“I’m not a fan of Superman comics. I just like the idea of being burdened with one’s past.”

—Mike Kelley

The imagery of Lenticular 4 is derived from Mike Kelley’s Kandors series, which comprises numerous representations of Superman’s birthplace, the city of Kandor. As the story goes, the titular hero was sent to Earth as a baby to escape the destruction of his home planet, Krypton. However, it is revealed that Kandor was, in fact, not destroyed, but rather shrunk and bottled by the villainous Braniac, with Superman later rescuing the scaled-down city and protecting it under a bell jar in his hideaway, the Fortress of Solitude. From then on, Kandor and its miniature citizens lived under Superman’s care, sustained by tanks of Kryptonic atmosphere. Kelley himself explained that Kandor “functions as a constant reminder of Superman’s past,” as well as “a metaphor for his alienated relationship to the planet he now occupies,” ascribing a deeper psychological meaning to Kandor’s role within the comic series. 

Kelley initiated his Kandors series in 1999, for a group show at the Kunstmuseum Bonn that was to focus on the impending millennium. Having selected to focus on Kandor as an out-of-date image of a “city of the future,” Kelley began meticulous research, culling through comics to locate depictions of Superman’s shrunken city. However, the artist was surprised to find that across generations of illustrators, no one had ever ventured to solidify Kandor’s city plan. As such, the depictions of the city that Kelley found were wildly inconsistent, and thus impossible to faithfully reconstruct. This discovery continued to fascinate Kelley until his death in 2012, as he continued to work on creating interpretations of the various source materials of Kandor and its surrounding mythos, including cast-resin cityscapes housed in glass bottles, projections of swirling clouds of colored gas, brightly-hued lenticular panels housed in light boxes, and a video of Superman reciting excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in a nod to the enclosure of his miniature city. 

“[Kandor is] “the home that can never be revisited, the past that can never be recovered. Yet there it is, shrunken to the size of a dollhouse – an ageless memento in real time.”

—Mike Kelley

Kelley’s fascination with the depiction of Kandor has roots in his career-spanning interest in trauma in spatial memory. Notably, the artist built architectural models of every school he every attended and purposefully left out sections he couldn’t remember for his 1995 work Educational Complex. This memory-focused work was derived from what Kelley identified as a cultural obsession with “repressed memory syndrome,” wherein all lapses in memory could be traceable to trauma. Through this framework, the inconsistencies between illustrations of Kandor could thus be particularly productive considering Superman’s traumatic loss of his home in childhood. However, Kelley has pushed back against this implication that anything that cannot be remembered is a result of traumatic experience. As the artist described, Superman is “saddled with the responsibility to watch over his hometown forever. What a horrible scenario – but everyone is stuck with their past.”