Santa Monica-based artist Michael C. McMillen’s evocative retrospective is currently on view at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). The title comes from his kinetic sculpture Train of Thought (1990), in which a small wooden trestle with a motorized track emerges from a museum wall and stops abruptly over the viewer’s head. The track gently conveys five hundred pounds of tiny alphabet noodles that fall letter by letter into an accumulating pile of macaroni. The seventy pieces that constitute Train of Thought are overwhelmingly good humored, beautifully crafted, unsettling, and philosophical, gently poking fun at the vulnerability and absurdity of human existence.
In this exhibition, McMillen uses the museum itself as site. His paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculptures, and installations are placed throughout the museum as interventions that dialogue with OMCA’s freshly reinstalled collection of California art. Walking through the exhibition, one towers over small-scale boats, airplanes, and hotels taken from the vernacular of mid-century American landscape, literature, and films. His piece Raft of History (1984) is a shipwreck placed directly across from a William T. Wiley installation called How to Chart a Course (1971), which looks like a three-dimensional treasure map.
I was familiar with McMillen’s Aristotle’s Cage (1983), which is on permanent view in the museum. Entering through a torn screen door into a darkened space, the viewer encounters a miniature diorama in which a decrepit trailer is set against an orange sky in a desolate desert landscape dotted with oil drums, American cars, and other refuse of modern American life. The lights are on in the trailer and in the factory in the distance. This piece uses the allegory of Plato’s Cave and examines the line between appearance and reality. McMillen strategically combines found objects with his own fabrications, examining the mysterious afterlife of objects and how they connect with poetry, the paranormal, dreams, popular culture, and science fiction.
The 1950s and ’60s Los Angeles of McMillen’s youth was crisscrossed by freeways, anchored by the aerospace industry, spooked by post-war nightmares, and colored by the tacky Southern California beach culture of Venice Beach and the Pacific Ocean Park. Raised by his grandparents in Santa Monica, McMillen was influenced by the Hollywood dream factory and its working class artisans, including his dad, a scene designer for TV, and his next-door neighbor Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electrical effects and machines for the first Frankenstein movie in 1931. McMillen himself also worked as a prop designer in Hollywood.
“Red Trailer Motel,” 2003; Courtesy of the Artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
McMillen’s 1973 graduate show at UCLA was a storefront installation in Venice called The Traveling Mystery Museum. The piece was staged at a local shopping mall, and shoppers encountered an ancient mummy (fabricated by McMillen) displayed in a glass case, predating the better known Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. A number of pieces from The Traveling Mystery Museum are included in the current OMCA show, including Spy Fly (1973), a diagrammatic drawing of a video drone disguised as a fly, the fabricated mummy head, the floor plans of The Traveling Mystery Museum, and the bottled last words of Picasso, certified by one Dr. P. Bernal. Although he was a generation younger, McMillen was influenced by Los Angeles’ visual Beats, a group that included collage and assemblage artists Edward Kienholz and George Herms.
