Dolls and Discontents

By ROBERT HUGHES

Every so often the American art world labors and gives birth to a buzz word or an ism. The latest one -- originating in Los Angeles and current for a couple of years now -- is "patheticism."

You might say that patheticism stands to notions of high culture (an ever imperiled growth in the United States) rather as the antics of Ren, Stimpy, Beavis, Butt-head and their pals do to those Edwardian gents in four-button ecru linen jackets who are seen contemplating San Miniato in Merchant-Ivory movies. To be a patheticist is to have more or less given up. It is to have made the discovery, always startling to the young, that parents lie, that politicians cheat, that moral authorities are hypocritical, that human society is one big sucking morass of dreck, and that you don't need to have much language, or be much good at using what you have, in order to say so.

Recent group shows, including that landmark dud, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, have been full of this stuff -- by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon and others. Its tacky sub-pop imagery, its dazed passive-aggressive stance, its fixation on teenage weltschmerz, all entitle it to be seen as a mini-trend, linking up with the wider American cult of dumb popular therapeutics. In the 1980s, American neo-Expressionist artists shoved their excremental clods of paint at us with the self-evident pleasure that eight-year-olds take in dirty words. Patheticism is the conceptual version of this: no paint, just the words. Poo- poo, caca, and screw you, Daddy.

But before dismissing it entirely, one should go to Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art this month to see the "mid-career retrospective" of drawings, installations, sculpture and performance leftovers by the movement's chef d'ecole, Mike Kelley. In the past few years, Kelley has become the most influential American artist of his generation. This doesn't mean that he's good all the time or even much of it -- only that he has strong lungs, a weird confessional talent and a lot of imitators.

Kelley is 39, Detroit Irish and blue collar. He is an ex-Catholic but in some crucial respects a Catholic still, and his work is charged with religious references and rhapsodic diatribes of moral insult that verge on panic. Jesus makes frequent guest appearances, and so do felt banners that parody the soppy semiabstract devotional art of the all-but-forgotten Sister Corita Kent, a liberal nun of the '60s. I AM USELESS TO THE CULTURE, BUT GOD LOVES ME, one of | Kelley's banners reads. He is as deeply immersed in the religious aura of his infancy, pre-Vatican II, as any Chicano postmodernist doing lurid Madonnas.

There was also Surrealism, which for many Catholic kids with artistic ambitions was the door out of orthodoxy. Kelley's work is larded with references to early eccentrics from the Surrealist pantheon, like the suicidal dandy Jacques Vache and the writers Raymond Roussel and the Comte de Lautreamont. On the other hand, his drawing is almost entirely derived from comic strips. Both confessional and obscure (why else would the museum have served up no fewer than 17 catalog essays to explicate it?), his work can nevertheless pack a flailing, provincial-surreal wallop -- now and then.

Kelley is best known for his soft sculptures involving found objects -- soiled, discarded stuffed toys, from teddy bears and bunnies to green plush snakes, which he sews together into teeming clumps or exhibits, in solitary pathos, on mats on the floor. You can cite a host of precedents for this, from Claes Oldenburg to Jackson Pollock, but the effect really depends on the nakedness with which Kelley presents the toys as elements in a free-form psychodrama about threat and vulnerability; they're like the dolls that witch- hunting lawyers use to elicit the evidence of children in abuse prosecutions. The most successful thing in the Whitney show is a reworking of Man Ray's famous Surrealist object, the wrapped-up sewing machine. Entitled Lumpenprole, it is a room-size afghan rug with (what else?) lumps, the size of children's bodies, beneath it. A burial shroud? A metaphor of silencing, muffling, the defeat of speech? Any of the above, or all, depending on your preference.

"A raging satirist," the catalog calls Kelley, but satire, like revenge, is a dish best cooked by skeptical adults and then eaten cold, and it takes more than Irishness and a fixation on excrement to make a Dean Swift. Still, we need to be reminded that adolescence is a cultural construct, a pathological condition invented by and for Americans -- and Kelley, at least, does that.