There are many different Supermen. Over the years this fictional superhero has developed and grown, but also fled into alternate universes to start again, each writer and illustrator building on past continuity and deviating from it just enough to keep fans guessing and the story alive. In his new show at the Jablonka Galerie in Berlin, Mike Kelley (1954) returns to his themes of personal memory and popular culture, this time exploring them through the myth of Superman’s lost city of Kandor. [...]
The whole set-up at the Jablonka Galerie suggests a complex expansion of a two-dimensional comic strip concept into three dimensions. The bottled sculptures are situated among futuristic home-design elements – space dividers, consoles, counters - that seem out of context, too spare. This counterintuitive homeliness is accentuated by the occasional ‘anachronistic’ prop – a woven basket, a discarded yellow shirt, or a kitschy porcelain bouquet. Anachronisms like this only add to the tension between the frozen state of the still, bottled Kandors and their sped-up projection counterparts, suggesting a distortion of the fabric of time, as if Superman just stepped out and the planet has forgotten which way to turn.
By titling the show 'Kandors,' Kelley acknowledges the multiple nature of Superman’s cultural heritage, by extension challenging the notion of an objective representation of the past and portraying our (pop-) cultural memory as shifting and amorphous, multi-interpretable. Seen in this light, Kandors is a successful play on the flexibility of this kind of cultural knowledge and its inherent lack of objective truths, as well as a powerful meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past.
Read the rest of my review at Whitehot Magazine.
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