The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully. 

It’s remarkable that any artist’s art school experiments would find home in the museum. Kelley’s 1970s high conceptualism does set the scene but takes some serious nous to be useful. His later turn to popular culture and historical construction thus feels detached from itself. The 90s’ Half a Man cycle, by contrast, brims with foresight. Kelley’s candid critique of the kidult/manchild culture (he satirises himself as a proud “pants shitter”) is remarkable next to his assault of the institution and the odd bout of political sloganeering.

But this is only the half of it. The show continues with sculpture, photography, and video installed so densely (or immersively) that they turn into cacophony. Kelley’s latter works restage high-school rituals and turn the museum into the gym hall. It is difficult to know where one piece ends and the next begins in this architecture. The art historian would know if such overload was the artist’s intended method. The layman will leave with a headache.