Mike Kelley, still from Day Is Done, 2005/2006.

DAY IS DONE (2005/2006) 

Mike Kelley 

The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series is a projected group of 365 videotapes or video installations related to the sculpture Educational Complex (1995), an architectural model made up of replicas of every school I have ever attended. In this model, all of the architectural sections in the original buildings that I could not remember were left unfinished. I rationalized my inability to recall these spaces through reference to the pop psychological theory of Repressed Memory Syndrome, which postulates that extremely traumatic experiences are repressed and forgotten. Thus, I designated the blank architectural zones as sites of personal abuse. The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series was designed to fill in these memory lapses with video narratives of standardized abuse similar to those found in the literature of Repressed Memory Syndrome. Details are provided by material taken from my own biography, intermixed with recollections of popular films, cartoons, and literature. Personal and mass-cultural experiences are treated as equally true; I'm postulating the equivalence of art and memory. My purpose in refusing to differentiate between personal recollections and the narratives of mass media is to make these works not only representations of my own abuse, but also ones of culturally shared group abuse. 

The Projective Reconstruction videos are restagings of photographs of "extracurricular activities" found in high school yearbooks. I then construct narratives around these found images. I purposely choose photographs that are ambiguous in meaning. Outside the context of the yearbook, they would not necessarily be recognized as school-related activities. Many of these images have artsy, cultish, or sexually perverse overtones. They are not standard school events, but carnivalesque productions, symbolically at odds with the ordered world of education. I am not interested, specifically, in the aesthetics of high school or of the age group associated with it. Rather, I am interested in common socially accepted rituals of deviance, such as, Halloween activities. Unlike traditional sports activities, for example, which could be considered propagandistic events designed to inspire in the general population the values of group cooperation and the competitive spirit of capitalism, these events serve no productive function other than being nonsensical escapes from institutional daily routine. They carry within them a subtle critical subtext. Yearbooks were utilized as a common source for such imagery, but similar photographs may be found in other sources. For a different project, Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972 (Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001), I used photographs taken from local newspapers.1 To escape the tendency of the viewer to understand the Extracurricular Reconstruction series as reflecting a teenage mind-set, I have used actors of a variety of ages in the video restagings. 


The first work in the series, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 ( A Domestic Scene) (2000), was exhibited initially at the Emi Fontana Gallery in Milan, and then in Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2000. A Domestic Scene took as its starting point a photograph of what looks to be a stage play. Two men interact in a set depicting a shabby apartment, the centerpiece of which is an open oven. In keeping with my reading of the image as a play, I wrote and directed a half-hour video in the manner of early television dramas, which were basically plays performed live on television. My script is a playful, melodramatic reading of this image and reflects the influence of Tennessee Williams2 and the paranoiac world view depicted in Saul Bellow's novel The Victim.3 The oven acts as an associational lead-in to a fetishistic portrayal of a ghostly Sylvia Plath, who famously committed suicide by gassing herself.4 This particular image was chosen to be the first of the restagings because it was one of the most complicated as far as production demands were concerned. 

Day Is Done is the overarching title for Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32. It was presented at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2005. The thirty-one video reconstructions, plus several spin-offs, were incorporated into twenty-five individual video/sculpture installations. The show also included additional sculptures, photographs, and preliminary drawings related to these reconstructions. Unlike A Domestic Scene, which is one installation stemming from a single found photograph, Day Is Done consists of a group of tapes designed to be seen together, forming a loose narrative with recurring themes and characters. Each tape, however, may also stand alone. The plot, if one cares to call it that, is the result of connections drawn between the selected images, which were chosen from the hundreds I have collected and filed by type. For this project, I limited myself to specific icono-graphic motifs taken from the following files: Religious Performances, Thugs, Dance, Hick and Hillbilly, Halloween and Goth, Satanic, Mimes, and Equestrian Events. Many of the source photographs are of people in costume singing or dancing, so the resulting tapes are generally music videos. In fact, I consider Day Is Done to be a kind of fractured feature-length musical. Because of the complex, multi part nature of Day Is Done, I did not expect the viewer to spend much time with each individual tape. The experience of viewing it is somewhat akin to channel-surfing on television. Like Hollywood or Broadway musicals, which are the least unified and coherent of popular narrative forms, Day Is Done is episodic, made up of a variety of scenes, acts, and production numbers. 


