SFBG: How did you dream up Day Is Done?

MK: I had already done one piece where I took a found photograph and I did a video tape, Extracurricular Number One Domestic Scene, and I had written a whole melodrama in the manner of a teledrama from the late '50s, early '60s, a Tennessee Williams-esque kinda of thing. But it was just one image expanded to a half an hour teleplay, so I thought next time I worked with this I'd like to work with more images. It automatically set up this problem that you get, kind of, in a filmic situation: how do you play with it temporally and how do you make all these different scenes work together. So that's how I decided to do it, as a musical, because I thought that would be the simplest. Musicals are basically episodic: they don't have a lot of complex narrative structure, and the structure is generally just a bracketing device for a lot of disconnected entertainment. That made it easier to do the installation, the gallery version of the film, because you could have these separate entertainments that would tick on and off and it didn't really matter so much about the sequence of them.

But when I decided I wanted to have a single-channel version that could be available for people to see outside of the institutional context, it wasn't interesting enough to have them one after another after another, like a kind of music review. So I said, "Well, I gotta hunker down and edit this like it was a film, do something with it," and it became much more complex - and I think it's much more interesting to watch. Now that you have all these things going on, you have this expectation, like, where do these people go? What's happening? You go to this section where there's a lot of entertainment following one after another, but they're sometimes broken up and intercut, and you're going back to other interactions, and I think it becomes something that's easier to sit through even though it's quite, quite long!

SFBG: Where did the photos come from?

MK: They're all from high school yearbooks and they're all of extracurricular activities, so you can't really tell where they're from. You cant recognize them. That was important to me. I wasn’t interested in high school per se. I was interested in finding an image bank where you could find a lot of images of a typical america folk activities and entertainment forms and that was really one of the few sources I could find for such images.

I didn’t want anything in which you could even tell what period it was, even though there are things in a period style, like there's a dance scene that's obviously Madonna-esque. But you don't know if it's from that time or some kind of throwback or nostalgia or something. So I wanted it to be confused in terms of time, which is typical of folk art forms - they don’t change that much. Once they're developed they kind of stay the way they are. You see a Halloween photo from 1920 and a Halloween photo from now, and unless there's some character that's really specific to that year, you wouldn't know what year it is.

SFBG: Some scenes, like the singles mixer, didn't seem like something you'd find in a school yearbook.

MK: By extracurricular I don't mean classroom-only. You have the same kind of activities in the workplace, like "Jeans Friday" at work, or dress-up day. At some businesses where a lot of people work, you will have singles mixers. The corporate environment's the same as the school's - it's the same in work environment, and all these activities aren't really age-specific.

SFBG: Why did the Halloween or ghoulish theme end up running throughout?

MK: Well, I have files of hundreds of photos of all different kinds of genres, and when I started working on this, just to limit the iconography, I only worked from a few files. So I worked from vampire and Halloween imagery, hick iconography and musical iconography. This particular project was limited to that. If i continue on in this vein, making more of these types of things, they will shift genre based on the photo collections I have.

SFBG: Do you think you gravitate toward monstrous imagery because of your background in, for example, Destroy All Monsters?

MK: I am attracted to that kind of iconography anyway, and of course, it's kind of funny to do a vampire musical.

SFBG: Are you repulsed by trendy imagery?

MK: Sometimes I embrace it, like "What can I do with it?" But other times, if there's too much stuff going on, people can't see through it to the work, to what you're doing with it. So I have some ideas to do another musical that's...more science-fictiony. I have a lot of files of people in costumes that are science fiction-looking or obviously Star Wars-derived or has that flavor.

SFBG: Where did the title of Day Is Done come from?

MK: It's some depressing organ standard, probably something you play at funerals. I wanted something that was like, the work day is over and the fun is starting. [Laughs] The work day is over, but maybe it's still not so good.

SFBG: Do you have a background in dance as well as music?

