Baby Ain't Got Back (Yet)

Mike Kelley and Baby Ikki wander the desert of the real

Comments (0) By Doug Harvey Thursday, Jun 24 2010

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In contrast, the video component of Voyage is almost hermetically segregated from its sculptural elements, each discrete projection hovering independent of one another and their ostensible host structures, almost as if they were haunting the ruins of a deserted playground — that one in Sarah Connor's recurring dream in Terminator maybe, or the one in Children of Men. The most prominent sculpture in the room is a towering rendition of Baby Ikki cobbled together from rusty tractor parts — a patently postapocalyptic cargo cult message from an almost forgotten world. If the first leg of the Voyage was to insert Baby Ikki into an environment that defines itself as a free zone for "radical self-expression," the second was to attempt to import the results of that experiment into the cultural crucible in which it was conceived. And they never quite made it.

The results are not necessarily as discouraging as they seem. For one thing, this failure in translation has paradoxically translated into powerful art experience on its own. And Kelley and Smith's appropriation of Burning Man culture — a distinct art world that posits itself as a vital successor to a failed elitist modernism — loses the taint of classism and exploitation that would have marred a more successful pastiche, ending up as a qualified validation of BM's creative legitimacy.

PHOTO BY FREDRIK NILSEN

A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, installation view

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We'll see what a further level of paradigmatic inversion will do, when Voyage becomes the setting for a neo-psychedelic fund-raiser for future West of Rome projects: on July 26, the reformed YaHoWha13 band — the house orchestra of Father Yod's L.A.-based 1960's Source Family "cult" (as opposed to an "art world" or "neotribal apocalyptic hoedown") will anchor a phantasmagorical multimedia event that will seek to bring Baby Ikki's round-trip to completion, and provide participants with a life-altering once-in-a-lifetime experience, allegedly including optional powdering stations and Ayahuasca-flavored pacifiers. At this point naive optimism may be our only way out.

MIKE KELLEY AND MICHAEL SMITH: "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery" | Through August 26 | Kunsthalle Kunsthalle, the Farley Building, 1669 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock