What's not to like? Robert Storr on Mike Kelley.

Andy Warhol: "I think everybody should like everybody."
Gene Swenson: "Is that what Pop Art is all about?"
Andy Warhol: "Yes, it's liking things."
--"What Is Pop Art?" Art News, November 1963

Go to the source. As far as Pop is concerned, that would be Warhol. Not because he was the first of his kind--Roy Lichtenstein edged him to cartoons and Claes Oldenburg to the dark side of the '60s--but because his detachment set the rhetorical tone for the movement that imploded high culture and inverted mass culture with the same wicked equanimity. Liking things omnivorously and with a seemingly indiscriminate enthusiasm is the natural tendency of modern window-shopping prosperity. It is democratic: Anybody can like things; it takes no special talent or education. It is sociable: You can always talk to people about what you like and what they like without getting into fights over it. And it is leveling as far as the objects of one's momentary attention go, which takes the anxiety out of living because you don't have to worry about liking some things more than others. You can, in effect, have the whole world wrapped up and sent home on approval, no money down.

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That's what television does, which is why passive looking was so crucial to Pop; it was a habit people already possessed but had never before applied to static, framed pictures. So they didn't yet realize how jarring it would be to their concept of art to just "watch" what was "on" in the galleries. But the minute it dawned on them that art wouldn't put up a fight to hold their attention, though it would be completely viewable for as long as they cared to spend time with it, they were faced with a choice they didn't think they had, a choice that artists hadn't given them before. That was the option to be focused but indifferent.

Naturally, this upset people a lot, since it revealed that that was the way they regarded most things most of the time and that art was no exception. Art, they assumed, was supposed to enrich everyday life with meaning, but here was art that didn't just portray the commonplace, it operated by the same rules. And so, Warhol demonstrated, you could "like" soup cans and car crashes and gangsters and Coke bottles and movies stars and suicides, and, and, and. The only real casualty was tradition, which Lichtenstein partially redeemed by homages to modern masters painted with superb neutrality. The upfront cost was overt emotion, which Oldenberg and James Rosenquist smuggled into their work, first through the inertial misshapenness that Barbara Rose called Oldenberg's "elephantine sadness," and second in the uncanny, monumental, and sometimes apocalyptic overload that Rosenquist brought to paintings like F-111, 1964-65. Meanwhile, back at the Factory, Warhol "chilled" industriously, keeping temperatures down overall and the production of dubious things to "like" way up.

I exaggerate. But not too much. The ambivalence that the Pop artists felt toward the schizophrenic culture they inherited put them in a bind. Populism ruled in commerce and public affairs, but the elitism of competing varieties ruled in art. In that domain, passionate seriousness was at a premium. It had resulted in marvelous Abstract Expressionist paintings during the '40s and early '50s--Lichtenstein and Oldenberg both served their apprenticeship with New York School style--but by 1960, AbEx's motivating circumstances were history, and the learned behavior that artificially prolonged its dominance had become embarrassing except when leavened with humor by de Kooning of the clam-digging cuties, Newman of the monocle and declarations, and Reinhardt of the cartoons and punning litanies. (Rothko painted more masterpieces but died of booze and ethical confusion; Still became a crank and stopped painting masterpieces; and Guston eventually saved himself and gestural painting by telling jokes in the dark--but that came much later, and he was attacked as a latter-day Pop artist for daring to do so.)

By contrast, Madison Avenue and Hollywood had no such pretensions and smilingly went about their business of providing images of anything and everything to an insatiable public. For artists, recycling the surplus they spun off was relatively easy--Dada showed the way. The hard part was insinuating "low" signifiers into "high" discourse. Fifth columnists among dealers and collectors soon offered their services, but defenders of the old avant-garde remained garrisoned in the museums, newspapers, magazines, and universities. What Warhol understood better than anyone was that they would wear themselves out in maneuvers on their own turf and finally surrender in exhaustion if the new avant-garde denied them their customary field of battle: argument.

Pop didn't argue. It was subversive rather than confrontational. AbExers had been outsiders for so long that they couldn't cope with becoming the establishment and, in denial of that fact, continued to bicker among themselves and scold the rest of the world long after they had triumphed. Pop's leaders were insiders or had at least reached the antechambers of the art world by the time they made their big moves. Their stock-in-trade was to create memorable images out of forgettable ones but to achieve this without getting too worked up (no sweat, no blood, no tears) and without making them too funky, lest that be misconstrued as provincial awkwardness or proof that they were retardataire spin-offs of "assemblage." Moreover, like all art inspired by Duchampian readymades, Pop had the look of displaced ordinariness, which in New York not only depended on the exquisite banality of the motif but also required maintaining a certain low-rent professional aplomb even after relocating to a high-rent district. The challenge facing the Pop artists, once they had their foot in the door, was to keep the ideas coming while deadpanning their way to the top--which they did. If this sounds sarcastic, it isn't meant to. Only deep-dyed conservatives resent successful strategies that assist the emergence of fresh understanding and new forms. There are still plenty of full-time resenters out there, but nobody's listening anymore. Pop changed the world with unconditional "liking," which, as things turned out, was the most difficult and devastating thing you could ask a society to do, especially one so riven with class divisions, cultural conflicts, sexual taboos, and optimistic self-deceptions.

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That was then, this is now. After 1968, the cracks in America's facade gaped, bringing to an end the social and political interval in which Pop first flourished. Today those cracks are wider than ever. Coolness no longer works in a context in which implacable missionaries of unselfconscious averageness and "common sense" proselytize on every street corner--with a vengeance. The mass media co-opted Pop techniques and diluted them until they were nothing but graphic effects and rote ironies, as effortlessly adaptable to the needs of corporate entertainment as to art. Demographics changed, too. The prime audience for contemporary art no longer numbers in the hundreds or thousands, as it did forty years ago, but in the hundreds of thousands, and they no longer congregate in Manhattan but are scattered across the country and around the globe. Pop art won by becoming popular culture--Lichtenstein's posters decorate Japanese pachinko parlors, and Campbell's has added a line of soup cans in Warhol's '80s palette--but now occupies the position of being both its own nemesis and the normalizing historical model that suppresses spontaneous eruptions of the same energy today. Somebody had to break with decorum and, so far as the demeanor of avant-garde cool was concerned, break character as well.

Enter Mike Kelley. His emphatic "uncool" is the first distinguishing mark of the paradigm shift he epitomizes. It begins with his defiant embrace of failure. His cartoon surrogate isn't square-jawed Dick Tracy or Superman, much less the dressed-for-success Brad, maker of masterpieces. It is Sad Sack on garbage detail, with Georges Bataille the scatological eschatologist as his phantom doppelganger. Of course, Warhol and Lichtenstein were travestying the wholesome heroes they recruited from the comics, but Kelley greases the slide from puerile humor to blatant self-debasement and heads right down it into the muck at the bottom. The amiably pathetic Sad Sack never makes an appearance in the 1988 "Garbage Drawings" based on his strip, only waves of inchoate, fecal waste. Upping the ante from Lichtenstein's objectified AbEx brush marks, Sad Sack's gesturalism takes action painting and links it directly to the Freudian concept of the artist as someone who plays with their own shit: art as paper training with the funnies faceup.

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Such anal-aggressive desublimation is everywhere in Kelley's work: in his enema apparatus Colema Bench, 1992, in the performance photographs Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects and Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood (both 1990), in Conceptual text-and-image acrylics such as Trickle Down and Swaddling Clothes, 1986, and above all in the 1987 banner-manifesto titled Three-Point Program/Four Eyes that reads, PANTS SHITTER & PROUD P.S. JERK-OFF TOO (AND I WEAR GLASSES). The purpose of all this is not just to wallow in infantile regression, though Kelley implicitly corrects Pop's policy of thinking dirty while keeping clean. (Of Pop's originators only Oldenberg in his early years crossed that line with both feet.) Rather it is to demystify and dismantle the idea of innocence. And not by toying with "bad" versus "good" taste and the conventions that frame such distinctions--that, in part, is Jeff Koons's gambit--but by cutting off the idea of innocence at its source, namely, childhood.

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Sentimentality when it comes to children and childhood is the social mechanism for denying people access to their polymorphous perverse, hence imaginatively fertile though scarcely idyllic, beginnings. "Cute" packages the still incompletely formed psyche and undifferentiated sexual body and hands it back to the unsuspecting child as a neat, unified object on which to project sanctioned fantasies that have been inscribed into its codified expressions and anatomical abbreviations and excisions--no genitals please! Kelley's assault on the semiotic manipulation of subjective transference and objectified affection--his conflation of mass-produced fetishes and lovingly handmade ones and his grotesque conjugation of their disorganized parts--destabilizes such icons of "normalcy" and turns them into voodoo dolls for hexing adult methods of quelling juvenile anarchy and the id-driven dynamism it unleashes. But the enemy here is not just the managerial culture that seeks to compensate for the real loss of freedom with phony tokens of security. It is also the '60s counter-culture that in its Rousseauian delirium propagandized a repressive notion of Edenic innocence at the expense of a more transgressive walk on the wild side. Not that Kelley condones the simple conversion of artist-as-child into the artist-as-criminal. In Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988--a corridor lined with paintings of writers and philosophers accompanied by quotations celebrating the outlaw status of genius and ending with a painting by a certified serial killer--he refutes it. Indeed, romanticization of all kinds gets up his nose, be it the platitudes of feel-good psychology, hippiedom, Beuysian hocus-pocus, or the bloviating authors of Great Books.

Kelley's general irritability and outspoken dislike for much of what is going on around him set him apart from the unfazable, lethally acquiescent Warhol. Kelley's determination to argue his case does so even more. If one thing Pop artists didn't do was get riled up, the other was to debate. Kelley is an indefatigable debater. His autodidact's knack for postmodern theory and his verve for polemic can be sampled in the recently published two-volume collection of his writings (Foul Perfection [2003] and Minor Histories [2004]), but his stance as a commentator matches the one he assumes as an artist; he's a provoker and a counterpuncher. He leads you into situations with a loose challenge and then snaps your head back with well-placed jabs.

There is science to his scrappy, underdog approach, and he is aware of the strength of his rooting section, which is nationwide. In Pop-oriented work made west of the Hudson, rock-bottom commercial and vernacular sources largely replaced brand names: Car culture, gas stations, roadside attractions, rec-room and garage projects, and rural or backyard follies provided iconographic and technical models for legions of artists. On the one hand, the so-called finish fetish and, on the other, deliberately undercrafting tended to dominate, bracketing the deliberate evenness of New York Pop production while breaking the glass floor that had prevented it from plumbing the depths of lower-middle-class and working-class taste. Kelley has zeroed in on just this zone in his attentiveness to the most rudimentary, if not trashiest, forms of graphic design--for example, high school newspapers, Sex to Sexty joke books, Gothic typography, Xerox-machine cartoons and gags--and, overall, his often makeshift output has explicitly gendered his sources in absurd reconfiguration of "feminine" fabrics and "masculine" carpentry. By comparison even Warhol's trusses, nose jobs, sex pictures, and holy-roller handout paintings seem not only opaque but fastidious. Meanwhile, Kelley is among those who gave the heady Conceptual art of the '70s a body, a body that doesn't just occupy its place in a dialectical binary in which the mind is still expected to overperform, but one that insistently functions and malfunctions, that craps, fucks, has pimples, smells, and occasionally loses track of itself.

Not content to be added to the list of notable "regional" artists, Kelley has embarked on the construction of a countercanon to the artistic mainstream into which Pop slipped so smoothly. Names of some of its members appear in articles such as "Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature" (Artforum, Jan. 1989), a typically Kelleyesque mixture of pop-culture erudition, art history, and psychoanalytic exegesis, which mentions Chris Burden, John Miller, Peter Saul, and Basil Wolverton, among others, alongside scholars Ernst Kris and Albert Boime, horror filmmakers David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, writers Roger Caillois and J.G. Ballard, and Renaissance figures Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Giorgio Vasari. Treated as a syllabus, Kelley's points of reference redirect the reading (and looking) of current generations. For those who pored over Ludwig Wittgenstein to grasp the essence of Johnsian wordplay, a detour into Kris's psychoanalysis of physiognomic distortion is not too much to ask. For those raised on a steady diet of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and company, others among these disparate entries--encompassing science fiction (Ballard) and traditional art history (Boime)--should be refreshing. In the meantime, Kelley's affinity for New York Pop-era mavericks like Paul Thek, Jack Smith, and Oyvind Fahlstrom is part and parcel of this same effort. With Thek he shares an explicitly religious dimension to his work, with Smith a flagrantly gender-bending one, and with Fahlstrom a sharply political thrust.

The nature of this enterprise and the context in which it is pursued point to one last striking difference between the new transcontinental Pop and its New York-based predecessor. Although Kelley and his cohorts show internationally and frequently, the locus of much of their activity has been art schools rather than just galleries and museums. It's not a matter of making do; it's an option studiously exercised. Kelley doesn't just argue, he teaches. Much of his energy has been invested in debunking art-world shibboleths and positing alternative practices and intellectual constructs, and his audience and collaborators have consisted in appreciable measure of students and colleagues. In California--as in Germany--state-subsidized academies were not the exclusive bastions of the old guard but the jumping-off point for the avant-garde as well. Beuys, about whom Kelley has thought a lot but whom he has also parodied, is the presiding spirit of this shift in art-world power in Europe. John Baldessari and the various generations of the "CalArts mafia" that thrived under him were harbingers of a sea change out West. With gigs at Art Center in Pasadena and, later, UCLA, Kelley has become one of the leading exemplars of this recentering of artistic practice.

New York is still largely unaffected by these changes, but then it is increasingly a depot and distribution center for art rather than a hothouse for radical ideas and innovative work. It used to be both. LA now has the advantage on the latter score, and Kelley is one of the major forces that have made this so. Europe recognizes this fact, which is why he is ubiquitous there. Although Kelley has ardent East Coast supporters and some peers, the relatively low profile he has had in New York since his 1993 retrospective at the Whitney Museum reflects the two art cultures that continue to divide America. However, the "outsiders" have grown in number and formed alliances that encircle the city, which has become institutionally and economically top-heavy and, in part because of that, threatens to become increasingly provincial in its enthusiasms. When the place where Pop first took hold in this country fully embraces Pop's mutant "out of town" progeny, then we will know that this process has reversed itself.

Robert Storr is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.