On the formal level, I moved away from the one-to-one approach utilized in A Domestic Scene, which consists of a single set with an accompanying tape shot on that set. My intention with Day Is Done was to create a kind of spatialized filmic montage: a feature-length film made up of multiple simultaneous and sequential scenes playing in architectural space. The installa-tion at the Gagosian Gallery consisted of multiple sets containing up to four videos. These were projected onto a variety of screens-some hanging, some incorporated into the sets, etc. The gallery's interior walls were removed so that the sculptures were all visible in relation to one another. Since the sets are architectural in scale (many of them contain doors, walls, windows, and other architectural details), they function, themselves, as spatial dividers. The viewer entered a darkened gallery to discover a spread of architectural fragments illuminated by moving videotape images. My hope was that viewers would intuit some kind of narrative flow. Of course, this flow is quite complex and difficult to navigate, but, like a musical, it doesn't really matter if one follows the logic of it or not. 

Installation view of Kelley's Day Is Done, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2005

The sculptures are constructed from set pieces, materials, and props used in the production of the Day Is Done videos. I have always been fascinated with film props; they usually have no life outside film production and were never designed to be seen in person. One of my intentions with A Domestic Scene was to focus on such provisional objects as sculpture. These were built in the manner of stage props, designed to be seen from quite far away. In contrast, the objects in the Day Is Done show were designed to be seen on video-close up-and thus were built in a more careful manner. I also constructed the sets for multiple usages; the front might be related to a completely different scene than the back. This was done in a somewhat random manner; there is no logical relationship between the varied set faces as far as narrative flow is concerned. This invoked both continuities and divergences as one viewed the exhibition. The tapes aligned with a particular set were not always in the correct sequential order. To make up for these discontinuities, I used a synching system so that videos switched on and off in the prescribed sequential order even though they were not in proximity to one another spatially. In other words, there was a temporal chronology but not a spatial one: a programmed flow of tapes, analogous to a single-channel version of back-to-back sequences, moved throughout the gallery, but not in line. There are roughly three hours of taped material, too much for the typical viewer to take in, so the tapes ran from three different points simultaneously. A viewer could enter at almost any time and follow the action. 


The video narrative takes place in an undefined institutional building and gymnasium (the Educational Complex), in which "institutional workers" of a variety of types (Hillbillies, Vampires, Businessmen, etc.) interact. They are summoned by three singing Train Dancers in mime makeup to attend an annual motivational speech, which functions as the opening ceremony for a series of entertainments. These are lead-ins to the Grand Final Spectacle (a donkey basketball game, which is not shown). The entertainments include a contest in which that year's Saints Mary and Joseph are selected, a May crowning ceremony, a children's Christmas play, a Gothic dance act, etc., etc.—all of which are derived from the found photographs. Though the videos in Day Is Done ostensibly represent recovered memories of "trauma" associated with repressed and forgotten zones in the Educational Complex, they are only screen memories—"false memories" consisting of a very generic filler made up of shared cultural experiences. While some of this content and its detail might be subjective, at core it is familiar to almost everybody via popular forms of entertainment and social rituals. In the literature of Repressed Memory Syndrome, recovered memories of abusive trauma tend to be of everyday situations gone bad: fellow church members become satanic abusers, a father becomes a rapist, a children's preschool becomes the site of deviant ritual. I have followed this logic and taken standard folk entertainment forms, generally viewed as positive, and perverted them, though generally in a subtle manner. The folk entertainments I represent are true in the sense that most people have experienced such things themselves during their lifetime. I don't see them as simply shallow, any more than I see false memories as shallow: they are truly felt experiences. Movies, popular songs, and stories are real on the emotional level. 

Mike Kelley, Devil's Costume, 2005.

