Profondeurs Vertes.

Mike Kelley Musee du Louvre, Paris

It's almost a joke: Mike Kelley haunts the basement of the Louvre with videos that "sexualize" examples of nineteenth-century American painting.

Parallel to an exhibition of American paintings, Les Artistes americains et le Louvre, Mike Kelley was invited to create an installation for a temporary exhibition hall located among the medieval foundations of this unbearably famous museum. Kelley chose to work in response to two American paintings that he says he had been drawn to while visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts as a youth. Watson and the Shark (1777), by John Singleton Copley, is a melodramatic sea scene that foregrounds a drowning, naked man who is missing a leg, and an advancing shark with jaw agape. Meanwhile, a group of men on a small raft are attempting to rescue this figure while harpooning the menacing fish. The Recitation (1891), by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, depicts two society women poised amidst an ethereal landscape rendered in hazy, atmospheric greens. The women face each other, one sitting, the other standing with arms hands on her hips, seemingly in the wake of the poetry reading referred to in the title.

Kelley reads these two relatively minor paintings as highly symbolic psychosexual narratives and sets them together in a dialogue of gender relations. The artist came to this interpretation when videotaping the paintings with the intent to place them in a temporal framework; it reveals and deconstructs the psychological milieu, largely puritanical, in America during these periods. Kelley's work is often characterized by issues of regression, trauma, and repressed desire, and he is especially interested in the constructed and fictionalized nature of psychological discourse (especially as it is used by contemporary popular media). He describes Watson and the Shark as an essentially romantic matrix of horror and religious and gender confusion that clearly plays on castration fears. Kelley made two video projections using this painting, which concentrate this interpretation: one that meanders through the port landscape of the background and another that traces the sightlines of the numerous characters. The second video presents the strange drama almost as action; the camera tracks from the figures trying to save the naked, androgynous victim to the sailor about to harpoon the shark, with close-ups of the shark's detailed teeth. The soundtracks of the two videos extend this sense of movement, the first accentuating the port setting with naturalistic sounds such as waves and the creaking of ships' rigging, while the second is scored to melodramatic film music a la Bernard Herrmann.

Included in the exhibition is a series of seven drawings that isolate compositional details based on these sightlines, concentrating particular moments of psychotension in the narrative by leaving out all other imagery. For example, Drawing no. 6 depicts only the harpooner and the eye of the shark in ...