![]() ![]() He looked at things and people so fully in the face that what he saw often passed right through them. Mike was unflinching about the associations he made, and fearless about their implications. The cumulative effect of the analogies underlines the immoral and ungodly impulses of art and, in effect, generates a demonized aesthetic, so that by virtue of its explicit predication on sin, malice and monstrosity, art production becomes something like the opposite of atonement. This figurative mosaic of dark, aphoristic opinion correlated art with savagery, extremism, lawlessness, outrage, cunning, destruction, murder, madness and acts of random violence. Mike’s association of art with guilt, criminality and behavioural extremism courses through the 43 quotations selected from a constellation of poets, artists, novelists, popes and philosophers, from Plato and Mikhail Bakunin to Edgar Degas and Oscar Wilde, painted onto monochrome portraits of their authors (in red, green, purple, orange, etc.) in Pay for Your Pleasure (1988). One set of relations between belief and religion and their social effects directed them through the conditions and experiences of art itself – viewed as an irresistible token of the fallen nature of humankind. ![]() Much of Mike’s work refers to the erosion, falling-off and unanchored rehabilitation of belief in contemporary life, as its religious and ethical tread has been utterly worn away. All images unless stated courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles. Mike Kelley, The Banana Man, 1981, production still. What was already true at the end of the ’90s was further underlined in the ensuing decade during which Mike’s work broke out in a breathtaking sequence of new syntheses between means and materials that had often coexisted (video, sculpture, performance, music, photography) but were now cross-hatched in a careening agenda of issues and formats that engendered the epic cyclicality and cabaret Americana of Day is Done (2005) the collusion of sci-fi projection, personal fantasy and vitrinous colour represented by the ‘Kandors’ works (1999–2011) and, amid all this, a return to painting and drawing – with a caricatural bent – mostly made in a small private studio adjacent to his former residence. ![]() When I wrote what was probably the first A–Z survey of Mike’s work in 1999, I titled it ‘The Mike Kelleys’, a playful reminder of the staggering plurality of positions and personae that made up his artistic identity. He tried to understand his culture from the bottom up, scouring thrift stores and yard sales for its refuse and cast-offs, addressing with an inimitable mix of caustic scepticism and what I can only describe as temporizing honour, the languages and assumptions of education, adolescence, crafts and DIY, holidays, pop psychology, parades and rituals, fandom, newspaper reportage, public address and a thousand other conditions of daily life. While his day job transformed him inexorably, sometimes painfully, into a high-end artist, even into a minor celebrity, he never relinquished his preferred role as a counter-culture warrior fighting for the release of the voices and skills he always felt that mainstream institutions kept in positions of muteness or invisibility. Co-director of The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.Īrtist, noise musician, writer, benefactor and Catholic misfit, Mike Kelley was a wholehearted and cantankerous sage with an indelible blue-collar background, who was sometimes so wired-in to the elemental stakes of the American vernacular that during certain on-song weeks he generated enough ideas and imaginings to last another sort of artist an entire career. ![]()
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