My working method consists of giving myself jobs. I have photos of people dressed in such-and-such a way in a certain situation, and I write dialogue or songs for them. Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles' Mixer), for example, is written in the manner of a television sitcom, with a laugh track. There was no real reason for this; it was simply an exercise in style. I worked with choreographer Kate Foley to develop dance numbers and musician Scott Benzel to develop the scores. The scenes were purposely produced in a variety of incongruous genres. The question arose: What kind of narrative elements should hold the production numbers together? Musicals and pornography were my model; they operate similarly-there are the popular acts, and then there's the narrative glue that holds them together, which is generally quite unimportant and often ridiculous. My narrative glue consists of the previously described thin plot, in which workers in an undefined institutional workplace attend a yearly grand spectacle. This "plot" functions only as a frame for the disconnected series of Projective Reconstructions. 

Educational Complex was meant to evoke such utopian architectural projects as Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum.5 However, Steiner's metaphysical organizing principles have been replaced with a formalist base: specifically, the "push-pull" compositional ideas of Hans Hofmann,6 which I define as a form of institutional indoctrination and mental abuse. This choice stems from my own rigid undergraduate painting training in the Hofmann manner. As detailed in the literature on Repressed Memory Syndrome, abuse becomes the underlying organizational rationale for all decision making. Like Steiner, I desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk-a unification of architecture, theater, dance, painting, etc. Repressed Memory Syndrome and "push-pull" are the unifying theories at the root of all of these varied productions. The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction project is part of this aesthetic universe. It is ambitious in scale and meant to rival such grandiose productions as Max Reinhardt's theatrical spectacles.7 My goal is eventually to make one tape representing each day in a year and, finally, to restage the tapes live, consecutively, in a twenty-four-hour period. I want to create a grand public ritual, designed specifically for, and mimicking, "victim culture," yet unrepressed and ridiculous in nature. 

Watch Art21: Mike Kelley in Memory.


1The Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972 (Wayne/Westland Eagle), part of John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (2001), was first presented in the exhi-bition Artists Take on Detroit: Projects far the Tricentennial, curated by Mary Ann Wilkinson and Rebecca Hart at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 19-December 31, 2001. It was then remounted at Patrick Painter, Inc., Los Angeles, April 20-May 31, 2002. The Guide consists of nearly 150 photographs of cultural events copied from my hometown newspaper. They range in date from the point when I dis-covered fine art to the year I left home. 

2Mississippi-born author and playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) wrote about Southern culture at its most lurid and exces-sive. His plays A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), and The Night of the Iguana (1961), among others, were made into feature films. 

3Saul Bellow, The Victim (New York: Viking, 1947). In this dreary novel, Bellow's protago-nist is accosted by a stranger who accuses him ofruining his life and talks the protagonist into letting him stay in his apartment. 

4The poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is best known for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1962), which is based on Plath's experience with depression. 

5See Wolfgang Pehnt, Rudolf Steiner: Goetheanum, Dornach (Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 1991). 

6Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), the German-born abstract painter, opened a painting school in New York in 1933 and became famous as the teacher of many of the New York School painters. He outlined his theory of "push-pull" composition in "The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts," in Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays, ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 40--48. 

7The theatrical presentations of Max Reinhardt (1873--1943) were often staged outside traditional theaters. One of his most grandiose projects was The Miracle, a vast, wordless religious spectacle-play staged at the Great Hall at Olympia, London, in 1911. See Max Reinhardt: The Oxford Symposium, ed. Margaret Jacobs and John Warren (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic, 1986). 

As published:

Francis, Mark, and Mike Kelley, eds. Mike Kelley: Day Is Done. London, England: Gagosian Gallery; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

Source photograph and reconstruction for Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #20 (Lonely Vampire)


Mike Kelley

 The photographic sources from which the Day Is Done series of videos are derived were limited to a select group picked from the hundreds of images of extracurricular activities that I have organized by type. For example, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #3, #4, #5, #6, #17, and #20 are all related to photographs of men dressed as vampires. Related iconographies were utilized for EAPRs #7 and #10, which picture groups of men and women in Halloween costumes that are primarily horror-theme-related, and for EAPRs #14, #15, #18, #19, and #21, which show individuals dressed as ghouls or in Goth fashion. Satanic and "pagan" imagery was the starting point for EAPRs #24 (which pictures a man wearing an oversized horned mask), #25 (a man dressed as the Devil), and #30 (a man sporting a pair of horns on his head, with a pitchfork slung over his shoulder).

