untitled, 2020
wood glaze and iron oxide on wood, steel, copper
83,5 x 24 x 35 cm

untitled, 2020
wood glaze and iron oxide on wood, steel, copper
36,5 x 23 x 23 cm

untitled, 2020
wood glaze and iron oxide on wood, steel, copper
52 x 26 x 45 cm

untitled, 2020
wood glaze and iron oxide on wood, steel, copper
34,5 x 34,5 x 26 cm

untitled, 2020
wood glaze and iron oxide on wood, steel, copper
42 x 24 x 35 cm


The Blindfolded Leading the Blindfolded

I always loved Mike Kelley’s birdhouses. I don’t know much about them, but just based on the images I’ve seen, and what I know about Kelley’s work, they always felt like a wink and a nod to minimalism, at the same time, firmly keeping a distance. Simultaneously ironic and sincere, a heartfelt mocking.
I remember reading about Kelley making them at CalArts in the late 1970s—I’m not sure if it was in response to his classmates and the general approach to art-making or art-teaching at CalArts at the time (there’s a part of me that has always wondered if Mike Kelley ever really bought into the whole CalArts conceptualism thing, apart from Laurie Anderson and that crew) or broader American culture of the 1970s but I like to imagine he made the birdhouses frustrated and exhausted after another Michael Asher marathon lecture. I imagine an all-nighter of mental gymnastics, Kelley walking out of class into the California morning sun, wiping his eyes and rubbing his temples. Whether his headache was from Professor Asher or just life (the way a grad student can just be fucking tired), I always read Kelley’s birdhouses as somehow a tongue in cheek—or, maybe, middle finger in cheek—shout out to his classmates or professors. But maybe it’s him rolling his eyes in the mirror.
Like any good, self-aware student (in his case, I’m assuming mostly self-critical), I imagine Kelley walking out of class and asking himself what all of this is about. What am I doing here? Who are these people? What makes me think my thoughts and my work are worth putting on display or even discussing? What gives me the right? Am I smart enough? Are these people around me even smart?! I imagine Kelley wincing at the idea of himself as the intelligent, singular artist, sick to his stomach, calling bullshit (on himself, his professors, and his classmates) on the tip of his tongue.
I imagine Kelley getting back to the studio and feeling the need to make something with his hands. He sucks his teeth at Baldessari’s Post Studio art class, rereading the course description, still having a hard time swallowing the idea of a class for “students who don’t paint or do sculpture or any other activity by hand.” Kelley sits down at his workbench and thinks—”No more thinking. No more ideas.” I imagine him not wanting to make art, just a thing. Hopefully, something with a purpose. But what does one make that isn’t perpetuating the heroic artist or the masculine-driven propensity to create?
Kelley takes masculinity and parodies it. He made a birdhouse. He made an object that checks off certain Conceptual boxes—minimalist design, political commentary, appropriation of a commonplace object—and yet, it serves a purpose beyond being an idea for its own sake. The form it takes is one that provides shelter and safe haven for the vulnerable. It could be made by anyone. Some of the birdhouses are more inviting than others. Some birdhouses propose a riddle, others a punchline. Some look like birdhouses, others do not.
When Kelley made the birdhouses did he imagine them to live on in art museums? Did he know they would become coveted, the air around them monitored to be kept at a specific humidity; or did he make them for his thesis exhibition, and if no one wanted them, at the very least, the birds could have them? And for that matter, does a bird care about the design or aesthetic of their birdhouse? Or do they simply need an interior, a structure with a roof to settle and the aesthetic is for us, the spectator? Do we see ourselves in the birds and so we feel like we need to give them homes, homes that mimic the architecture we’ve constructed for ourselves?
I don’t know if, when making these, Kelley cared about architecture. But I do think he cared about creating a space for something. Maybe he used the premise of a birdhouse so that whatever material used or form it took, it was ultimately an object that held the possibility and potential for protection and reminded us of vulnerability. Maybe he saw his dad make a birdhouse in the garage once and saw the contradiction of his father’s worn, working class hands crafting something as sweet as a temporary shelter for a bird. A kindness he never imagined his own father capable of. Maybe his dad made him join a boy scout troop when he was a kid to learn about the virtues of masculinity, and maybe this was the beginning of Kelley’s disdain for authority and values, and maybe he had to make a birdhouse (which he secretly enjoyed). Maybe his mother had birdhouses in the yard and maybe Kelley watched birds come to them from the kitchen while he ate his Cheerios.
Christoph made some birdhouses too. I’m hoping he sends me one because they remind me of my idealized train of thought around Mike Kelley’s birdhouses and how they came to be. I know Christoph has been teaching for some time now—architecture students if I recall—and I wonder if any of his students look at him the way I imagine Kelley might have looked at his professors. Who gave this guy the right to stand at the front of the room? Or perhaps Christoph is still a student, he just has to make the syllabus at the beginning of the semester. And even if he is the professor and not the student, as much as Kelley hated figures of authority, he became a beloved professor himself.
Christoph tells me he made his birdhouses blindfolded—which feels like it has some kinship to my thinking around Kelley’s birdhouses—a series of guesses and attempts to put something together that makes sense only with our eyes closed. I’ve been thinking and writing about Kelley’s birdhouses blind too, intentionally trying to not read too much about them. Part of me likes the idea of constructing my own narrative as to how they came to be. When Christoph opens his eyes and looks at his birdhouse, it is what it is. And when someday, someone corrects my story and tells me how Mike Kelley came to build his birdhouses, and it wasn’t out of frustration and it wasn’t inspired by his dad’s hands in the garage, I too, like Christoph, will gladly accept that it is what it is. It’s OK—sometimes the image in our mind, regardless of how accurate, is as important as what it is in our hands.

Yuri Stone



exhibition views Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna / AT
images: kunst-dokumentation.com