Mike Kelley
Encyclopedia
Mike Kelley is a contemporary American artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
. Kelley's work involves found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, performance and video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
. He often works collaboratively and has done projects with artists Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...
, Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...
and John Miller. Kelley is often associated with the concept of abjection
Abjection
The term abjection literally means "the state of being cast off". In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and meanness of spirit.-In critical theory:...
..
Life and work
Kelley was born in Wayne, MichiganWayne, Michigan
Wayne is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan, southwest of Detroit. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 17,593...
, a suburb of Detroit in 1954. In his early years he was involved with the city's music scene which spawned bands such as Iggy and the Stooges
The Stooges
The Stooges are an American rock band from Ann Arbor, Michigan first active from 1967 to 1974, and later reformed in 2003...
, Kelley was a member of the noise band Destroy All Monsters
Destroy All Monsters (band)
Destroy All Monsters were an influential Detroit band existing from 1973 to 1985, with sporadic performances since. Their music touched on elements of punk rock, psychedelic, heavy metal music and noise rock with a heavy dose of performance art. Their name likely came from the Godzilla film Destroy...
. In 1976 Kelley graduated from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. He moved to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
in 1978 and attended the California Institute of the Arts
California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...
, where he admired the work of his teachers John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold
David Askevold
David Askevold was an experimental Canadian artist who lived in Nova Scotia.Askevold studied art and anthropology at the University of Montana. In 1963 he won a Max Beckmann Scholarship to study painting for a year at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art in New York...
and Douglas Huebler
Douglas Huebler
Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.-Life and career:Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II...
. At that time he started to work on a series of projects in which he explored works with loose poetic themes, such as The Sublime, Monkey Island and Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, using a variety of different media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and writing. Kelley started to gain recognition outside Los Angeles in the mid-eighties with the sculptural objects and installations from the series Half-a-Man and has since exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and participated in events such as Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
9. Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
featured his work on the cover and booklet of their 1992 record Dirty. The Whitney Museum in New York City held a major retrospective of his work in 1993.
In November 2005, Kelley staged Day is Done, filling Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. There are currently eleven gallery spaces: three in New York; two in London; one in each of Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Paris, Geneva, Hong Kong and Moscow.-1980s:...
with funhouse-like multimedia installations, including automated furniture, as well as films of dream-like ceremonies inspired by high school year book photos of pageants, sports matches and theater productions. In December 2005, Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney...
described "Day is Done" as a pioneering example of "clusterfuck aesthetics," the tendency towards overloaded multimedia environments in contemporary art.
Kelley was also in the band Poetics with fellow California Institute of the Arts
California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...
students John Miller and Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...
.
Kelley's work is inspired by diverse sources such as history, philosophy, politics, underground music, decorative arts and working-class artistic expression. His art often examines class and gender issues as well as issues of normality, criminality and perversion.
A selection of representative works
- "Mike Kelley at Skarstedt", 2010
- "Haim Steinbach on Mike Kelley" at Overduin and Kite, 2008
- "Mike Kelley's Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry", 1992, Public Art
- "Heidi", 1992, Video (in collaboration with Paul McCarthyPaul McCarthyPaul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...
) - "Pay for Your Pleasure", 1988, Installation
- "Half-a-Man", 1987–91, Series of objects, drawings and installations
Contributions
2008 Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/2008/02/mike-kelley.phpExternal links
- Official site
- Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBSPublic Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 1 (2001). - Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery
- "Tomorrow Never Comes" Steven Stern on Kelley, Frieze, March, 2006
- Daniel Sherer, “Heidi on the Loos. Ornament and Crime in Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s Heidi.” PIN-UP 3 (2008), 59-62.
- Mike Kelley biography/interview
- Mike Kelley is a member of Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism, publisher of X-TRA
- "I Want My Mike Kelley" by Ben Davis, Artnet Magazine
- "Clusterfuck Aesthetics" by Jerry Saltz, Artnet Magazine
- Mike Kelley and the Conceptual Vernacular
- Exhibitions and works at Jablonka Galerie