We’re not quite done with artist Mike Kelley, profiled this week in Sonic Reducer. Easy-going, amiable, and eager to ramble at length on the phone from his base in LA, Kelley – a founding member of influential Ann Arbor, Mich., art-noise band Destroy All Monsters – will show his first feature, Day Is Done, Thursday, Jan. 31, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
SFBG: Day Is Done has been changed significantly since its installation at Gagosian Gallery?
Mike Kelley: Oh yes, it’s been radically changed, completely chopped up and intercut. When it was installed, it was on multiple screens and computer-synched, and because the space was so large, we would have it run at two points simultaneously. Nevertheless you couldn’t take it in as you would a normal film – it was spatialized and treated more as a sculpture, so you could sit and watch sections and follow it over to here and over to there. But it would be hard to follow it in a very linear way. And also you wouldn’t have this very purposeful crosscutting that you have in a single-channel version, where we take all the various scenes and treated them as if they were simultaneous action and played with that kind of filmic language.