MK: I'm a garage musician. But I was always interested in dance, wherever I was at school, there was always a dance progam and I was always very interested in dance and avant garde theater. But I'm not a trained musician - I come out of rock 'n' roll. I never studied music, and I don't know anything about it on any kind of technical level. I develop everything in my own manner. I never thought of my music as "music music" - I thought about it as art music. So I'm hesitant to even talk about it as music.

SFBG: You did re-release Destroy All Monsters's recordings a while back.

MK: Yes and we re-formed as well. We did the reissues when this whole Japanese noise music hit, and it was like, gee, we did this kind of thing and nobody knows about it and you can't get it. So we put that out just for our own amusement, really, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was really into it and he put it out on his little label. There was a lot of interest in it, so we re-formed and did a couple dates and then we started playing again and releasing new records.

Now I'd been doing music ever since that time, with other people or solo. I quit the band format in the late '70s, early '80s, and I was doing solo performance for almost 10 years and I thought of that as a kind of music in itself - even though it was just me and there were no instruments and it was just spoken. All along I thought it was very musical.

I kept playing with people at that time, and I never thought about it as art per se, but at the same time I missed [music] and I wanted to bring that back into my work. So at first I was doing kind of sound components mixed into sculpture, because I didn't have time anymore to kind of play recreationally with people. So I said, "OK, if I really want to do this, I have to work it into my practice," and now it's become very important to me.

I'm working on several projects now that have sound componetns, and sound is a very important aspect. And I'm making a lot of records - I think I've put out 14 records or something now, of various kinds, on my own label. I don't even have distribution. They sit around in boxes, and I sell them on the Internet. I don't make any money on them, but I like to do them.

SFBG: What drew you to video?

MK: I've never been a fetishist for...technology. I always kinda use what I think I can get something out of. I do everything: I draw, I paint, I perform, I play music - all these forms interest me in one way or another. I kind of have this Wagnerian sensibility. I want to make everything work together! I want to develop this total artwork package. [Laughs] I'm a maximalist - when I see a technology, I'm not, like, "Oh, I'm superinvested in this" for its own sake.

Day Is Done is my first feature-length one. I made some very long things with Paul McCarthy - they're more installational, and those tapes are never shown outside of installations. I think the longest tape I've made is a half an hour. But I've done a lot of videotapes over the years. Oftentimes in collaboration with other artists like Erika Beckman, Tony Oursler.

SFBG: What's your current work like?

MK: Well, I just had a show in Berlin of these sculptures. ["Mike Kelley: Kandors" at Jablonka Galerie] Again sci-fi-ish overtones. A lot of the iconography was derived from Superman - this motif in Superman, this bottled city. I'm not interested in the mythos, really: it's just that I became interested in the fact that I was looking for a typical rendition of the city of the future. And I thought of this city, this bottled city, and when I researched it, I found out it was such an unimportant aspect of the comic that it was never drawn the same way twice. I was able to find like, I don't know, a 100 versions of this city, and I thought it was very fascinating as this kind of metaphor for memory and architecture because in the last 15 years I've done a lot of sculptures that were architectural in orientation, but were about forgetting and parts that can't be remembered and things like that.

So I thought about this bottled city, which represents this character's past, is never the same, and is kept in this bottle, this memento, and I had these bottles blown, very large, and made these sculptures around these bottles, and again I wanted to activate the whole thing. I started playing with these bottles and blowing various kinds of reflective materials around inside them and in post-production, playing with that going backwards and forwards, wondering if I could create tornado partterns and turbulence effects and almost light-show kinds of effects inside these bottles. And of course, I felt like I needed to compose sound for it, and that led me to a whole set of videos where I grew crystals and I played with New Age-y aesthetics, and so I just did a whole record of New Age music, and that was very fun to do.

