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2003-09-09 - 2:46 p.m.

I must go back to �Art and Its Objects� - one of the first aesthetics books I ever read.

Yesterday I read an article by the critic who had the greatest influence over the development of abstract art in the US in the 40s and 50s � Clement Greenberg. Its easy to see him as a �baddy� because, when the history is presented these days, the 60s are portrayed as a breakout reaction to his views. The article I read was written in 1967 for a review of contemporary US sculpture. I have to say I was pretty impressed with it.

For Greenberg, Minimalism is an overt attempt to be �far-out� and to push the boundary between art and not-art as far as it will go. Too far � in that the balance between idea and aesthetic effect is excessively towards the former. While at first sight a Minimalist work may surprise, this only works the first two or there times that you see it whereas with great art (he cites Pollock and Raphael) the power to surprise is constant. When the shock of a Minimalist piece has worn off it degenerates into good design or so CG suggests. A point which others have developed � Minimalism as �religion-lite� � some kind of pseudo-purity.

Greenberg sees Minimalism as trying to bottle the essence of �far-outness� � a characteristic which is present in other recent movements like pop, kinetic and assemblage to a lesser degree. The third dimension is an important resource for artists seeking the �far-out� because within painting the boundary between something and nothing had already been explored and appropriated as art. Sculpture offered more scope for this strategy in the 60s.

He thinks that the UK sculptor, Anthony Caro, actually beat the Mins and managed to do essentially far-out sculpture before they reached that point. Caro taught Richard Long , Gilbert & George, Roger Ackling and Barry Flanagan � part of the great story of British modern sculpture in the 20th century.

To be honest the notion of being �far out� with ideas in the area between art and non-art quite appeals to me. It sounds quite a lot like Cage, for example. It doesn�t necessarily follow that the works produced in this way won�t have the permanent aesthetic power to surprise.

There were a couple of exhibitions here in the last two years which I didn�t get to � about one of the next steps from this point � one was about an Italian movement called Arte Povera and the other was by a US sculptor called Eva Hesse. I read a review of the latter which said that I had probably missed some of these works for good as they were falling apart. Hesse took the idea of �far-outness� in sculpture a stage further.

A Detroit artist (born 1954) is coming to the Liverpool Tate next year � his name is Mike Kelley. In his early teens he was drawn to the White Panthers � the political group established by MC5�s manager. At Michigan University he tried to develop some of Rauschenberg�s ideas and then developed an interest in making sculpture out of the rock band situation by starting a band called Destroy All Monsters. He was intrigued by a photo he had seen of a Cage performance where all his equipment was left �lying around like post-Minimalist sculpture.� His approach was partly influenced by the disappearance of the bands he liked in his youth like MC5 and the Stooges to be replaced by bland commercialism. He incorporated Kraftwerk and Moroder beats and thought that he had invented the pop-music of the future. This is an interesting move to make in Detroit circa 1976 given that the great originators of techno start up a couple of years later.

Kelley�s art work is now in the Gugenheim and the Detroit Institute of Art � as a serious sculptor, video and installation artist. Apparently in the early 90s Thurston Moore got from Kelley some old Destroy All Monsters tapes and this resulted in the first release of their work. Subsequently some murals appeared and a spoof documentary commemorating the glory days of Detroit rock.

All of this arises from a serendipity dip into a recent Wire � and explains why however obscure or pointless an edition of this mag might be it often manages to throw up an unexpected linkage. This all makes seeing the Kelley exhibition in Liverpool a priority.

I started on an Arthur C Danto essay on pluralism in art since 1970 � which is what Kelly seems to exemplify. John Welchman of the University of California tells the story as follows:

�Schooled around Detroit at the junction of American automatism, Hoffmannesque formalism and ceramic funk art,[x] Kelley quit Mo-Town in 1976, relocating to Los Angeles with Jim Shaw, his Ann Arbor housemate in "God's Oasis Drive-In Church" and fellow DAMer. Already immersed in "hippie street culture," reading Wilhelm Reich and looking to guerilla theatre and the Viennese Actionists,[xi] Kelley was enrolled for an MFA at Cal Arts, Valencia between 1976 and 1978. His blue collar background, counter-culture proclivities and multi-media experimentation left him creatively at odds with the more stylized, academic looking photo-text Conceptualism and institutional critique of Cal Arts faculty such as Michael Asher, John Baldessari, and Douglas Huebler. At the same time he was intrigued by aspects of the conceptual photography they developed, especially those invested in the linguistic organization of structures, systems and objects. Kelley acknowledged a certain continuity of method with his Valencia mentors, borrowing elements from what he termed its "dominant signifiers"--"maps, diagrams, unprofessional photography, and simple understated typography." He later preferred moments in this work that emphasized the artists' negotiation with their environment, such as Huebler's turn towards "his own historical placement" in Crocodile Tears, begun in 1981. Kelley finally rejected the pseudo-formalist purity of Conceptualism's social referents, based as they were on a regime of "clever," quirky, minimalist interference that clung to an attenuated avant-gardist vision--present in Baldessari's structural games, Huebler's sampling dissolve, and Asher's small-increment critique.

Kelley fought his way out of the dry canyon of Conceptualism with a tank division of DIY birdhouses. Typically, his tabula rasa was not constituted in a potentially grandiose abstraction, as with the everyday (for Huebler), the structural diagram (Baldessari) or the institution (Asher). Instead, he built a series of how-to-manual birdhouses, reorienting their "meaningless" functionality to suit an impossible congregation of special need avifauna--"Catholic," "upside-down," "tall," etc. It was around this time too, that Kelley began to pose his difference from the overweening legacy of 1960s Pop Art, a ritual visualization, he suggested, whose confounding internationalism only "gave people what they wanted to see about American culture." With these key separations in place Kelley was on the way to his own location in what was later termed "the conceptual vernacular."

The sedimentations of body-action, research, recitation, conversation, ratty diagrams, philosophical inquiry and remembered Rust City rage that made up Kelley's most ambitious performances--Monkey Island (1982-83), The Sublime (1983-84), and Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile (1985)--are among the most powerful efforts in (and beyond) their genres. Little known, or performed, in New York and Europe during the 1980s, never videotaped and unevenly documented, their invisible life is caught up only in oral extension, and they are now, as Kelley put it "dead" to their own history.�

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