Mike Kelley: A Swansong to Detroit

In 2012, the art world was stunned when the visionary, anarchic artist Mike Kelley tragically took his own life. His last work was Mobile Homestead, for which he created a replica of his childhood home in the working class suburbs of Detroit and drove it around the broken neighbourhoods of the Motor City on a trailer. As it travelled, Kelley filmed some of the people living there, the small business owners whose livelihoods were devastated by the economic downturn, vigilante bikers terrorising Michigan Avenue, and the prostitutes, heroin addicts and strippers all hustling to make a living in a city that is a shell of its former self. Indeed, Detroit’s burned out homes, its derelict Michigan Central Station and crumbling storefronts paint a Gothic picture of decrepitude.

While Kelley had an ambivalent attitude to his hometown, leaving it for LA in the 70s, his portraits have an undeniable humanity and humour, celebrating local attempts at community building in an eviscerated city. A life-size replica of the house was built after Kelley’s death, and at his insistence, was to feature none of his own work but function instead as a sort of local community service office. And while the house itself was intensely personal for Kelley (he offered to buy it off its current owner several times to no avail) there is no biographical information in the films: Detroit itself is squarely the subject, hope for its regeneration flickering at the edges. The trilogy is being screened in London until the 18th of November, while in New York a major retrospective of Kelley’s work – so much of which riffs on and manically twists ideas about home and childhood – is on at MoMA PS1. As Bobby Bare croons in the films’ accompanying song Detroit City, though we might feel conflicted about it, all we ever really want is to go home.

The Mobile Homestead videos will be screened at independent cinemas in London this November. Click here for full details.

Text by Laura Allsop