Welcome to Mike Kelley’s World: Beautiful, Ugly, Funny and Dumb

Fantasy birdhouses, monkey islands, U.F.O. abductions, poltergeist possessions, hillbillies, rockers, goths, stuffed animals, graffitied history books and colorful banners with humorous phrases (most of which can’t be printed in this newspaper): The work of the Detroit-born multimedia artist Mike Kelley has something for everyone.

At Tate Modern, in London, “Ghost and Spirit,” the first British retrospective of Kelley’s work (on through March 9, 2025,) shows how he mirrored America back to itself, like a twisted fun house maze filled with deranged, anarchic duplications.

“My interest in popular forms wasn’t to glorify them, because I really dislike them in most cases,” he said of his work, which draws on references as varied as Pop Art, Roman Catholic ritual, folk traditions, mainstream television and tabloid newspapers. “All you can really do now,” he said, “is work with the dominant culture, flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it.”

Hung chronologically, Tate Modern’s extensive exhibition begins with Kelley’s time at the California Institute of the Arts, a school known for its experimental and political approaches, during the late 1970s. Early photographs, sculptures and works on paper show the artist, recently transplanted from Michigan, where he had been involved in the underground music scene, experimenting with concepts of identity and authorship in what would become a characteristic deadpan-weirdo style.

A 1982 series called “Personality Crisis” has three large paintings of Kelley’s name in different fonts, stacked above each other like an adolescent doodling — sort of. The first variation is in looping cursive; variation two, in angular death metal font; and the third, subtitled “Death Trail of a Flea,” shows the artist’s signature, the ultimate stamp of authenticity, dissolved in an erratic curlicue trail — at once an insect’s dying gasp and a nod to the automatic writing of the Surrealists.