The performativity of objects

Fabricated histories, Grief and objects, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit @ Tate Modern.

I imagined I’d find more to write about when I started writing this Substack. In just over a year I’ve only managed three posts, while I still have notebooks filling up faster than the Auld Shilelagh on a Friday night. I know I’ve no standard to live up or any looming reputation preceding me, but I started this with the intention of having a more immediate string to my bow, something other than the slow, seemingly endless creative projects that seem to take up my time elsewhere. So, my 9 subscribers, I’ll try and post a little more often, if only for the fact that I struggle to read back my own handwriting in the notebooks.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the materiality of writing. I’d like to say that I’m in the party of writing for writing’s sake, that I’ll write until I can’t any longer, regardless of whether anything makes publication. This is partly true, insofar as a large percentage of my writing (much of it incoherent scrawling) exists for my eyes only, but that’s probably more to do with a fear of sharing than any great moral standing against the commodification of art. Posting on the internet does slightly fill me with dread, but it’s an act that’s free of some pressure — that of any financial output or expectation — at least. There’s no physical buying and selling that slights the wonderfully surreal act of building with words. I do wonder how many writers seriously consider the marketability of their writing before they set out though. I suppose a book deal is a book deal and I’m in the naïve camp here, or the camp destined for small ambitions at least. I’ve certainly bought bestsellers and thought they were utterly predictable. And as for physical books, well — doesn’t there seem to be a lot of folk that buy books as decorative objects for their homes? Though that can’t be anything new. There’s hope yet that this particular breed of heathen might help in the quest to bring back pre-1980s book design, if only for its collectability.

I grew up in a household without many physical books, but with a shelf of favourites that consisted of my mother’s GCSE texts (Of Mice and Men, Lord of The Flies), a few ‘how to’ arts and crafts books, an Oxford Dictionary and a full encyclopedia that I seem to remember was bought from a car boot sale to fill the rest of the shelf space. I had a couple of Mallory Blackman’s that I bought with my Christmas money from the big ASDA, The Chronicles of Narnia, a book on The Great Plague, and after reading my loot I moved naturally over to Steinbeck’s great novel on my mum’s recommendation. The experience of reading Of Mice and Men aged 10 was a profound one. It was the first book I was floored by, undoubtably responsible for forming my penchant for stories of displacement and dreaming, of marginalised characters and their poignant loneliness.

After attempting Lord of The Flies and not quite getting on with it at that age, it was for a little while in the hands of Corby Library to provide any further reading material. The library made the book as a physical commodity all the more enticing. Borrowing a temporal object for a strict window of time held it sacred. The fact that the books were free to consume, on condition that you weren’t fined for damage or lateness, somehow separated for me the object of the book and the words within. I might not have possessed the book, but I possessed its story.

Despite not being a book family, we were one of great storytellers. I don’t remember my grandparents (who lived next door) having books either, discounting the bedside bible. I did however find a copy of Alex Ferguson’s autobiography in the spare bedroom on a recent visit. Our literary imaginations were instead fostered through the bygone verbal ritual, and I think a lot of the women in my life had a gift for spoken word. My mum’s sensibility was more closely aligned with the cautionary tale, stories of children flushing cats down toilets and men shooting pet rabbits, all quite horrific really, but an insight into the southern gothic of eastern Scotland nonetheless. My granny paradoxically told tales of fairies living in the small tree in the garden, of her little helpers polishing the stars at night — grounding us in magic and the world of endless possibility. She kept up with her own stories from one day to the next, creating whole sagas over the years that she continued to tell them. Both sorts of stories hinge on the power of innocence, and perhaps that its power can’t last forever in our fast-paced modern world. In a sense this act of storytelling, more so than book-reading, is an unassuming act against the commodification of words through publishing, and somewhere in that, capitalism itself.

We lost my granny at the start of October. She had been ill for some time and we hadn’t been able to relive some of the imaginary moments that were so precious to our childhoods. The dreamlike vision remains boxed up and relevant only to its time, whereas I’m sure it would’ve long continued if my granny willed it, with the sweet indoctrination of the younger great-grandchildren.

