Biographie

An 'artist-provocateur' whose subversive approach is laced with wry humour and irony, Mike Kelley uses varied artistic forms (performance, installation, video, drawing) to examine the construction of broad systems of though defining collective experience, especially in ordinary American society. Through cynicism bordering on caricature, Kelley brings out the different dysfunctions revealed by the psychological interaction between individuals, family structures, religious beliefs (mainly Catholic) or the relationship to the body, in spite of efforts to standardise these different domains. Otherwise stated, he attempts to deconstruct certain myths by revealing all of their weak points in order to undermine their validity. The idea of failure, embodied in the individual's deviant nature, for example, thus runs throughout Kelley's work. While he appropriates all kinds of images from American pop culture, however, what interests him is not the visual content of this language but the way it maintains certain norms: 'I'm very much an antiformalist,' he maintains, 'but I'm interested in the ramification of form, how it's applied' [1].

Born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, Kelley grew up in a working-class environment and received a Catholic education. His undergraduate years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor saw the creation of the music group Destroy All Monsters in the company of Jim Shaw, Cary Loren and Niagra. When he entered the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1976, Conceptual art was the dominant current, with a teaching staff which included artists such as Michael Asher, John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, as well as Laurie Anderson, whose performance practice had an important influence on him. At the end of the 1970s, he devoted himself almost exclusively to this form of expression, which he infused with considerable dramatic intensity from the very outset. Poetry in Motion, his first series of public performances, took place at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 1978.

In 1977, Kelley founded the art-rock performance group The Poetics with Tony Oursler, Don Krieger, Mitchell Syrop and John Miller; twenty years later, this experience was to give rise to the installation The Poetics Project, first presented at Documenta X in 1997. The installation, created in collaboration with Oursler, includes sculptures, paintings, video projections and sound installations which, beyond their direct links with the group The Poetics, evoke the diversity of popular culture [2].

The encounter with conceptual artist David Askevold, a professor who shared Kelley's interest in rock music, proved determinant in the artist's years of training at Cal Tech. In 1979 they collaborated on the Poltergeist project, for which Kelley wrote a text associated with a photographic self-portrait and two black-and-white drawings punctuated with captions. The representation of the characters in a comics-like style, the black-and-white treatment and the irony of the captions announced the principles of many later drawing series, such as Loading Docks Drawing. This series, with the obscene, irreverent accents emblematic of Kelley's graphic language, also recalls certain works by Raymond Pettibon and Jim Show in its form.

The association of several media within a single project, as is the case with The Poltergeist, is typical of his artistic practice; between 1977 and 1986, his projects, each of which were devoted to a specific theme, were systematically developed in several forms. A phase of research and writing on the theme in question thus preceded the realisation of installations composed of drawings and objects, which were themselves accompanied by performances. Such is the case, for example, with Pluto's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, presented at the Artists Space in New York in 1986, which included texts, a series of drawings and a performance.

In 1982 Kelley made his first video, The Banana Man, inspired by a children's television character of the same name. As is often the case with his videos, he combined the roles of director and performer, in this case playing the part of Banana Man. With a narration based on the free association of thoughts and ideas, the story and the actions carried out by Banana Man and the other characters follow no perceptible logic. Kelley adopts this same writing method in most of his texts and scripts, which frequently make use of metaphor and a wealth of description. In subsequent videos, he associated himself with other artists: Kappa (1986), where he plays the mythical Japanese character of that name, was made in collaboration with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, while Sir Drone (1988), dealing with the beginnings of he punk movement in the United States through the story of two teenagers faced with the ethical and aesthetic questions raised by the creation of an underground music group, is the result of a collaboration with Raymond Pettibon. In 1989 he collaborated with Ericka Beckman to make Blind Country, inspired by the H. G. Wells novel The Country of the Blind and relating the story of a man forced to give up his eyes in order to exist in a society which vision does not exist. The underlying idea of castration in Wells's story became the main theme of Blind Country.

