You might be tempted to call John Kelly a Renaissance man as he is a musician, songwriter, performance artist, dancer, visual artist, actor and probably a few other things that we are leaving out.
But Kelly doesn’t see the variety of his efforts to be all that different, more like branches stretching out from a tree that has been around long enough to explore many different ways of artistic expression.
His new show at Tribeca’s P·P·O·W gallery, A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, 2016-2025, is a piece consisting of the “artist’s epic 182-panel hand-illustrated graphic memoir” of a period in his life that he was lucky to survive. But it doesn’t stop there, as there is also a viewing room that contains a video installation created by Kelly that reflects the timetable of the tale.
The video also presents original music, a collaboration between Carol Lipnik and Kelly. On Feb. 12, Kelly will become part of the memoir and video, performing original music at the gallery that arises from the works on exhibit.
The show’s title is a nod to a simple act that led to a tragic event. Years ago, Kelly received a book about the 17th-century Italian painter Caravaggio, which led to an obsession with the artist, which led to a planned performance inspired by that art — and then a massive setback.
“At the training session before the performances, before the premiere, I fell from a trapeze, and I broke my neck.” Kelly recounts. “I was laid out at St. Vincent’s overnight on a Friday night, 15 hours, not knowing if I needed surgery, x-rays, CAT scans, MRIs. I was laid out, no water, no aspirin, just staring at the ceiling all night.”
“So when I wrote the story,” he explains, “I wrote about the things I experienced, being there in St. Vincent’s, all the sounds I heard, the puking, the beeping, wheels going by, Alzheimer’s insanity. And then after 15 hours of lying there and myriad tests, they found that I didn’t need surgery and I could go home. So I was laid out for a month, you know, and then it took me a year to really get back in my body. I was completely traumatized.”
Kelly turned the trauma into art, working on the storytelling panels for nine years with the help of several grants and residencies, the last one being in P.S. 122, where “it was up on the walls, but it was never meant to be seen in those giant grids.”
“It really was meant to be seen in a horizontal flow as it’s been hung in the gallery,” he adds. “And it’s thrilling because I can really witness it and take it in, and it allows me to see it more objectively and assume ownership over it, good, bad, and whatever.”
Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of the P·P·O·W with Penny Pilkington, was won over by the work as soon as she saw it. “I have always been a huge fan of John Kelly’s performance work and never knew he worked in other mediums,” she says. “When Cindy Carr and Gracie Mansion urged us to go to his studio, I reluctantly agreed and was immediately stunned – I truly didn’t understand the depth of the work, but his vision was immediately clear to me. John’s obvious connection to our program was also a no-brainer. His relationship to Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and the 1980s East Village scene was where we started as well.”
Kelly’s ongoing musical collaboration “Rimbaud Hattie” also connects to those days when the Pyramid (“my home, my school, my shrine”) was a flourishing scene of creativity and debauchery. Bandmates include Heather Litteer, Dany Johnson, and Doug Bressler and Julie Hair, who both played in ‘3 Teens Kill 4’ with David Wojnarowicz.
Not being one to sit back, Kelly is also set to star in the upcoming production of Bughouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley’s adaptation of the texts of outsider artist Henry Darger at the Vineyard Theater, from Feb. 18 through March 29.
As for the graphic memoir, Kelly is hoping to find a publisher that will publish the work as an art book, with print quality that is up to the task of reproducing the original works.
“I won’t settle for a cheap-looking book,” he states. “It’s got to be really, you know, the best it can be.”
Likewise, the pieces in the show will not be sold separately.
“I’ve got paintings for sale, oil and wood paintings that are replications of imagery from the graphic memoir,” Kelly says. “But either the whole thing is going to be sold, or it’s not going to be sold at all. And if I ever do sell it, I’ll have a contract that says this can never be exhibited piecemeal. It needs to be exhibited in its entirety or not at all.”
As much as the piece looks backwards, Kelly is always looking forward as well.
“I survived AIDS. I survived a car crash, you know. So I think I’ve earned my lives,” he muses. “And I’ve figured out ways of prevailing while facing catastrophe. But this was a new one on me. And it was a very, very loaded scenario. I mean, the idea of a trapeze accident is very drastic-sounding, and it actually happened. So, yeah, it was like, what are you doing on a trapeze at your age? You know, you could stop being the hero. Well, I think that comes with the term for being a performer. You always want to push yourself, to challenge yourself. It comes with the idea of showing up in front of people for a scheduled event. It comes with the turf of performing. It’s the sense of aliveness, risk-taking, and pushing further into the moment. So, that’s what I was doing. Yeah. Wow.”