I don't do light opera, I don't do New Age music - I come out of noise music! So these projects took me where I've never, ever gone before, took me by the nose and said, "OK, let's figure out how to do this. Let's figure out how to write light opera or let's figure out how to do New Age music, and make that work somehow or another." That's fun for me. It's like exercises for me - to expand my repertoire - so I don't do the same thing over and over again.

SFBG: Is that why you inserted yourself into Day Is Done as the morose ghoul - to expand your repertoire?

MK: That's only because you can't tell who it is. I played it and another actor played it. It was just that I was available!

SFBG: Did your own high school experience play into that character's poetic, gloomy monologues?

MK: No, it was very generic. Again I want to downplay this whole high school thing - this is something that people are really, really fixated on. That's what everyone gloms onto, no matter how much I say it's not about high school.

SFBG: What about the sequence in which a blood-dripped woman tries to sell a credit card to alumni?

MK: That's very collegiate and also very post-collegiate. That text is literally read from a credit card advertisement I got in the mail from the University of Michigan where I went to undergraduate school. So that to me is much more about an older person - they're trying to milk the alumni with these scams. I just thought it was funny.

I think school is just a kind of factory to get you ready for the workplace. It's the same kind of drudgery, 9 to 5, and the workplace is just an extension of it. So I don't see any difference between first grade and work. People like to fetishize high school because it's after puberty, so they can sexualize it, and also adolescence now is completely fetishized. It's the free zone in most people live - it's before they have to go to work, but they're still semi-adult. There's the possibility of getting laid or something. Everyone has this fantasy about high school and what could have been - it's very pathetic and advertising and everything is geared toward hat, like your life stopped when you were 16. Selling sugar cereals to adults and all this kind of willful childish return. I think the nonsensical aspects of a lot of these forms are that way, but they have a function throughout your life - even at the old folks' home, people do these ridiculous activities as a break from the drudgery of the daily routine. Carnivalesque activities are just a part of the institutional framework of American life. You have drudgery and you have symbolic nonsense, disorder.

Those are the kinds of photographs I focused on - images of disorder. Things that are either artsy or carnivalesque, things tht would not be normative, so this whole world is constructed of the nonnormative or artsy aspects of institutional life. At the same time they're folk forms, they're things that are very, very recognizable, and they're not transgressive. If they are transgressive, they're only symbolically transgressive, which is what a lot of holidays are, anyway. Like, once a year, you get to get drunk on St. Patrick's Day, or one day a year, you get to revel in death for Halloween. You have Sadie Hawkins Day or cross-dressing day - there are tons of these kinds of rituals that are played out, and in some situations, that's the only time there's a kind of breach in this kind of schedule. Other people make that their life [laughs] like me! Every day is breach day for artists.

These are kind of like proto-art forms, in a way, and they interest me as such. Even people who don't like art - and most people in America don't like art - don't mind donkey basketball or some ridiculous activity like that. They don't think of it as art - they think, oh, I don't have to go to work now. I can go see this instead.

SFBG: You don't see video as a new folk art?

MK: I don't think mediums are inherently folkish. I think manners of usage are folkish, when things become cliche they're folkish - like for example, there is folk video like public access or YouTube.

SFBG: Why don't you put your videos on YouTube?

MK: I always think that would be a good idea, but I'm actually not very techy, y'know! I don't know how to do it. I'd have to hire somebody. It just seems liek a waste of my time, and I think, oh, gee, well, if I put these videos on YouTube, will anybody look at them? I don't know, probably not. They tend to look at videos of passed-out drunks or girls shaking their booties or sick kitties or things like that. But it would be interesting.

I made this doll for this toy company, and we're working on a commercial for it, and I thought I'd put that on YouTube. So silly. I haven't done it yet, but we’re going to do it. It s a talking doll, and it looks like a personified pillow, and it says 20 things. It's kind of marketed towards adult sissies.

SFBG: What's going on with the doll and stuffed animal fascination?

MK: Well, I don't think I was fascinated with them - the audience was fascinated with them.

Early works with those kinds of materials, like More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, everything in that sculpture is handmade, but it also includes afghans, knitted scarfs, as well as dolls.
People were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there was a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the '80s. And the work sort of changed to address that issue once I realized it was there.

Then I kept trying to come up with works that would circumvent that, play against that natural inclination on the part of the viewer, to see these objects as being primarily empathic in nature, or that being my intention. So I tried to formalize my approach in presentation, or present them in very anthropological ways. But of course, that just increased the empathy!

Then people started to psychoanalyze me, and that's what led to all this work with repressed memory syndrome. I became interested in working with these kinds of photographs because they were ways for me to, say, fill in the gaps with screen memory.

I thought generic folk forms were the perfect way to fill in these blanks. The original idea was I'd fill in the blanks with these screen memories, and then I would do other tapes that would be cliche abuse situations. Behind the screen memory is this - but it's another cliche. There's no real memory. There's only various kinds of tropes. There's the screen memory and then the recorvered memory, and the recovered memory is another kind of drama. That's the first tape I did, which was this dreary play, a male couple, and this guy wakes up, and he doesn't understand how he ended up in this house lviing with this man, how he got there, and it's played out like some kind of Tennessee Williams dreary scenario.

After that it sort of didn't even matter what the content of it was. I can just play with genre. That's what Day Is Done is about - it became an exercise in montage and creating something like a feature.

SFBG: Still, an intense dislike for or skepticism about Christianity came out.

MK: I think it's kind of like the revenge of paganism because a lot of these holidays are Christian usurpations of pagan holidays - like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween. In a sense I wanted to re-paganize them. {Laughs] Or at least not make them Christian anymore. Then I had activities like the candle-lighting ceremony. One is a Catholic school girl, and then there was another photograph of a Jewish girl, and they became kind of battling candle-lighting ceremonies and the whole dialogue developed. A lot of it was, I have these images and how do I have some sort of drama? What do you do? OK, I have a dark preetty candle-lighting Jewish girl and a chubby Catholic girl, so I have this conflict, and I pushed it by having these horrible rappers sing this terrible song about her. Nazi rappers at that! So it's just ludicrous. It's just having fun with these things and pushing the narrative, if you want to call it that, along.

SFBG: So what do you think of video as a medium?

MK: Well, it's hugely popular. Ten years ago you didn't see galleries filled with sellable video installations, and now it's a cliche. Video is extremely normalized at this point as an art material.

SFBG: What will your next video piece be like?

MK: Well I just did this big show in Berlin - it just came down, actually: "Kandors," which has a lot of video in it. There were these videos of these bottles projected onto the walls with various kinds of light patterns and a drone track, and there were these monitor works with time-lapse crystal gardens growing, and those had New Age soundtracks. It was almost like a terrarium, or equating the city in bottle with a terrarium, a magical world inside of a bottle.

Kandor is the city that Superman comes from on Krypton, and the city in the bottle in his fortress of solitude. I'd be in asked to be in this show in Bonn, Germany, on technology, and I thought I'd do something with futurist imagery. I made a comparison between the city in the bottle and Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar. It's kind of a site of alienation - just thinking of this guy watching Internet porn all night, staring into a screen, but disembodied. Then I decided I was going to make these bottles and then researching it and finding out the city was never done the same way twice, it was so much like what I was working with, with repressed memory syndrome. This was like physicalizing one thing that has 20 faces - that paradox interested me.

But then it took a lot longer than I thought. I spent two years trying to make these bottles: I had to go all over the world to find a place - only in the Czech Republic could they blow a bottle that big, and it just turned into this giant thing. At first it was going to be this show of pretty bottles - I start with one idea, and three years later, it's this outrageous megolith. Like Day Is Done, which turned into a feature that I worked on for how many years.

Part of an interview with Mike Kelley, first shown as part of PBS's Art:21, on the making of Day Is Done.

Day Is Done screens Thursday, Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
701 Mission, SF. $6-$8.