Hey Mikey I Think He Likes It Matrix

[Brett Mcgalliard]

twoother issues - I think the workflow as posted is dense matrix variables in rows - not dense matrix constraints in rows as it initially showed up on my system.... Don't know if that's a change from the 2017 version. also I'm getting negative portfolio allocations. Albeit tiny negative allocations- they are still negative allocations which is odd as the lb is zero. I'd love to see a more up to date version of quadprog optimization if anyone has one.

Left out the b^2 - but otherwise - just the standard quadratic equation has a 2a denominator which I'd expect this relates to. I'd have to dig more into it to get how this is implemented here. I honestly haven't look at this (or anything related to this in a while so I'd need a refresher).

In the days following his death the tributes to Mike Kelleyflooded in from the art press, broadsheets and online alt.rocksites, many proclaiming him the greatest American artist of hisgeneration. That Kelley was a significant figure is not in doubt,which is part of the problem.

Born in 1954 into a working class family in the suburbs ofDetroit, Kelley was one of a number of American visual artistswhose aesthetic was formed during the 70s comedown from the failureof the 60s counterculture to actually change anything. Like hisfellow art students at Ann Arbor's University of Michigan with whomhe formed the performance/Noise group Destroy All Monsters, he wasa blue collar freak rather than a Progressive hippy, and maybe itwas the harsh realities in effect on Michigan's city streets in thewake of civil rights, rapid industrialisation and the 70s economicand spiritual downturns which deepened his cynicism and meant hesaw through the facade of the corporate Prog-hippy ideal, sensinghow its supine cultural politics actually buttressed the status ofmiddle America and its ruling elites, reinforcing by other meansexisting hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality andaesthetics. As with Frank Zappa's recordings with The Mothers OfInvention a decade earlier, Destroy All Monsters seemed designed toconfront apathetic hippy delusions head on, as much as it was anassault on bourgeois values, goading them from the sidelines via aseries of guerilla art pranks.

In 1976 Kelley quit DAM and the boho Ann Arbor freak scene tostudy at CalArts, where he parlayed all his cynicism and disgust atthe way the underground had been co-opted into a branch ofCorporate Entertainment USA into an art world career whichbowdlerised pop culture to such an extent that ironically (a doubleirony here) made it palatable to America's cultural elite.

Art critics, museum curators, private gallerists and majorinstitutions all promoted Kelley's work for the way they thought itanatomised (by dissecting and rewiring pop cultural detritus) theuptight schizophrenia that reigned in America's public, private anddomestic spheres (an aesthetic which reinforced their own delusionsof panoptican superiority because in their eyes it articulated aprocess which they thought they were above and beyond). That's themacro view. At a much lower level, he was a symbol for all thatcould, and usually does, go wrong whenever the visual art worldmoves in on rock 'n' roll.

Kelley's background may have been mid-West working class but hissensibilities became those of a sardonic West Coast conceptualartist. The first rule of conceptual art is that it should beuniversally understood, that everyone should be in on the joke.This imperative was recognised by both Marcel Duchamp and JohnCage, conceptual art pioneers who also produced its two greatestworks (perhaps its only great works), Fountain and4'33". As with Duchamp, Kelley's art was full ofreferences to vernacular culture, was in fact constructed entirelyfrom them. He dissed Duchamp's readymades for being 'obscure'relative to his own art of cultural appropriation andregurgitation. But despite this assertion, compared to Duchamp'ssubversive celebrations of materials which to the art world of histime were abject and abhorrent, Kelley's art constituted a seriesof bitter in-jokes and twisted asides executed on a grand scale, anaesthetic which made personal disjecta out of pop culture tropes ina way that would appeal directly to the class-based prejudices ofdetached art world snobs, who bought up the work in theirdroves.

Kelley's admirers have claimed many things for his vast body ofwork, the most grandiose being that it performed a totalpsychoanalysis of the state of the human condition, its inner spaceand exterior landscapes, at the close of the American century. Butultimately it was too solipsistic to perform any function otherthan offering an explicit tour through the conflicted realms insideKelley's own head. Kelley had been abused by his father as a child,was an outsider lower class artist operating in an elitistestablishment milieu, and he mistook the trauma and conflicts ofhis own personal experience for universal truths, resulting in anart which was like a perverted form of sexual and identity politicsfor sociopathic sick fucks (as in the entertainment industry, themore edgy and sensational art gets, the more the art establishmentlikes it, because it gives them something they can package andsell). It was no accident that Kelley became part of the culturalcapital of Los Angeles, the most solipsistic and sick city on theplanet, as well as one whose stratified topographies mostthoroughly embodied and enacted the corrosive reality of theAmerican dream that he was now living.

