"Hollywood is Sleaze": Mike Kelley Thinks About Los Angeles

An Archival Interview with the Late Artist

In 2011, my friends David Kramer and Sammy Harkham, the proprietors of the much-missed bookshop Family, guest edited a special Los Angeles section of Paper magazine. I had the good fortune of speaking with one of my favorite artists, Mike Kelley, for it. The loss of him left a gaping hole in not just the art world, but culture in a much larger sense.

This interview doesn’t seem to be available online anywhere, so when I found it on an old hard drive, I decided to bring it back out into the light. The directive was to speak with Kelley about L.A. in particular, hence the focus of this interview. This was four years before I moved to L.A. myself, so please excuse the naïveté of some of my viewpoints in what follows. Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy hearing some words from the man himself…

SLUM IN THE SUN

Mike Kelley has been making art in Los Angeles since 1978. But is he an LA artist, or is he an artist who lives in LA? See the difference there? And, setting that whole mess aside, what does he even think of LA? Does he like it? These are things I want to know. So…

Jesse Pearson: Are you a Los Angeles artist?

Mike Kelley: I’ve never thought of myself that way. I didn’t grow up here. I came out from Detroit to go to graduate school, and most of the people I was meeting then were not from here either. Like with New York, people come from other places to a big city like this. Coming up in the era that I did, I felt more a part of an international scene. My teachers were, for the most part, conceptual artists. That wasn’t a localized or regional art form.

So does where you live figure into your work at all?

I wouldn’t say so. I’m nothing like Ed Ruscha, whose work is really about a kind of Los Angeles mindset. My work is more sort of Middle American, or class-oriented in general. It’s not specifically caught up in regionalisms.

As a Detroit kid, did you have preconceived notions about LA?

I didn’t know anything about it. But growing up in the Midwest, I thought of cities in terms of metropolises. The scale of Los Angeles—and the landscape and vegetation—was not like anything I’d experienced before. When I first got here, I was going to school out in the desert. A lot of people there weren’t even going into Los Angeles. But I was very into the music scene, so I’d go to clubs. I started meeting local artists and I started to feel connected to it all. But I also knew people in other places, and so I never felt like, “Oh, I’m an Angeleno.”

Portrait of Mike Kelley made for this issue by Sarah Soquel Morhaim.

But you must feel like one by now.

Well, I feel particularly connected to the group of artists here that I’ve met over the years. I stayed here after grad school when that wasn’t a very common thing to do. People would immediately go to New York. Today, many artists stay here after school, and people are coming from other places to live here. The young art scene here is so immense—so much bigger than it used to be.

Your studio is in Highland Park?

Yes. When I first moved here, there were very few studios. But now it’s kind of an artist zone. I live in South Pasadena, which is close to here.

One benefit that I’ve found to LA being so spread out is that different neighborhoods really feel like mini-cities of their own—far more so than different neighborhoods do in Manhattan or Chicago. Is there a particular part of town that you feel closest to?

I think that I’m much more east side-connected than west side-connected. I hardly ever go near the ocean. I lived in East Hollywood for many years. I left right before the explosion of the Silverlake area, before the hipsterization. When I was there, it was primarily Armenians, Filipinos, and Mexicans. There was a kind of gay scene there too.

Downtown is maybe the most intriguing part of LA. The first time I saw Skid Row, I was totally astonished.

It’s horrible. It’s what Soho was like many years ago. Downtown has all of the street people because it’s where the missions are, but then right next to that is this fake zone of culture. MOCA, the Music Center, all of that. And then you’ve also got Little Tokyo and Chinatown. It’s a funny mash-up of things. A lot of artists used to live Downtown until the real estate prices went up in the 80s and they were all forced out. Now there’s a little zone of hipster-ish restaurants and loft dwellers right near the bus station and Skid Row.

Growing up on the east coast, LA to me was surfers and 90210.  

