Mike Kelley

Mythologist Joseph Campbell once noted, “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” Mike Kelley’s art embodies this idea. His ability to find rituals in the trivia of everyday life made him a shamanic figure even before his death in 2012, and his memory is now burnished by the mythos that accrues posthumously to some influential artists. Coming on the heels of Kelley’s traveling retrospective covering three and half decades in two-hundred-plus works, which began at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2012, the present exhibition, “Eternity Is a Long Time,” presents a small selection of just ten pieces that his admirers in most cases will already be familiar with. Yet, by distilling Kelley’s ample shade qualitatively, rather than offering a comprehensive overview, curators Emi Fontana and Andrea Lissoni manage to prove the old adage of less is more in this season of Kelley.

The curatorial thrust here entails turning a cavern and its darkness into a dramatic arena in a manner that only Kelley’s art could do. Unlike the predictable and occasionally indigestible shape of retrospectives, the lean curatorial format here bolsters a myth in the making with cornerstone works taken mostly from the last decade, when Kelley’s dexterity as a performer-writer-artist entered the stratosphere along with his budgets. Besides the selection, the show is about gleam, which is due largely to Lissoni’s distinguished use of stage lighting inside the HangarBicocca’s hull. For example, the quietus of individual estrangement from the ranks of the crowd that runs through the stagecraft of the better-known works, acquires a touch of the sublime in the reinstallation of the lesser-known installation Profondeurs Vertes, first seen at the Louvre in 2006.

“Eternity Is a Long Time” is, in short, a blend of the familiar and unfamiliar faces of Kelley; not all the talismans, vampires, outcasts, “Kandors,” and lonely tramps that he personified in his performances and videos and fashioned into conceptual art chew toys are here, but the curators can be credited with how carefully they selected works to take advantage of the dramatic expanse of the venue in order to amplify a sportive power found in the best of Kelley’s output. Among his admirers this power is akin to alchemy. Outside the burden of a retrospective, Lissoni and Fontana have captured this sense of augury in relatively few pieces.