I FIRST SAW an artwork by Mike Kelley before I was able to recognize it as such. On the wall of a dorm room at the rural English boarding school I attended, someone had pinned a poster for Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty: a photograph of a stuffed toy crocheted from orange yarn, an alien with antennae and a bashful smile.
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A confession: the last time Ei Arakawa performed in Los Angeles, I was out of town. I had it in my diary, but when I realized I couldn’t make it, I wasn’t particularly upset. Besides the event’s title – GET BACK / GET OUT – and the scheduled date, 9 April 2022, the email from the artist’s gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, had offered scant details of what to expect. One piece of information stood out: ‘2 – 6pm (open rehearsals and performance)’. The performance, it seemed, would not be differentiated from its rehearsal. I’d attended too many proudly shambolic, deskilled art performances before, I thought, and I wasn’t so sad to miss another. I was wrong.
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Jonathan Griffin 