My granny was a collector of many objects that formed emblems of the stories after they’d ceased, her house at times seeming like a museum. After she died, I found it quite difficult to be around some of these objects without crying. Most notably — but not limited to — her collection of ceramic and glass elephants that lined up in different formations above the fireplace; her large crystal ball, apparently once used in a seance-like ceremony whereby my young, pregnant cousin lay across the dining table, surrounded by crystals, as my granny summoned forth the gender of her unborn child. She guessed wrong on all counts, and this was quite an unconventional practice for a catholic; a cartoon hippopotamus clock that was always above her bedroom mirror; and her padded velvet coat hangers that I always thought to be the height of sophistication. It was strange to me that I felt a sudden surge of emotion around these objects, as when my mum died almost exactly 7 years earlier, I didn’t feel this way at all. It appears that material things can remind us of the person lost, but also — in opposition — they can become suddenly obsolete with no symbolic importance, like debris or shells.

Perhaps I'd internalised this material blankness when I lost my mum. Then, when my granny died, objects became suddenly significant, as though I was willing them to be. Years after my mum had died, much like when we left the family home when she was sick, I cursed myself for not keeping or photographing more of her things, of cataloguing memories, which perhaps informed my reaction this time around, birthing an unintentionally performative reception of grief objects. 

The idea of uncanniness in objects suggests a certain level of newfound detachedness. The objects related to my granny, though, seemed inhabited with her spirit, they didn’t seem unfamiliar or abject at all. This reminded me of a line I recently read in Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head:

The familiar world of ways and objects within which I had lived for so long received me no more; and our lovely house had suddenly the air of a superior antique shop. The things in it no longer cohered together. It was odd that the pain worked first and most immediately through things, as if they had at once become the sad symbols of a loss which in its entirety I could not yet face. They know and mourned. [1]

The objects here for Murdoch’s morally unconventional protagonist, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, are at once de-personalised and yet they know and mourn — these two things seem at odds with one another. They receive him no more, and yet they are sad symbols. Both ideas encompass my feelings around objects in loss, though I didn’t ever feel both negative and a positive reactions in conjunction, rather, one experience informed the next. But who knows, perhaps next time somebody kicks the bucket…

There is an irony to Murdoch’s tale. Martin, facing the loss of his wife through her unfaithfulness, has been unfaithful to her in the first place. The objects too have an ironic quality in that they are objects for the sake of objects, rather than useful or particularly cherished items. They are collected to extend the internal landscapes of the characters, and their triviality is symbolic of the triviality of the marriage that they represent and belong to. 

This ironic history of objects and memory also spoke to my understanding of Mike Kelley’s exhibition, Ghost and Spirit, at the Tate. Kelley notably said of his experience:

I didn’t feel connected in any way to my family, to my country, or the reality for that matter: the world seemed to me a media facade, and all history a fiction - a pack of lies. I was experiencing, I think, what has come to be known as the postmodern condition, a form of alienation quite different from postwar existentialism because it lacks any historical sense - there is no notion of truth that has been lost. [2]

Kelley’s concern then, with how the individual is shaped by familial and institutional power structures within society, seems to suggest the opposite, though that is likely the point. The subjectivity of the explored influence, the truth and/ or fabrication of personal history, seems to be key. In absence of insight into Kelley’s own personal history, he spans to the collective American past and spits it out in dizzying multi-colour. The personal is then indistinguishable from the collective, and the fact that we don't know what is true — raising a wider question on whether anything can be trusted as fact — seems to me to be the power of the work.

Walking into Kelley’s exhibition and thinking about writing this post, I was surprised that the works that resonated with me the most were perhaps some of the least concerned with the object in and of itself. Several of Kelley’s works, as you may know, are concerned with physicality, purpose, and the class of objects (if/ when measured on a scale of low to high brow culture). The works that most intrigued me were those concerned with Kelley’s preoccupation with memory and Repressed Memory Syndrome, notably the issues that arise with the psychological assumption that memories are blocked as a preservation response, and therefore gaps in memory are representative of trauma.

The Banana Man (1983) is Mike Kelley’s first recorded performance work. Never having seen the show Captain Kangaroo, but having heard other kids talk about the show’s banana man, Kelley interpolated his own version of the character from the fragments gleamed; namely that the banana man liked to pull long items from his many pockets, including toy trains and strings of hot dogs, and also his vocalisation of an oooh sound that accompanied this sort of activity. It the strikingly odd performance — which for me spoke to the surreal, audibly repetitive lo-fi films of Cecilia Condit, particularly Possibly in Michigan of the same year — Kelley as banana man repeatedly insists that he is not responsible for his actions, acts as mother to a colony of squeaky dog toys, and states that he doesn’t need the front two legs of a chair as he has his own two legs. The strangeness of the script is perhaps what I liked so much about The Banana Man, though in that strangeness is the same old question of identity, responsibility and external influence. The Banana Man auspiciously ends with Kelley, in his yellow banana suit, curled up on the floor in the shape of a question mark.

