Mingcheng Song

I've always known Educational Complex, in concept. And then I saw the photograph of the piece taken at a lower angle than I was used to seeing, where the fine grids laid out by the window panes came into focus. Suddenly the scale shifted, the large white shapes representing the roofs of buildings got chopped up by the window pane-pixels. The higher resolution shrank the models because the reference--the vitrine--had stayed the same. Once I was able to see the windows, the discontinuity became apparent. Yes, the walls were gone, and so was a part of the roof, I knew that, but I had never imagined it that way. The first time I saw the piece was at the Whitney, I remembered seeing the vitrine and the way it reflected the bright gallery light, the height of the table that carried it, and how central it was to the medium sized room--even these memories I was a little unsure of. What I did remember for certain was the tent-like structure in one corner, which turned out to be the auditorium of John Glenn High School, though I couldn't help but see it as a ridiculously large small tent. And I partially blamed the concentration on the tent for my oversight of the missing parts within the models. Other than that, the foam board conrstruction were largely a plot of inconspicuous whiteness, which blended with the interior of the museum. Details were filled in later, gradually and continuously as I looked at more photo documentations.

Mike Kelley's statement for Educational Complex is that the piece is composed of all the schools he has ever been to plus his childhood home, with the parts he couldn't remember left out, which according to the theory of repressed memory syndrome, indicates trauma of abuse. However, he clearly overestimated memory's ability to render sensible images once extracted.  

It soon became apparent that my memories of the structures were so poor that it was impossible to construct three-dimensional models based on them. My attempts at drawing floor plans resulted in incomprehensible sketches of disconnected rooms with no information as to their spatial relationships.

Realizing this, Mike Kelley resorted to photographs, blueprints,  even site visits. With several graduate students in architecture working on the model, Kelley was able to eliminate parts on an ad hoc basis, largely driven by aesthetic concerns. At this point, it seemed to me that the project had become one of formal subtraction, which intended not to destruct but preserve the signifiers of the institutional infrastructure. Since the architecture students had lend their expertise to the model's construction, the basis of Kelley's subtraction exercise was dependent on institutionalized practices, conventions and methods which he had experienced himself in the undergraduate years and expressed dissatisfaction about. It's somewhat ironic that the institution is maintained in two ways, first being that the students were told to keep the model fairly conventional and straightforward in order to highlight the repressed areas; and second being that the structures preserved in the subtraction was able to regenerate and complete itself all over again since structural damage was never intended by the artist.

I wasn’t trying to undermine Educational Complex, nor was I offering a formal critique by any means. I was mostly curious about how the process contradicted the intention, and the moments I took notice of in Kelley's description of his own process were the ones that seemed to mark a kind of conceptual departure. I shared many of the same dilemmas with him, started off trusting my memory and dreams, regarding them as currencies, only to come to the reckoning that they were perhaps inaccessible to even myself. Even though the making of Educational Complex seemed to prove an error in the process, for some reason it still arrived more or less at the designation location. Maybe it's the bias of having prior knowledge of the work's concept--every clue I picked up in reconstructing the image in my head is shaped by a few lines of written texts. Or maybe the making process was in some ways resistant to my crude interpretations, which would come to mean that the formal qualities within an art object is not so much governed by language after all.