A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark's Film “Porky's” (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnik's Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull”, and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room

Mike Kelley’s multi-room installation with its descriptive title of A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark's Film “Porky's” (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnik's Electronic Composition “The Wild Bull”, and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room is an in-depth study of the artist’s autobiographical preoccupations. It is based around plans of the schools he attended and notes made on his memories, creating a maze-like space in which there are a number of panels covered with plans, notes and photographs of grey school buildings, pictures of classes and pupils and even the usual school toilet graffiti. The electronically-generated high-pitched noise, like that heard in the changing rooms of school gyms, creates a feeling of oppression that references the film “Porky’s”, with a new soundtrack. What Kelley is aiming at with this work is a personal reflection on the Uncanny in the Freudian sense of contact between the private, the domestic and the familiar, connected with repressed memory syndrome: the school-space associated with repressed, silenced traumas, brought back through humour and sublimation by a mass-market film like “Porky’s”. The mixture of architecture, musical and film references is an attempt to establish a sense of order in the selective amnesia suffered by a victim of a specific social medium.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio