Stars of the dyspeptic universe
Mike Kelley, Sunset Boulevard, the color pink, First Reformed, Pepto-Bismol, clouds of unknowing, Hollywood, death, rebirth
“Colors are light’s suffering and joy.” — Goethe
“There's nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark.” — Sunset Boulevard (1950)
I look at the pink bunny. Then, at Mike Kelley’s face lit by Hollywood’s magenta sky. Goethe says there’s a hidden color between blue and red which makes a loop, not a line. My eyes are supposed to be shut. This is some years ago.
There are seven toy animals in total, all in a row, fluffy mugshots whose tender plastic eyeballs seem to dangle in the wind of the room I’m in. I fall in love with Mike Kelley in the nauseous and cloudy way, eyes half-closed, green and pink. I am given a few secret syllables to hold like the clotted center of a cloud, but they disappear in the eyes of the animals. The bunny’s the only pink one, though there’s something pink about them all, Kelley included, a sweetly disquieting mixture of young and used. Outside, the sky’s cleared of clouds.
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous 14th century text, a work of via negativa based on the belief that the divine, beyond speech, human comprehension, or affirmative declaration, must be approached through unknowing, unsaying. The cloud, an intimate yet faraway concealment of whatever’s between me and you, you and me, makes dust. The more it contracted the faster it spun and when it collapsed, the ball at the center made a sun.
“Hollywood,” said Michelangelo Antonioni, “is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.” Cloud, flash, cloud, formation, main sequence, death. I text you an image of the edgeless and pinkening sky. Gray, orange, black, cream, pink, and beige are the colors of the toy mugshots in Mike Kelley’s Ah…Youth! (1991). A framed photograph of the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, host of the Cosmos television series (1980) sits on a shelf adjacent to the faces. “We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!” says Norma Desmond, the once famous star of the silent film era in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder which opens with the homicide squad in Hollywood as the body of a young man floats in the swimming pool of an aging star. HE ALWAYS WANTED A POOL, says a voice delinked from body. The body belongs to the narrator, our guide.
Ah…Youth. Cosmos. Sunset Boulevard. A light in Dante’s hell: “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.” From the bottom of the pool he floats atop, bloated like gray lint in a drain. In “Playing With Dead Things: On the Uncanny” (1993), Mike Kelley describes Forest J. Ackerman’s Hollywood Hills home in an elaboration that’s also apt for Norma Desmond’s place in Sunset Boulevard: “Touring it is like walking through a morgue. Everywhere there are recognizable fragments of Hollywood film reality.” Desmond, youth-obsessed, is attempting to re-assemble something from a time when life was bearable, a star to rebehold.
The life of a star = formation, main sequence, death. Life is often synonymous with light, but as Carl Sagan tells us: STARS ARE PHOENIXES RISING FROM THEIR OWN ASHES. Ahh…Youth takes the form of eight cibachrome photographs, 24 x 18 inches each, and that ominous ellipsis between Ah and Youth. A black hole is A STAR IN WHICH THE LIGHT ITSELF IS IMPRISONED. The jailed light bending back over itself as it consumes whatever matter’s around while not taking up any space at all.
In “Dyspeptic Universe: Cody Hyun Choi’s Pepto-Bismol Paintings,” Mike Kelley writes: “Pepto-Bismol aside, it’s even hard to recall many artworks that are colored pink. For some reason pink has been deemed an unsuitable color for art. Perhaps it’s art’s ‘noble’ stature that occasions this regulation. For, when pink is used, it is generally seen as perverse, as something purposefully wrong.” I open my eyes wide and look into the toys. Born in Korea, Cody Choi moved to Los Angeles in 1983 and his work investigates cultural indigestion, bringing elements of Eastern and Western cultures together to reveal disorientations of displacement, glimpses of, according to Mike Kelley, “an unstable world, a dyspeptic universe.”
Georges Bataille tells us that pink and black go together, that pink by itself would be unbearable, obscene. Think of those pink balloons, thousands of them, in the devil’s house in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond walks down the stairs, cameras flashing. Everyone gets a secret mantra. If you forget it, you can call. “I forgot my mantra,” says Jeff Goldblum on the phone at a Hollywood party during the 3 seconds he appears in Annie Hall (1977). A thing to hold as it slips. Stars are born in groups called nurseries. Fresh pink ones begin to grow white. It is the destiny, says Carl Sagan in 1980, of a star to collapse. All those cameras. Where is the cinema? Dirty light imprisoned in the toy eyes surrounds the bus I ride through Hollywood, cloud-like and underpainting whatever’s ahead.
The pink medicine Pepto-Bismol appears in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017) as a pretty distress signal in an otherwise non-pink film. The ecstatic descent of Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) a Protestant minister struggling with illness, a tormented past, and a crisis of faith, commences. The Pepto-Bismol sloshes around in the whiskey, the liquids not quite mixing. A gut is a soul or a tunnel, a tongue to somewhere. In the next frame he walks around a cemetery under mute gray sky as his voiceover quotes THE BOOK OF REVELATION, the last in the New Testament. He’s removing the pages he scribbled under the influence of pink because THEY WERE WRITTEN IN A DELIRIUM. The film’s remaining thirty minutes issue quick near-pink slices as Toller’s mental and physical health degrade.
“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white,” Jean Genet writes at the start of The Thief’s Journal. And elsewhere: “...from my beggar’s state, from the dust of the ditches that rose up in tiny individual clouds about each foot, renewing themselves at every step, my pride derived a consoling singularity which contrasted with the banal sordidness of my apparel.” Mike Kelley has a series of thirteen black and white photographs of blown-up balls of lint and dust that resemble violent and soft ends-beginnings of worlds.
Meanwhile in the glass, Pepto-Bismol and whiskey remain separate as they swirl in a moment that mirrors Toller’s insistence at the film’s start that we must hold hope and despair, conflicting impulses, in our minds. An otherworldly slosh that rarely graces the stomach.
At the end of “Death and Transfiguration,” Mike Kelley refers to Paul Thek’s work as CONTRARY PRETTINESS. He says: “In A Procession in Honor of Aesthetic Progress, Thek exhibited sculptures damaged during shipping in a gallery where they were bathed in pink light. He repaired them in this light, and when they were fixed, moved them into a room lit with white light. They were reborn. They moved from the womb into the world.” Light and matter. ANOTHER PICTURE AND ANOTHER PICTURE AND ANOTHER. Flash, birth, main sequence, death, pink rebirth. Sudden sustenance from nothing. But you don’t need to know any of this to enter.
Stealing 2/3 epigraphs.