Feeling-Building
The house—material and metaphor—is a queer place indeed. Not simply queer in its relation to non-normative sexualities, but queer as in an adjective denoting something “strange, odd, peculiar.”^1 This strangeness stems from its familiarity, otherness and archival role. In addition to its pragmatic use as a shelter for residents and a container for their records in the form of objects, clothing, and more, the home also holds affective experiences—memories both fond and fraught that we might associate with the psychic scars of trauma. Moreover, many archives, specifically queer archives, find their origin story beneath beds and in closets as well as final destinations in converted residences. Though only a brief reflection on the domestication of commemoration, this longstanding and inseparable connection between sites of dwelling and sites of memory may therefore offer unique potential in locating affect (our feelings towards things and events) within these repositories.^2 What capacity does the built environment—the space of the home in which we all experience—serve in capturing the complex strata of histories, quotidian emotions and the creative ways we respond to and negotiate its trauma?
Trailer hitch of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. Image courtesy of the author.
Containing, relaying and representing this emotional environment is of critical interest to queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich, with the practices of capturing the “ordinary feelings that are attached to what gets called trauma” integral to her subsequent concept of an archive of trauma.^3 For the author, trauma is intangible; it’s the “cultural responses to trauma” and “trauma as connected to the textures of every day experience” rather than diagnosable conditions like PTSD or other psychological reactions to physical or sexual violence.^4 Trauma, in Cvetzovich’s reading, is an ongoing lived experience. Therefore, this includes more commonly associated affects such as loss and mourning but further strong feelings like humor, sentimentality, nostalgia and anger. Associated with material artifacts, places and spaces, such cultural trauma often goes unnoticed or appears invisible due to being confined to the private sphere, deep within the house. Exposing it may similarly result in exposing the strata of slow, multi-scalar violence that frames everyday life. Due to its seeming invisibility and unrepresentable nature, trauma challenges longstanding views of the archive as it requires non-standard modes of documentation, commemoration and testimony to activate or relay. Trauma as a felt experience cannot be entirely contained in letters, photographs and other materials commonly held in repositories and collections, but equally in the ephemeral relations to such material. It is embedded in material artifacts, the emotional value invested in said objects and the corresponding feelings they elicit. As a result, these archives are “repositories of feeling and emotions” containing “many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame and more” that required unorthodox practices for the unorthodox holdings that pressure dominant forms of recording, commemorating and memorializing.^5
Relating primarily to photographic, filmic or artistic projects capturing LGBTQ2IA+ experiences, particularly the documentation of personal artifacts by the author’s friend Tammy Rae Carland, Cvetkovich identifies the trauma archive’s broader capacity to preserve not only distinctly queer experiences but “the deeply sedimented histories of violence and survival that form the social, political and cultural environments that we inhabit in the U.S.”^6 More expansive strategies of holding trauma and its surrounding cultures, then, may manifest by extending this exploration to the scale of architecture—to installations caught between pubic art and public building.
In 1995, Kelley compiled a collection of 8 architectural models representing significant environments in his education. The artist had originally attempted to conceive the scale models purely from memory, however the task proved nearly impossible and forced a reliance on other records: photographs, drawings, blue prints and site visits. For Kelley, “the implication is that anything that can’t be remembered is somehow the result of trauma.”^7 The absences in the models composed for Educational Complex and of the past are “the site of some kind of repressed trauma,” with such feelings oscillating between real and imagined.^8
Though connected to the 1980s sexual abuse case at McMartin Preschool, the collection of “memory buildings” are highly personal, self-referential reflections of the artist’s own history. For instance, process material presented as the sketch plan Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid No. 3: Reconfiguration of Wayne High School into the Ritual Presentation Arena of the Educational Complex (2002) records the mnemonic construction, yet this memory work is deliberately absent from the final installation. In this sense, as much as Educational Complex presents a history, it equally aims to obscure it. As with Carland’s photographic archive, Kelley’s architectural autobiography is mediated, curated and restricted. Its spaces are uninhabitable, inescapably bound-up with their own trauma and more akin to monuments than repositories. Today, the forms may draw connections to the ongoing threat and widespread trauma of gun violence in the U.S. as well as other malleable relations to educational space. Yet, by relying solely on representational media—the architectural model—Educational Complex is limited in the broader strata of cultural trauma it can contain.
Garage and exhibition space of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. Image courtesy of the author.
Nearnly two decades later, the second phase of Mobile Homestead, the artist’s final work, was completed. By April 2013, what had begun as a touring full-scale copy of the façade of the artist’s childhood home on Palmer Street in the working-class Detroit suburb of Westland settled permanently outside the MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit).^9 The replica single-storey 1950’s Ranch-style structure was finished with the remaining walls, interior spaces and attached two-car garage. Its latest incarnation was intended to function as an inhabitable curatorial and community platform that would “represent the cultural interests” of those in immediate proximity, according to the artist.^10
The only public artwork Kelley completed and by far his most ambitious in scale, Mobile Homestead—unlike Educational Complex—deploys inhabitable media: architecture. As a once portable now inert full-scale model, its connection to context is inevitable and inescapable. It’s precisely this place-based nature that distinguishes its archival capacity. Located in the heart of midtown Detroit, Mobile Homestead—a literal manifestation of the materiality of white-flight—inevitably invokes the politics surrounding housing in the city. “It will look quite out of place in downtown,” Kelley wrote in 2011, “this fact itself points to the complex racial and class-based issues that are representative of the Detroit area.”^11 In the years leading up to its execution, the national housing crisis had ballooned after the 2008 recession. Sweeping foreclosures stemming…
…keep reading in Issue 31.
Evan Pavka is a writer, editor, and currently an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University. His writing has appeared in idea journal, Field, Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture, Lunch, POOL, Inflection, Disc and Digital Fabrication in Interior Design, among many others. He studied design and architecture history & theory at Toronto Metropolitan University and McGill University.
^1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Queer, adj.”
^2 See Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no.2 (1995): 9-63.
^3 Tammy Rae Carland and Ann Cvetkovich, “Sharing an Archive of Feelings: A Conversation,” Art Journal 72, no. 2 (2013): 73.
^4 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3-4.
^5 Ibid., 7.
^6 Carland and Cvetkovich, “Sharing an Archive of Feelings: A Conversation,” 77.
^7 Quoted in John Miller, Mike Kelley: Educational Complex (London: Afterall Books, 2015), 9.
^8 Ibid., 9.
^9 Begun in 2005, the project was commissioned by London-based public art organization Artangle as their first endeavor in the United States. Conceived with a “street legal” facade and a form that approximates that of a conventional mobile home, the artwork’s tour through Detroit from its origin point in Westland to its outpost at MOCAD was the subject of two feature films exhibited posthumously in the 2012 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York. The hitch is still visible on the front of Homestead, as if anticipating another sojourn. Mike Kelley, “Mobile Homestead,” in Whitney Biennial 2012, eds. Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 158-16.
^10 Ibid., 159
^11 Ibid., 161.