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Unisex Love Nest (1999), a parent's static idea of their child's gender - polarized, cutified, idealized, simulated and projected. |
"I’m an avant-gardist. We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde. So, all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it— because popular culture is really invisible." --Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley (b. Detroit 1954 - d. Los Angeles 2012) was a conceptual artist (not sure how he'd feel about that label, though) whose application of the punk attitude 'by all means necessary' to his artistic practice makes his work hard to categorize within strictly material terms.
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Banana Man 1983
(early performance piece, replicating
famous kids tv show character off of
hearsay descriptions) |
Kelley's childhood was that of a true punk attitude, defying his parent's projected aspirations and all else of society and culture he found as 'a load of shit'. He co-founded the noise/rock band Destroy All Monsters and eventually left it when he attended CalArts. From here his early interests were in performance, but included video work, writing, and other crafts and materials. His expansive approach to medium is thanks to his punk approach to art production, 'by all means necessary', finding materials and objects in thrift stores and other sources of used items (trash maybe).
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Eviscerated Corpse, from the "Half a Man" series
(vaginal-shaped conglomerated creature,
spilling its guts/giving birth) |
This is particularly notable by his most well-known series of work with children's stuffed toys, using them as medium for subverting and exposing the hyperreal nature of their existence. As he put it, "the stuffed animal is a pseudo-child, a cutified sexless being which represents the adult’s perfect model of a child—a neutered pet" (4).
The stuffed animal to him is a hyperreal state of being projected onto a child by means of a toy meant for enjoyment, with most other childhood decoration and objects doing this same neutering and projection of gender polarities (gender fluidity being a early interest of Kelley's). His stuffed animal series "Half a Man" explores this with stuffed animals being placed in sexual positions--ambiguous and explicit, establishing a strong importance of impression, rather than pure object admiration--and sewn together to create hypersexualized creatures giving birth, spilling their guts out, etc. (5).
Kelley's work with low-end culture material (with a semi-readymade approach) exemplifies his interest with mining pop-culture, focusing on the prolific parts of popular culture and capitalism's grip on it (production of products) which other artists who mine popular culture, such as Andy Warhol, focused only on the high-end of. Combined with his performance work, writing, video, drawings, and craftwork, Kelley's approach to new media is truly new media because it creates no boundary between the soiled stuffed animal and the essays and videos which accompany (and are) his works.
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Ahh...Youth! (1991) ('Mugshots' of stuffed animals and Mike Kelley yearbook photo,
puts the animals in a ambiguous but uncomfortable position, as well as 'self-caricaturizing' himself among them) |
His later works involved more installation, video, and performance, as well as drawings and other crafts. The 2005 comprehensive installation piece "Day Is Gone", which was never 'completed', is series of videos, performances, soundtracks, and other works which deconstruct and rearrange many very American performance types/characters and puts them into a framework of historical tropes. This series feels like a culmination of all his previous work, with themes running through all of them clearly. This and previous works, such as his full-room installations reframing institutional settings, focus on things and concepts directly in the hyperreal simulations of pop-culture:
"[People are] not taught to look at films and recognize them as things that are put together. They see film as a kind of nature, like trees" (3).
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Day Is Done (2005) (a sea of symbols/performances,reconfigured and bombarding you - dizzyingly familiar) |
In an interview with Kelley, he reflects Baudrillard's ideas on the state of simulation and simulation of state and the hyperreal nicely, commenting on how even educational industrial complexes (a hyperreal thing itself) are machines that produce ideologies that allow the simulation's invisibility to continue. This goes for all aspects of social and political critique of pop culture, and Kelley finds in this an identity as an artist; a sort of ethnographer of the low atmosphere levels of pop culture. "I’m an avant-gardist. We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde. So, all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it— because popular culture is really invisible" (3).
His work's focus of blending definitions of beautiful and non-beautiful objects is a direct interaction with hyperreal concepts (opposite of the object-value of Koons' and subjects of Warhol), but with a tiredness with the metaphysical lens of Baudrillard--or that of outside the self which doesn't even exist--he develops a stronger and stronger interest in psychological theory and that which is most directly responsible for philosophies relating to Baudrillard's and the experience of humanity: our psychology.
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Educational Complex (1995)
(layout of all institutions he's attended by memory,
with parts missing/cannot remember as solid blocks) |
"For me, psychedelia was sublime because in psychedelia, your worldview fell apart. That was a sublime revelation, that was my youth, and that was my notion of beauty[...]It was very interiorized, it wasn’t about a metaphysical outside; it was about your own consciousness" (2).
From a 2005 interview with Kelley, he talks of his disinterest in "new beauty", calling it old-standards revival, instead mentioning his interest in sublimity and effects of the sublime, particularly of "a less elevated beauty" (2). His work throughout his career exemplifies this, especially of his use of these 'low-end' cultural items/materials.
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Mobile Homestead (2005-2013)
(with a unfriendly childhood, is this copy, meant for community gatherings, more real than his original childhood home?) |
Unto his suicide he slowly detaches nearly completely from the art world, blurring the lines between not only polarities of beauty but of art and activism. By his death in 2012 he would just barely see his work
Mobile Homestead be completed, a replica (ahem) of his childhood home in Detroit, with a basement underneath barred from the public, letting artists in to do their own private, antisocial things. Part of it detaches and can be moved around the country for various community outreach gatherings, sitting this replica home in a unique position as both hyperreal, deliberately hyperreal, and for strictly selfless and anti-artworld uses.
Mike Kelley sees no distinction between the value of objects, as it is all made up. His work blurs the lines of object classes, dissects and minces all levels of pop culture, and has an intensely focused understanding of its own hyperrealness. Kelley understands on a constant level the 'producedness' of everything, like the illusion of simulacrum dissolved long ago for him.
A punk butcher of pop culture's lower atmospheres, Mike Kelley dug through society's junk drawers and found that it all only meant something, but never was something.
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