In 1987 Kelley began the Half a Man project, which was to occupy him for the next five years and gradually bring him to the attention of a wider public. At the core of this project, which includes several series of works, is Kelley's appropriation of childhood objects and toys such as cuddly animals, dolls, crocheted afghans, school books and so on. According to Kelley, these are not so much destined for children as for the psychological satisfaction of adults; the doll, for example, would thus allow them to believe in the innocence of childhood, devoid of any sexuality. Arena Series (1990) refutes this myth in a radical way, with dolls and stuffed animals meticulously arranged on old blankets to create vignette often of an obscene nature. Elisabeth Sussman, curator of 'Catholic Taste', the artist's 1993 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, remarks on the subject of Arena Series: 'In their pathetic, abject appearance and in their raucous and ribald associations, they offered a carnivalesque critique of social interaction and exposed the psychological complexity that had always defined Kelley's work' [3]. Half a Man also contains drawings and objects, as well as other installations such as Empathy Displacement Series (1991) presented at the 1992 Whitney Biennial, where photos of dolls were associated with boxes on the floor which symbolised their coffins. Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991), exhibited at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1991, consisted of series of cuddly animals laid out by types on folding tables, as if they were about to be autopsied. In Lumpenprole (1991), presented at the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux in 1992, the dolls and animals are hidden under blankets to create undefinable biomorphic shapes. The disorganised appearance of these installations, based on the accumulation of anti-aesthetic elements, indicates an explicit rejection of the formal principles of Minimalist sculpture. The idea of a man working with old dolls, moreover, runs counter to the Modernist conception of the male artist using industrial materials to create imposing sculptures while contradicting the essentialist feminist theories which were particularly strong in Los Angeles. As Kelley would later declare, 'I refuse to say that knitting is only for women. That's sexist.' [4] While he was working on Half a Man, Kelley also made the 1988 installation Pay for Your Pleasure, which he presented the same year at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society and which also raised the question of masculine identity and more specifically the cliché of the male artist.

Kelley met Paul McCarthy in 1985 and their first collaboration took place two years later, during the making of the video Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, where McCarthy plays a domineering father and Kelley, the son. The two artists also address the problem of family dysfunctions in the Heidi project, carried out for an 1992 exhibition at the Krizinger Galerie in Vienna. Taken from the children's book by Joanna Spyri, the video shows life-sized puppets filmed in a setting installed in the gallery and functioning as a kind of installation.

In Fresh Acconci (1995), Kelley and McCarthy reconstituted Vito Acconci's video performances from the early 1970s, but by transposing them into a Hollywood villa setting suggesting the world of certain porno films. Sod and Sodie Sock Comp. O.S.O., inspired by the comic-strip character Sad Sack, whose daily life took place in the army, was a satire of military life and its disciplinary system bringing out their resonances with Clement Greenberg's Modernist theories of art. The video, made by Kelley and McCarthy in 1998, also includes an installation recreating a military camp.

The preoccupation with questions about childhood and adolescence which is reflected in Kelley's videos also comes through in his Missing Time project (1974-1995), which has as its point of departure the syndrome of repressed memory whereby individuals reject all the traumatising experiences they have undergone into their subconscious. Missing Time includes, among others, the installation Educational Complex (1995), a huge model of the house of Kelley's parents and all the places where he studied, in order to examine the associations between space, architecture and memory and ultimately, the idea of repressed memory.

Kelley's work was the subject of a second retrospective, organised by the MACBA in Barcelona in 1997 and also presented in Malmö, Sweden, and Eindhoven the The Netherlands. In 2002 he participated in the 'Sonic Progress' exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, for which he collaborated with Scanner to make a series of sound and video recordings in various places in Paris. He has also curated several exhibitions, including Social Distortions, shown at the LACE in 1986 and 'Uncanny', which took place at the Gementeemuseum in Arnhem in 1993. He has taught in various U.S. universities including UCLA and Cal Arts and presently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Frédérique Baumgartner
Translated by Miriam Rosen

[1] Interview with Robert Storr, Art in America, June 1994, p. 93.

[2] For Kelley, the Poetics Project is 'in the end, not so much a portrait of The Poetics as it is an examination of how history is constructed. And in this examination, hopefully the present historicization of the punk period will be perceived as a war for the control of meaning, a war that one can still fully participate in. This history is not yet etched in stone.'

[3] Elisabeth Sussman, 'Introduction', Catholic Taste, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, p. 16.

[4] Art in America interview, p.90.