Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley was an American performance and installation artist. He completed a BFA at the University of Michigan School of Art, Ann Arbor, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, after which he settled in Los Angeles (Go figure, not New York!).
Mike Kelley was an American performance and installation artist. He completed a BFA at the University of Michigan School of Art, Ann Arbor, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, after which he settled in Los Angeles (Go figure, not New York!).
As a student at Cal Arts, Kelley was influenced by the conceptual approach taken by teachers such as Jonathon Borofsky, John Baldessari (woohoo!) and Douglas Huebler.
His first acclaimed performance work, staged in Los Angeles in collaboration with David Askevold in 1979, was Poltergeist; it included photographs, objects and black-and-white drawings combining image and text in comic-book style. The counter-cultural, critical energy and concentration on themes of dysfunctionality and repression in his early works became more focused in the mid-1980s, when he began working with found objects, specifically soft toys.
As Kelley's work morphed from performance into more installation using found objects, his focus tightened as well. Where at first his works commentated on public or culture, his later works became something more biographical. Many of his pieces reflected on the way personal tokens and totems of affection can be invested with desire and repression, and can form part of a person’s psychological development. In contrast to earlier work in which his individuality would be complicated and obscured, biography became increasingly important for Kelley in the 1990s, albeit an openly fabricated biography. In 1995 he produced an architectural model of the institutions in which he had studied, Educational Complex based on incomplete memories. The sections that were missing suggested areas in which trauma events occurred, referred to by Kelley as ‘repressed space’. By basing his work on a regression to troubled periods in childhood and adolescence, he underlines his view of art as a dysfunctional reality which, through a re-enactment of traumatic events, can have therapeutic ends.
Kelley's journey through creation was a journey of self-discovery. And I find his later works truly inspiring. Unfortunately, by the end of his life, it doesn't seem that he found what he was looking for. Mike Kelley died earlier this year. He was only 57. Kelley was found at his home in South Pasadena in what seemed to be a suicide following a serious depression. It breaks my heart when an artist with so much talent doesn't make it, like Sebastian Horsely or Jackson Pollock.
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