In that original incarnation, DAM dished up self-consciouslyinept rock noise designed to pater the very same bourgeoisie thatwould later commission and patronise Kelley's massive installationworks. It satirised the Total Rock 'N' Roll Theatre of Iggy Pop andThe Stooges to such an extent that it made Alice Cooper's cartoontake on the same material look like a profound expansion of it.

Where The Stooges presented America's ruling elite with adefiant 'fuck you!' symbol of the trailer trash they so feared(because it confronted them with the reality their mendaciousdealings made inevitable), Kelley and DAM reassured it that all waswell with the world by offering them a curated version ofrevolutionary working class culture that one day they might safelyinvite into their white-walled galleries and empty loft spaces. Thegroup rechannelled The Stooges's raw power, via an ironic restagingof the feral energies of Dada and Fluxus, so it became a trashcommodity the cultural wing of the ruling elite could accept andget behind, because they could contain and sell it.

DAM emerged at the same time as the first wave of New Yorkpunks, whose music expanded on the earlier breakthroughs of TheVelvet Underground, Suicide and The New York Dolls, not to mentionJohnny Burnette, Bo Diddley and The Shangri-Las. But Kelleyrejected punk as being too 'retro', not realising it was part of avital and ongoing continuum, the 'changing same' (to borrow AmiriBaraka's phrase) of vernacular experimentalism and resistance thatfought the system from the inside and on its own terms, rather thantrying to provoke it from the sidelines via a series of impotentprovocations. For a savvy and ambitious art school educated freaklike Kelley, punk was simultaneously too volatile and sure ofitself to be of any interest; as raw material it was too conscious,too historically right and exact to be moulded and manipulated toserve the kind of mutable aesthetic he wanted to pursue. But whenthe grass roots agitprop of punk gave way to the metropolitanradical chic of No Wave (just compare the existential rage of PattiSmith and Richard Hell to the solipsistic nihilism of Lydia Lunchand James Chance) the die was cast. The group that most fullyabsorbed Kelley's and DAM's sardonic sensibilities, thenregurgitated them as PoMo gestures, started out as a No Wavetribute band, and they would go on to become the most influentialoutfit in alt.rock. The moment Sonic Youth signed to Blast Firstwas the moment rock 'n' roll's vanguard became fully annexed to awing of the art world.

Kelley objected to other people's subjective criticalinterpretations of his work so much that he attempted to controlthe debate around it by writing his own essays and critiques of it.Without irony he claimed this process was actually intended toadvance discussion, and while Kelley was ferociously intelligentand a highly articulate writer, even for a conceptual artist, andknew his art history and critical theory as well as his popculture, this was a classic piece of obfuscation. Subjectivecritical interpretations are the only ones human beings are able tomake, and as Duchamp understood, it is via this process that artbecomes universal, by bringing individual expression into dynamiccontact with external reality. SY likewise shut down the discoursethat had historically existed in rock 'n' roll by conceptualisingthe music in advance, rendering any further interpretation ordiscussion mute and moot.

Celebrated in the cosy ghettos of mid-80s indie thanks to theirBlast First releases, SY only made a decent record after theysigned to a major (one run by that ultimate corporatehippy-turned-head David Geffen). Suddenly, these Generation X popartists were confronted with both the blue collar existentialism ofGrunge, and the reality of the tensions that had historicallyanimated vernacular culture's relationship with Capital (thusreplicating the experience of The Stooges before them, who, as soonas they signed to Elektra, sussed that their original PsychedelicStooges incarnation, a Cage/Coltrane inspired Noise unit that waslike a proto-DAM, was indulgent playing-to-the-plukes that wouldnever change anything). Goo, SY's first record for Geffen,immediately put a rocket under the oblique strategies of thoseBlast First albums, a niche UK indie with art world pretensionswhich instilled a smug slackness in the American groups thatrecorded for it and which they in turn mistook for punk rockinsouciance. Suddenly, the songs were tauter, leaner, punchier, thesound more vivid, the arrangements more inventively compact, thedelivery more direct and urgent. The exceptions were thecontributions of Kim Gordon, a former conceptual artist herself andthe SY member whose sensibility was most oriented towards thevisual art world, as well as the cover, which was basically a MikeKelley tribute trash-pop artwork.

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