation brings together Kelley’s ideas in grotesque installations and moving images, which feature sweating barbers that jerk off behind bathroom doors and singing teenagers with a colgate smiles who perform pop songs in cowboy hats – both equally disturbing. Childhood trauma is here brought to the fore, with no white walls or censorship to hide it. It’s an overwhelming, nightmarish experience, which is tantalising and stomach turing all the same.

Kandors (2007) Photo GJ van Rooij

After this overwhelming visual and sonic encounter it’s a pleasant surprise to then walk into a room filled with Kandors – Kelley’s softest and most  aesthetically pleasing works. Based on the Kryptonian city of Superman’s childhood, which was miniaturised by Braniac and captured in a bottle, Kelley created ten different versions that light up the room with an almost magical illumination and peaceful glow. Heart warming sculptures depicting something inherently sad.

A few video works follow in the museum’s surprisingly great theatre, after which the exhibition – rather abruptly – ends. There’s no ‘the end’ sign and before you know it you’re released into the wild where you’re reminded of the harsh reality that is the museum itself. The cold, white spaces that follow make you realise what a pleasure and privilege it was to be immersed in Kelley’s universe, where there was no hesitation, shame or fear, to show us all that life encompasses.

We are continuing our Best of 2009 coverage for one more day. Don’t miss our exclusive interview with Allison Schulnik to be published later this month in conjunction with her upcoming solo exhibition, Home for Hobo, at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles.

Best of 2009

Allison Schulnik: Hobo Clown
Originally published on July 15, 2009

It’s unfortunate but rare that art, particularly video work, moves me to the point where I’m exaggeratedly weaving words like “love” and “obsessed” into conversations about it–confessions that some might say belong more within the confines of teenagers’ online message boards about “Twilight” than within the discussion of serious contemporary art. But such is the case with Allison Schulnik‘s claymation video Hobo Clown (2008). The few minutes that it runs are some of the most heartbreaking, kaleidoscopic, breathtaking and gracefully tragic that you might ever spend on viewing art. Schulnik has created a messily pinched and sumptuously colored world of upside-down-smile wearing clowns, dragging along a vast lonesomeness of delicate floral arrangements and faded landscape, to the mesmerizing music of Grizzly Bear. You just want to climb inside the video and wrap the folds of clay around yourself, maybe fall asleep to the heartbreaking guitar strums. Around the point when the song’s first lyrics hum “Why don’t you do any dishes?”–which surprisingly isn’t at all distracting, as is the case with much of the music played over video work–things turn psychedelic, but in an honest and fresh way. Hobo Clown is currently on view at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

Allison Schulnik lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of Arts in 2000. Her paintings have been exhibited internationally at venues including Basel; The Armory Show, New York; Rokeby Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica; and Bellwether Gallery, New York.