The other major genres referenced were mimes (EAPRs #2, #16, and #30), hicks (EAPRs #8 and #9), ceremonial and religious spectacles (EAPRs #11 and #13, both of which feature women lighting candles, and EAPRs #23, #27, and #28), and equestrian events (EAPRs #31 and #32). EAPRs #12 (related to a photograph of two men dressed as Nazis), #22 (an image of two young women in a stage presentation), and #26 (derived from an image of a female shadow dancer) are somewhat anomalous images used to flesh out the narrative aspects of the video. Some videotapes in the Day Is Done series make no overt reference to these images but developed out of  free-associative narratives written in response to them. For example, the bar­ber shop scene attached to EAPR #25A (Devil's Door) is not recognizably related to the found photograph but acts as a kind of "flashback" to a traumatic event in the Devil's childhood. This tape features a young actor who also appears in EAPR #28 and the May Crowning/Hag Mary video; it was my hope that the reappearance of certain actors throughout the Day Is Done series would give the impression that some sort of narrative continuity existed within the project, even though that is hardly the case.

Most of Day Is Done was shot on sets constructed in my studio, though a few scenes were shot on location. The sets, props, and some of the costumes used in the production of the tapes were reworked into sculptures, most of which incorporate the finished videotapes. These sculptures are accompanied by a pair, or pairs, of photographs consisting of an enlarged repro­duction of the original black-and-white found photograph that inspired the reconstruction with a fairly exact copy of it, in color, featuring the video cast members.

Following are excerpts from a series of notes written by Kelley on the individual Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction videos that make up Day Is Done.  In total Kelley conceived of 31 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions for the Day Is Done project, some of which were broken down further into variations or spinoffs.  The complete notes can  be found in the the exhibition catalog, Mike Kelley: Day Is Done, Francis, Mark, and Mike Kelley, eds.  London, England: Gagosian Gallery; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

Source photograph and reconstruction for Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #2 (Train Dance)

EAPR #2 (Train Dance): Based on a photograph of three women in mime makeup in line-dance formation. They are posed in what looks to be the hallway of an institutional building. The narrative arc of Day Is Done concerns a series of entertainments presented as part of an unexplained festival day in an unspecified institution or workplace (the Educational Complex).

The three women perform a Train Dance throughout the hallways of this site, singing a song (telepathically, as they are mimes) to alert the population that the festival is beginning. The scene was shot in the hallways of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) during the summer, when school was not in session. The dance was choreographed by Kate Foley, based on my description.

EAPR #6 (Motivational Speech) is based on a photograph of a man dressed as a vampire, standing in front of what looks to be a plywood platform, in an exterior location surrounded by a Cyclone fence. A crowd of people is in the background. This figure has been interpreted as a "motivational speaker"-a high-level figure in the Educational Complex social hierarchy. The scene begins with the mass exit of the Complex population out of the building to what looks to be a tennis court. In fact, the footage was shot at a public tennis court outside the Eagle Rock Recreational Center, which was designed by famed modernist architect Richard Neutra. This building was used, as well as sections of CalArts, as an exterior  representation of the Educational Complex. The speech itself was pieced together from bits of elegiac texts found in high school yearbooks.

