Mike Kelley – Cinema of the World

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith – A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009)

admin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:16:16 +0000

“Michael Smith is a big baby. Well, not all the time. But when he gets into his droopy diapers and lacy bonnet, adds sunglasses and a pacifier, and totters around on his stumpy legs as Baby Ikki, he’s as riveting to watch as any real toddler, albeit larger, hairier and a bit scary. Mr. Smith, the multitalented performer, video maker and multimedia artist, has been doing this character for about 30 years, and it never gets old.

For his latest escapade Baby Ikki went to Burning Man, the weeklong celebration of all things psychedelic that takes place every summer in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A film crew followed him as he wandered around the festival in white Crocs, and the resulting footage is the heartbeat of “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” a wonderfully entertaining and slyly thought-provoking collaboration between Mr. Smith and Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles artist known for, among other things, sculptures made of old, grubby stuffed animals and children’s blankets.

Occupying the SculptureCenter’s main space, the installation features a half-dozen large flat screens showing various phases of Baby Ikki’s day and night peregrinations, which cumulatively add up to an odyssey. In the gallery is a set of tubular metal structures resembling children’s playground climbing equipment, which includes one shaped like a rocket and a geodesic dome skeleton whose floor is covered with stuffed animals. This emphasizes a view of Burning Man as an essentially juvenile gathering. The boyish optimism of Modernist futurism — as in the inventions of Buckminster Fuller — is evoked by these jungle gymlike sculptures.

Looming over all is a colossal sculpture of Baby Ikki made of welded-together junk metal, which parodies the towering wooden sculpture with the emblematic figure that is climactically set on fire every year at Burning Man.

The videos start with Baby Ikki playing in the motor home that brought him to the event. Evidently preoccupied by fire, he clicks on a cigarette lighter, turns on the gas-fired stove top and consumes candy fireballs while horror-movie scenes of a woman threatened by flames plays on a television.

Outside he ambulates among campers dressed in all kinds of fanciful costumes, gesturing with clumsily splayed fingers at people and objects of interest. Occasionally he belts vehicles — done up like animals for a parade — with the stuffed green creature he carries around in one arm. All the while he maintains an expression of melancholic, slightly quizzical impassivity.

When night comes, he visits some of the elaborate, walk-in environments created by various campers and observes people dancing, twirling flaming batons and otherwise expressing themselves. At one point three minimally dressed women pull him onstage and writhe around him like lap dancers. Finally, all tuckered out, he finds a cushion-covered floor and falls asleep.

Baby Ikki seems to fit right in amid all the zanily attired burners, but he’s not one of them. He’s a kind of mole, a secret agent with his own agenda. Clearly Mr. Smith and Mr. Kelley designed their project not to celebrate but to mock the Burning Man circus. To substitute a giant baby for its wooden avatar is to suggest that the festival is driven by infantilism.

Contrary to the old hippie fantasy that expanding consciousness through unbridled fun, creativity and hedonism — and of course psychotropic drugs — will transform the world for the better, they imply that Burning Man is naïve and disingenuously complicit with capitalist consumerism. It becomes a symbol of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” which reroutes unruly and rebellious instinctual energies into politically harmless sybaritic indulgence, escapist entertainment and spiritual delusion.

There have been times when anarchic revelry seemed like a good way to resist and overturn socially limiting mores. The antics of the Dadaists in the 1920s and the high jinks of the Merry Pranksters in the ’60s were, perhaps, genuinely liberating. But now that Dionysian catharsis has become the promise of beer commercials and spring-break debauchery, behaving “wildly” is no longer so threatening to the status quo.

This does not make the Smith-Kelley project antipsychedelic. A politics of paranoia that finds everywhere the surreptitious, systematic curbing of individual freedoms and democratic initiative has always been part of the counterculture psyche. Yet this sort of suspicious mind-set can be diverted into less troublesome endeavors like “institutional critique,” the academically certified type of conceptualism that views art museums as agents of consciousness control and puts its faith in the analytic powers of the properly trained intellect.