Another connected selection of works are Kelley’s Kandors. The illuminated model cities under bell jars are based on Kandor, the capital city of Krypton, the hometown of Superman in the Superman comics of the fifties. The story follows that Superman was sent to Earth as a baby, surviving the shrinking of Kandor and its inhabitants. Kelley, not a fan of Superman in particular, was intrigued by the fact that in every cartoon depiction of Kandor, the city appeared slightly differently. The miniature city, though not central to the comicbook storyline, is a souvenir of the character’s past, a past that constantly renews itself by appearing differently, and so the relevance to Kelley becomes clear. Kandor becomes symbolic of a vacillating memory: always there, always cherished, and — most importantly — always changing. In a videowork that sits alongside Kelley’s Kandors, an actor recites from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999) seems to be a work of double, triple and even quadruple takes, as a reincarnation of Superman reads from the work of Plath — another great American relic and external influence — splicing and obscuring Plath’s original text through film editing and repetition. The relevance of liminal space between the past and the present (adolescence, for Kelley and Plath) constellates between the character of Superman, Sylvia Plath and Mike Kelley, all three of which hold a sense of the past in a metaphorical bell jar. This also brought to mind the following lines of one of my favourite Plath poems, Face Lift:

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby. [3]

The past she/ her in the poem is separate from the I, as though Plath, or her speaker, were looking at her younger self in her own Kandor — perhaps the home she shared with Ted Hughes at Primrose Hill? — preserved under a fluorescent bell jar. The line, pink and smooth as a baby, then disrupts this separation of time as the past ‘babyhood’ is at once brought back into the present. Plath’s circular splicing and misalignment of time embodies exactly my thoughts on the nature of memory in Kelley’s work, and so Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath is a work of logical and astute — though visually absurd — connection.

The last piece of work that I felt relevant (and I could go on, but will spare spoiling the exhibition for those who haven’t yet been…) was Educational Complex (1995), a selection of model reproductions of the buildings in which Kelley was educated, including his family home. The sculpture itself isn’t present in the exhibition, though plans, drawings and video slides are. The parts of the buildings that Kelley could not remember being inside appear as holes or absences, blanknesses that for Kelley symbolise both repression and imagination.

It is this duality that is perhaps similar to what happens to objects in loss — in that where there is no knowledge, or blankness, we (like Kelley’s banana man)  interpolate and/ or make things up, feigning significance. Loss certainly distorts the meaning of objects, forming them as emblems that connect us to the past while underscoring its unknowable nature. Though of course, some of these objects are remembered as significant for real. Like in Murdoch’s novel, they know and mourn.

As for the source of the memory loss or blankness itself, I’ll leave you with this quote from Mike Kelley:

Educational Complex was done directly in response to the rising infatuation of the public with issues of Repressed Memory Syndrome and child abuse. It led to a rash of similar kinds of cases. the popularization of this certain kind of-of therapy which was predicated on the idea that certain traumatic events, that especially sexual abuse are repressed and only removed later through therapy. The implication is that anything that can't be remembered is somehow the result of trauma.

So the parts I could not remember of these buildings was the majority of them, probably like eighty percent. So that meant eighty percent of these buildings that I had been in for most of my life were the site of some kind of repressed trauma.

No one's going to think that when they look at it. It looks completely orderly. It doesn't look dysfunctional at all. But seen through the theory of repressed memory syndrome, that's what it means. Like, why can't Mike Kelley remember like all these rooms in the schools he went to every day for, you know, most—like, half of his life. Well, nobody can. [4]

[1] Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, Penguin Books, p.33.

[2] Mike Kelley: Ghost and spirit, London: Tate Publishing, p. 136.

[3] Sylvia Plath, Face Lift, The Poetry Library [web]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=99&issue=6&page=19

[4] Human interest Episode 662: Mike Kelley, Educational Complex, 1995 [web]: https://whitney.org/collection/works/10293