Mike Kelley’s wall hanging More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, with a related work, The Wages of Sin, both 1987.
I’m the type who falls in love with artists based on the language they speak–figuratively or literally it doesn’t matter–I’m in search of a sense of communion. I am fascinated by the words artists choose to use and some of them are among my favorite writers (Bruce Nauman comes to mind), so much so that I wrote an article for ARTnews a few years ago about how artists choose titles for their artworks and the connotations that they carry.
One of my favorites is by Mike Kelley: More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, which he discusses with John Miller in a BOMB interview that hits my achy spot:
JM Much of your work hits upon things that haven’t been acknowledged, the anonymous side of what people do.
MK When I first started working with crafts they were invisible to me also. The first piece I did with stuffed animals, for example, wasn’t even about stuffed animals but was about gifts. That was because the primary discussion in the art world at that time had to do with commodification. There were these Utopian ideas being bandied about, “Well, we can make an art object that can’t be commodified.” What’s that? That’s a gift. If I give you this art-thing, it’s going to escape the evils of capitalism. Well, of course that’s ridiculous, because if you give this thing to junior he owes you something. It might not be money, but he owes you something. The most terrible thing is that he doesn’t know what he owes you because there’s no price on the thing. Basically, gift giving is like indentured slavery or something. There’s no price, so you don’t know how much you owe. The commodity is the emotion. What’s being bought and sold is emotion. I did a piece called More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid. I said if each one of these toys took 600 hours to make then that’s 600 hours of love; and if I gave this to you, you owe me 600 hours of love; and that’s a lot. And if you can’t pay it back right away it keeps accumulating…
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I’m always thankful when an artist gives me a title that expands and directs the meaning of the piece. Particularly in photography, where the work is often so specific, its easy to cop out with untitled.
One photographer who’s particularly good with her titles is Collier Schorr. She had a picture in the “Family Pictures” show at the Guggenheim that was titled perfectly. It was a boys torso, stopping just at the top of the neck, and there was a bruise/hickey/something on the neck. And it kind of looked like a galaxy.
Yeah, I think untitled sometimes reveals more than it conceals–an underlying resistance to communication or some kind of political posturing or commitment issues (I can empathize with everything but the posturing). It’s also hell for cataloguing. Numbers would be preferable.
So, you’ve intrigued me . . . what did she title it? galaxy?
Yea it was called “Galaxy” (if my memory serves me correctly). My comment would have made more sense if I had remembered to put that in there.
Never even thought about cataloguing. I honestly think sometimes it’s just laziness, although I can see the “resistance to communication”. I guess my feeling is that you’re communicating something whether you like it or not, and a title is the best place to point the viewer towards whatever it is you’re trying to say.
I like the connotation of the word galaxy with a boy’s torso. awesome.
In my ARTnews article, I quote Robert Morris who was reticent when it came to titling his works, “I think that the reason that I don’t title them is that 1 don’t think the work is about allusions. And I think titles always are. And I think the work is very much about that thing there in space, quite literally. And titles seem to me always to have some allusion to what the thing isn’t, and
that’s why I avoid titles.”
While I can see Morris’s point, I can also understand the conundrum encountered by Robert Therrien who for years rejected any attempt to title his sculptures. First he named all of his works Untitled, and then he switched to No Title, because he preferred the way it looked and sounded.” In the 1970s, He was pretty emphatic about it until he began compiling indexes for a group of sketchbooks and realized the consequences.
“Trying not to have a title seems like you’d be simplifying things, but it actually makes things more complicated. And it doesn’t work. People just ignore the fact that there’s no title and give the works their own names.
You can’ t fight the world in how people see things.”
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[...] do we owe each other for what we’ve taken, shared, created, borrowed, been given? What would Mike Kelley say? Forget if it can ever be repaid, what is it paying for? Whose debt is it, was it, will it [...]