People from out of town, all they ever think about is the beach and Hollywood. But even Hollywood, the reality of it is that it’s a slummy area. It’s a factory. There’s nothing there. Hollywood Boulevard is just a tourist street. People are very surprised when they see how crummy it is.

I’d like to get back to what you were saying about Hollywood, as in the film industry. It’s really a dark and creepy history, and it gives LA a dark and creepy vibe.

It’s sleazy. All you have to do is read Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger.

Exactly.

Hollywood is sleaze. And yet it’s also, to many people, this dream world. But it’s an industry. Like a steel factory or something. I even worked in Hollywood when I first moved to Los Angeles. I did set building and light construction, even extra work. There’s nothing glamorous about it, and it doesn’t really have a great presence here. It would be like saying, “Gee, is New York all Broadway?” Of course it’s not. A few people are invested in that, but it’s primarily a tourist thing. There’s also this idea that Los Angeles is all sun and fun. But LA is, in many ways, a giant slum. A huge slum. It goes forever and ever and ever. From the beach all the way to West Hollywood, there are these enormous pockets of wealth. It’s hard to think of that much money in one place. But it’s balanced off of 90 percent of abject poverty.

What’s an underappreciated aspect of LA?

It’s kind of an intellectual center. This is where the art schools are. It’s where people come to learn about art. In that sense, it has less of a business orientation in relation to art than New York does. One thing I really like about that is having been a teacher here and being a part of this community, we really talk about art. There’s this cliché of people here being “self-taught” renegades, but that’s never been my experience here.

It can be argued that New York artists have addressed the film industry more in their work than LA artists have.

It’s really funny because I remember being a part of the Pictures Generation and seeing artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, with their complete fixations on mass media and film. I’m living in that and it’s of zero interest to me. It’s this kind of pop art mentality, and for some reason it’s always put on the artists that are here. Or there are these ridiculous clichés like “sunshine and noir.”

Do you have any instinct as to how your work might have developed differently if you’d stayed in New York?

It’s hard to say. You know, I almost went to Yale. And I’m so glad I didn’t. It was so formal and so caught up in these New York traditions of technique. On the other hand, I was very much interested in a lot of the New York artists of the 70s. More like performance related artists, like Acconci. But those people are hardly even considered part of New York’s art history. Like conceptualism, it was more of an international movement.

How quickly or slowly does Los Angeles change? New York has changed so drastically over the last 20 years. Has LA?

It’s changed a lot. When I first moved here, the Valley was the bedroom community for Los Angeles. I’m talking about Van Nuys and places like that. That’s all slum now. All that bedroom community stuff has moved way out to the North Valley, Orange County, or the Inland Empire. There’s also been a huge change in the ethnic makeup of certain areas. When I first came here there were pockets of Asian communities. Now there’s an immense Chinese community, an immense Korean community. Glendale has gone from having a tiny group of Armenians to being almost all Armenian. Also, when I moved here there was no contemporary art museum. This whole strip of official culture downtown did not exist. Little Tokyo barely existed. And there was no hipster Silverlake. There wasn’t this huge population of wealthy hipsters.

At a very simple level, an immediate advantage of all this diversity is different ethnic cuisines. That’s something I really like about LA.

That’s one thing that’s really great here. The food is incredible. Just going to the supermarket when I got here was like, I’d never seen half those things before. I’d never had Thai food before I came to Los Angeles, and it’s like my favorite food now. So all these different cultural things are very interesting. Of course, in other ways it’s very segregated.

What do your predict for the next few years in LA?

It’s hard to say. This is a city that I don’t think ever cared about being international, probably because it has its own industry. A lot of the city is immune to economic changes because the entertainment industry does well no matter what. LA has never cared about people who come here, like as tourists. It’s the worst airport in the world. You come into there, and it’s almost like they want you to just go home. I see lip service being paid to trying to make the city more comfortable for non-car users. I mean, Europeans come here and they’re shocked.

It’s insane how much a city of LA’s size has to rely on cars.

That’s the saddest thing about this city. There are a lot of sad things about it, but that’s the saddest.