Reconstructed image for Extracurricuoar Activity Projective Reconstruction #7 (Woods Group)

EAPR #7 (Woods Group) is based on a photograph that shows a group of four people in costume. One of them is wearing a mask similar to that worn by the mindless killer in the Halloween series of slasher films; a female is dressed in a Gothic robe and holds a staff; a fig­ure of indeterminate sex is attired in a gaudy dress and ratty wig and holds a scarf of similar pattern to the dress. The fourth figure is a man dressed as a vampire. These characters were introduced earlier as members of the group of people leaving their offices during the mass exit of the Complex. Now they are shown skipping away from the motivational speech to wander in the forest. As they enter the wooded area, they split into three groups: the Vampire and the Druid (the Woods Duo) stay together, while the hippie/transvestite (The Wizard) and the Wandering Ghoul stray off by themselves. EAP R #7 (Woods Group) consists of three separate videotapes: #7A follows the Wandering Ghoul; #7B, the Woods Duo; and #7C, The Wizard. All three tapes feature overtly poetic texts spoken by the characters as they meander in the woods.

The Wandering Ghoul shuffles about in dreary zones of industrial/natural interface. He speaks in voice-over, as if we are privy to his private thoughts, which consist of depressive expressions of self-disgust and complaints of abuse at the hands of others. All of the text in the three videotapes that constitute EAP R #7 was constructed out of material found in juvenile literature from the 1940s and 1950s-though in a highly reworked manner that heightens repressed subtexts in the found writings. The words of the Wandering Ghoul are based on themes found in Curse of the Voodoo Gods by Joyce Rochat, a miserable Christian propaganda novel about the trials of a native Christian boy in Haiti.

 EAPR #7B follows the Vampire and the Druid as they roam in lush woodland. Their highly ambiguous conversation is a mishmash of cliches of the poetic sublime and cosmic horror, some with sexual overtones. Most of the iconography of this dialogue is derived from motifs found in Teen-Age Science Fiction Stories by Richard M. Elan.

The environment in which The Wizard appears is a little more open  than that of the Woods Duo and primarily dominated by large trees. The text spoken by The Wizard, who seems to be a kind of acid-head entomologist, is heavily indebted to Insect Stories by Frederick Shackelford. This section features several hallucination scenes reminiscent of those found in 1960s drug-exploitation films such as Easy Rider. The three videos were shot on location in a park.

EAPRs #6,#7A,#7B, and #7C are all included in the sculpture titled Woods Group, which consists of sections of chain-link fence, artificial bushes, and a standing tree stump out­ fitted in The Wizard's dress and wig. The black-hooded cloak worn by the Druid in EAPR #7B is featured in a separate sculpture titled A Gem in the Night. The cloak, fitted over a metal understructure, forms a housing for her staff, which has been motorized so that it spins. A fake diamond attached to the staff catches the light as it spins, producing a flashing glint inside the darkness of the costume.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #8 (Singles Mixer)

EAPR #8 (Singles' Mixer) is based on a photograph of a group of people in a class­ room setting. A woman in the foreground is dressed in hick attire and holds two large plush toy bananas; another woman has facial makeup mimicking that worn by one of the members of the rock band Kiss. The other four people in the photograph are  not in costume: they consist of a Caucasian man wearing glasses and three African American women. Because of the fairly large number of people in the photograph, I decided to use it as an opportunity to write a more dialogue-driven scene. The setting is a singles' mixer, a party designed for unmarried people to meet, but since there is only one man present it is not a particularly successful one. In addition to being a singles' mixer, the event has a show-and-tell element. Some of the characters have brought objects with them to present to the group. The Hillbilly, who is somewhat patterned after the naive country girl from the Tammy series of Hollywood films, talks about her plush bananas. She presents a painting of country singer Garth Brooks. The other women have also brought paintings of various male celebrities who represent their notion of the ideal man. These include portraits of basketball star Kobe Bryant, R&B singer R. Kelly, and actor Brandon Lee. The Kiss Fan exhibits a portrait of Gene Simmons, the famously large-tongued singer from Kiss. She is an artsy type who, at one point, recites a poem in honor of Simmons' tongue. Kobe Bryant and R. Kelly were chosen simply because they were in the news, linked to sex scandals, at the time I wrote the script.

The scene is patterned after television sitcoms and was shot in a similar manner­ basically, live with three cameras. The connection  to sitcoms is strengthened  by the  fact that I also used canned laughter, though I purposely employed stylistic discontinuity. For example, I mixed the canned laughter with dramatic film-sound-track-style music. The action primarily concerns the escalating antagonism between the Kiss Fan and the Hillbilly, who toward the end of the scene tells a long and pointless parable written in the style of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The parable is interrupted by illustrative sections of science-fiction special effects that are little more than amorphous organic flows. The scene ends with a catfight between the two enemies.

The sculptural version of Singles' Mixer includes a three-screen version of the tape, cut to accentuate the spatial positions of, and performative interaction between, the various characters. The catfight is presented as a fourth projection that runs in a continuous loop. The sculpture also incorporates various set pieces, including a snack table and the toy bananas, as well as the celebrity portraits.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #16 (Mimes)

EAPR #16 (Mimes) is based on a photograph of two mimes wearing the exact same facial makeup and costume: button-down shirt, bow tie, suspenders, and bowler  hat  outfit­ ted with a daisy. The face of one of the mimes is cut in half by the photographic frame, while the other mime is entirely in the frame. Playing off this relationship to the edge of the frame, the video documents the generally symmetrical and mechanistic movements of the Mimes in and out of it. This symmetry is heightened  through a video mirroring effect, which was used to double the image of a single Mime at times, making it even more difficult to differentiate between the two of them. The editing is extremely regular; the tape was cut to the beat of a click track. On occasion, the image of the Mimes is interrupted by sequences of flashing color frames that mimic the coloration of their costumes: red, black, and white. The cutting is so fast in these sequences that the individual frames are barely recognizable. This produces a flicker effect. As the tape progresses, the regularity of the editing breaks down and the Mimes are shown in random superimpositions as the sound of the click track becomes distorted through the use of a reverb effect.

The sculpture related to this tape, titled Structuralist Mimes, consists of a simple metal structure that holds two video projectors projecting onto built-in screens. One screen features the Mimes video, while the other consists of a loop of the flashing color sections. The Mimes' hats sit atop the projectors, and bits of their costumes are attached to the steel frame­ work. It is an incongruous pairing of structural simplicity and decorative accent, which mirrors the aesthetic of the videotape.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #22 (Picking a Mary)

EAPR #22 (Picking a Mary) is based on a photograph of two young women standing on a raised platform onstage. They are dressed in street clothes. A young man in a suit is poised at the bottom of a step made from a wooden crate, which leads up to them. An older woman, wearing a ladies' dress suit, gestures toward  the  two women. I reconstructed  this action as a kind of fashion competition, where the two women are finalists. The winner becomes the Saint Mary, a kind of festival princess of the yearly Educational Complex assembly. The man has already been chosen as her ritual mate, Joseph. The older woman is the judge of the event and critiques their mode of dress, bearing, and demeanor. I patterned her behavior after a poise teacher in Frederick Wiseman's documentary High School, and the fashion commentary mimics that found on such television makeover shows as What Not to Wear. At the scene's end, one of the women is crowned Mary and garbed in a blue robe. Her acceptance speech and the judge's responses are taken directly from biblical scripture. In researching this text, I was surprised  to discover what a small amount of speech is attributed to Mary in the Bible.

The sculpture that incorporates this video, which is projected onto a hanging screen, consists simply of freestanding clothing racks holding five hundred custom-made pink T-shirts on hangers. These are based on a sleeveless shirt worn by one of the two women in the photograph. On the front of her shirt is an indecipherable graphic that I interpreted as a horizontal geometric form underneath simple comic representations of a bird and an alligator-like shape. Later it was pointed out to me that the graphic on the shirt in the found photograph was, in actuality, an image of the Warner Bros. cartoon character Road Runner. My interpretation of it bore no visual relationship to this character at all, and I later titled my graphic Paranoid-Critical Road Runner in reference to Salvador Dali's method of projecting double readings onto images.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #24 (May Maenad)

EAPR #24 (May Maenad) is based on a photograph of two people in a gymnasium interior. A woman holding cheerleader's porn-porns leads a large male figure wearing an over­ sized mask with horns into the space. The woman is dressed in a skirt decorated with cutouts of leaves. I have interpreted the female figure as a Maenad. This decision was designed to counter the amount of attention previously focused upon the figure of Mary in the Day Is Done narrative. The action now shifts away from Mary, back to the main assembly hall, and Christian iconog­ raphy is countered with pagan iconography. The Maenad recites a text written in the  manner of ancient Greek Dionysian poetry. A bacchante, she is associated with the more contemporary figure of the Manson Girl, and the horned escort is her ritual victim. After the recitation of her poem, the Maenad returns without her mate, with blood running from her mouth. She delivers a commercial proclamation for an Educational Complex-linked credit card. The text for this was lifted from an advertisement for an alumni credit card sponsored by my alma mater. Some of this scene was shot in a gymnasium, and some on sets in my studio.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #25 (Devil Master of Ceremonies))

EAPR #25 (Devil: Master of Ceremonies) is based on a head shot of a man dressed as Satan, standing in front of an open door. I have interpreted this character as a kind of master of ceremonies for the final section of the Educational Complex assembly. He makes his entrance onto a stage outfitted with a Christmas-theme candy cane throne. Western-theme Christmas stage sets, found in the backstage area of the gymnasium rented for the production of this video, were incorporated into it. The Devil begins by singing his theme song, which was patterned after that of bawdy nightclub comedienne Rusty Warren. He then tells a dirty wedding-night joke, which segues into a "recovered memory" of childhood trauma linked to pubescent facial hair (the Devil sports a beard). In this "recovered memory," the young actor who crowns Mary in the May Crowning scene is cast as the Devil when he was a child. He enters a barbershop, where he is taunted by a barber, played by the same actor who portrays the Devil. So the Devil, in effect, abuses his own inner child. The scene was shot on location in an actual barbershop. Following it, the Devil enters the door behind him-which turns out to be a public restroom-to discover, and tempt, himself as a boy. All of this acts as a reintroduction of Mary, the princess of the Educational Complex assembly, who is then presented with a special group of entertain­ments in honor of her ritual marriage to Joseph.

These scenes are presented in two individual sculptures. Devil's Door consists of a found public toilet stall with two screens attached to it. On one of these screens is projected the barbershop scene (Barbershop) and on the other, a video loop of the Devil's face, which has been rendered in black and white and overlaid with digital film scratches and dirt, giving it the distressed look of an old "smoker" film (EAPR #25A [Devil's Door]). It has also been warped somewhat, in emulation of the effect used in movies to signify a flashback or dream sequence. This signifies that the Barbershop scene is a recovered memory.

Still from Day Is Done, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32 (Horse Dance of the False Virgin)

EAPR #32 (Horse Dance of the False Virgin) is the final reconstruction in the Day Is Done series. It is based on a photograph of dancers dressed in comedic horse costumes, posi­ tioned in front of a group of cheerleaders assembled in a gymnasium. Narratively, this scene acts as the final introductory performance before the presentation of the Grand Final Spectacle: a donkey basketball game, which is not presented in Day Is Done but will be the subject of its own forthcoming Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction. The Horse Dance was choreographed by Kate Foley and was performed in a gymnasium in front of an audience seated on bleachers. Mary observes the dance from the proscenium stage, but this Mary is not portrayed by the same actress who plays her throughout the rest of the production. Nor is it the actress who portrays the evil "hag" version of Mary. She is a counterfeit Mary who, to me, represents the inherent falsity of all of the pseudorituals that make up Day Is Done. At the close of the Horse Dance, this False Virgin exits the stage to the center of the space. The camera pans up her body to the ceiling of the gym as she performs the holy gesture of Mary. This segues into a spin-off video titled Empty Gym,a video portrait of the unpopulated site, videotaped in daylight for the first time. At moments, flashbacks of certain scenes shot within the space appear:the Devil standing on stage with Mary seated in her candy cane throne; Joseph and Mary seated in front of the fireplace with the mule and the donkey.