The Smith-Kelley project is an unusually imaginative and funny instance of “institutional critique,” assuming it is fair to call Burning Man an institution. Admittedly, satirizing the festival and its associated New Age culture is like shooting fish in a barrel. (Borat could have a field day there.) But there are moments in the videos of considerable metaphorical and emotional urgency, as when we see Baby Ikki alone in the distance, almost lost in a dust storm, or when he falls asleep and dreams of women’s breasts.

In the Fellini-like scene with the three dancers, he’s like Odysseus enduring the call of the sirens. It’s less the tendentious didacticism than the comic, mythological vision that makes it compelling.

But the tension between ideological critique and carnivalesque rebellion — a schism that has been running through American radicalism for over a century — is something to think about too. A choice between purity of spirit and exuberance of soul.”

Director: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Writers: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Cast: Michael Smith
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 26mn

Voyage Of Growth And Discovery (Mike Kelley And Michael Smith 2009).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 26 min
Size: 	1.25 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 831 kb/s
BPP: 	0.177
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/F026C5B1F2AA758/Voyage_Of_Growth_And_Discovery_(Mike_Kelley_And_Michael_Smith_2009).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Kelley and Michael Smith – A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Mike Kelley and Ericka Beckman – Blind Country (1989)

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:48:12 +0000

“BLIND COUNTRY is a collaboration between myself and filmmaker Ericka Beckman. It was inspired by the H.G. Wells short story The Country of the Blind, which was a favorite of mine as an adolescent. I was both fascinated and repulsed by this tale of a man having to give up his eyes to live in an alien sightless society. In rereading it as an adult I was struck by the obvious fact, which I was oblivious to as a boy, that it is a castration story, and by the thinly veiled sexual and racial fears within it. Blind Country bears no discernable reference to the Wells story but instead plays with these subtle underlying themes.” – Mike Kelley

Director: Mike Kelley, Ericka Beckman
Writers: Mike Kelley
Cast: Mike Kelley, Ian Bearce, Lori Desantis,
Producer: Ericka Beckman
Cinematography: H. John Penner, Frank Thackery
Music: Bruce Darby
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 20mn

	
Blind Country (Ericka Beckman & Mike Kelley 1989).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	20 min 6 s
Size: 	314 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	762x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 990 kb/s
BPP: 	0.151
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/6D6A1C1A7376D07/Blind_Country_(Ericka_Beckman_&_Mike_Kelley_1989).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Kelley and Ericka Beckman – Blind Country (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Mike Kelley – Day Is Done (2006)

admin — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 05:58:00 +0000

Mike Kelley’s Magnum Opus: Day is Done released as a 2 DVD set (169 minutes). Written and directed by Mike Kelley, with original music by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, choreography by Kate Foley

Quote:
The first of the projected 365 videos, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) was shown at the Emi Fontana Gallery in Milan and then in “Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2000. The tape was a half-hour melodramatic play mimicking the look of ’50s TV dramas. With the current series I didn’t want people to get so caught up in the individual tapes; rather, I wanted to create an experience akin to channel surfing. The structure of movie musicals seemed a good way to achieve this, as they generally dispense with traditional narrative. Musicals are episodic and contain a variety of scenes, acts, and production numbers. Among popular forms the musical is the least unified and coherent. On the formal level I moved from a single set with accompanying tape to something more like spatialized filmic montage: a feature-length film in which montage is literalized in space. I wanted complexity, but I never imagined that I would end up with the thirty-some tapes that I did. It just turned out that way.

Once I chose the images, I wrote songs and music for a series of production numbers based on them. I worked with a choreographer to develop dance numbers. The question arose: What narrative elements should hold the production numbers together? Musicals and pornography operate similarly: There are the popular acts, and then there’s the narrative glue that holds them together, which is generally unimportant and often ridiculous. My narrative glue consists of a thin plot in which workers in an undefined “institutional workplace” attend a yearly grand spectacle.

…I want to create a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk that is not utopian in nature but is an extension of our current victim culture. My version of this unremittingly dark vision is presented as fun, as a carnivalesque escape from the drab daily grind of normal life. We are now in a period in which a lot of fun art is being made. I put this show together with New York in mind. There’s a lot of Broadway in it, and Broadway is quintessentially New York. — MIke Kelley, excerpted from 1000 Words: Mike Kelley Talks about Day is Done, Artforum, Oct. 2005

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Kelley – Day Is Done (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.