ArtSlant Los Angeles

Online Media
July 26, 2010
Page 1 of 3

Leave it to Beckett to pose the activity of art making as one massive, unredeemable
failure: “To be an artist is to fail,” he says in one of his more lucid moments, “As no
other dares fail, and that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and
craft, good housekeeping and living.”
Beckett’s is a strange vocation, which could also read as an instructional manual for both
Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, who both made careers in the nineties, exploring the
fine art of failure (forming, along with Paul McCarthy, an unholy triumvirate of sorts).
It is no surprise, then, that their collaboration—a sprawling installation at the Farley
Building in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of LA, which includes some large sculptural
works and a six-channel video projection—comes across as an epically-scaled absurdist
monument to their practice, and it is aptly titled: "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery."
Far from any teleology or narrative progress, the project follows the aimless wanderings
of Baby Ikky (one of Smith’s curious personas that’s a hybrid of Baby Huey and what
Lacan would call “a trotte bebe”) through a desert commune/arts festival that bears an
uncanny resemblance to Burning Man. The strange, and at times painfully
uncomfortable odyssey (Ikky is a sort of anti-Odysseus), features various interactions
with the festive locals that blur the divide between artifice, life and performance. At its
best, the film also evokes Smith’s early work, which used the public access airwaves to
torment and otherwise annoy the pretentious New York art world of the late Eighties.
Although more polished than previous efforts, the result loses little of its existential
punch, packing the type of Kafka-esque discomfort mastered most recently by Ricky
Gervais (who, come to think of it, could very well be a Michael Smith creation).

The joint effort touches on some familiar topics: the unraveling of the artist-hero, the
integrity of the art object, the disillusion with utopic horizons, the use value of the
abject—all the heavy duty stuff that Hal Foster would write some hefty tome about. But
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perhaps most importantly, the project examines the currency of these strategies within
our present historical moment. It is worth noting that for both Kelley and Smith (as well
as McCarthy), these anti-aesthetics were rooted in the art world boom of the Eighties,
and the inflated egos of the neo-expressionism—what better way to undermine
bombastic self-expression than with a poo-ey smear? The project seems to carefully
weigh these deliberately pathetic antics. Perhaps this accounts for the somewhat solemn
feeling in the Farley space (which feels like an extension of the install), filled with long
rows of port-a-potties, arranged with the fastidious seriality of Sol Lewitt modules, or
those Seventies Volkswagens with their deflated tires, stuffed full of stuffed animal
assemblages—with their little black eyes questioning. As unsettling as it is funny, the
overall effect reveals how incredibly relevant these tactics remain, and it also exposes
the indebtedness of so many younger artists currently still mining this rich vein.
But nobody botches an artistic gesture like these two, and that’s the monumental
accomplishment, sublime in its absurdity.
- Franklin Melendez
Mike Kelley and Michael Smith "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery", 2009
Mixed Media Installation Featuring Multi-Channel Video, Sound Installations, And Sculpture.
Image courtesy of West of Rome Public Art, photography by Fredrik Nilsen