While studying at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, Mike Kelley (1954, Detroit) and Tony Oursler (1957, New York) put together a punk rock band called The Poetics. This experience back in their youth that lasted from 1977 to 1983 formed the basis, for these two artists, for their own aesthetics, breaking away from the popularized conceptual ideology and Minimalism in vogue at the time. It comprised a mix of genres (dance, performance and comedy), a critique of cultural standards, violence of expression and collaboration with others, such as John Cale, Alan Vega, Kim Gordon, Tony Conrad and Dan Graham. In 1996, Kelley and Oursler produced a triple CD which was a compilation of the group’s remixes: The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings from 1977 to 1983. The second chapter of this adventure, The Poetics Project, was the result of the artists’ desire to prolong the whole experience by turning it into visual art. For its first presentation in 1996 at the MACBA in Barcelona, Kelley and Oursler exhibited their archival material with the idea of bringing it back to life. They created several other pieces for the event, notably videos. The Barcelona Poetics Project, which comprised a multi-band, sound video projection, was elaborated for the “Documenta X” in Kassel, in 1997. After being kept in the dark for a while, an “in-depth” installation of the work was created for the Documenta-Halle. Its contents were diversified to the point of saturation. Ambient sound and video projections of performances, metaphorical sketches, interviews with rock stars and sound artists of the likes of David Bowie and Laurie Anderson, were intermingled with murals, video paintings and sculptures, all in the spirit of “Bad Painting” cherished by Kelley and video projections by Oursler. The collection cultivated a hotchpotch style difficult to categorize, whether as documentation, installation or possibly creation laboratory. The Poetics Project is a manifesto against the compartmentalization of genres. It recalls the notion of author, as in Kelley’s Why I Love (Drums), a cyma moulding painted with a heart from which hangs a speaker emitting the recording of a drum solo performed by the artist himself. It ties in with popular culture, with references to punk, gothic, horror and Hollywood, and incorporates the assumed risks of blasphemy or insult as with Jesus and Santa Claus in the Pulpit Show painting, and verbally transmitted, violently antifeminist ads. Added to these are figures representing the pain of living, including a naked man whose image is video-projected within a silhouette of a listless woman, trapping him in the uterine stage. The Poetics Project is meant to be a polysemous, “open” work, subject to change (a year after its exhibition at Documenta X, it was modified and exhibited in two New York galleries.) A distant descendant of the first Dadamass in Berlin, The Poetics Project expands on the art of installation in the sense of the 1990s’ love of chaos (Jason Rhoades, John Bock, Pascale Martine Tayou…). It also has a hint of synaesthesia through its diverse links with the visual arts, music, image and décor. Another prime example of this type of “all-in-one” notion, similar to Gesamtkunstwerk, is the chance it offers to maintain a double rapport with the work through the random thinking and ambling around that is required by its vast scope: one that is thought-provoking in an exploratory and archaeological way, and the other that is sensitive and unrefined as one lets oneself be swept up by its mood.

In The Poetics Project, the past is brought back in the form of 1970s’ alternative culture, to enlighten the 1990s culture that borrowed from it. The bridge the work builds between past and present is more like an organized flashback than mere documentary. This injection of fiction that bears witness to the artists’ glorified “replay” of a bygone past is as stimulating as it is disturbing. How is it possible to disentangle one’s own timescale from such a work? Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler vie with one another in reinterpreting their lives as artists, and reappropriating crucial moments of their existences in order to reveal them and adapt them to their creation of the moment. Beyond being an expression of an experience, the work is an open review by two actors of their own careers, including their regrets (the punk stars we never became). Heritage value and the rendering of the past are eroded by the assumption of creation, a sublimated poiesis giving Kelley and Oursler the chance to recreate, or even invent, themselves. It could be regarded as fraud, but it is moreover the ability to transform art. As Kelley said, by way of confirmation, “If you don’t create your own history, someone else will.”

Paul Ardenne

Translated by Diana Tamlyn