Mike Kelley, a California conceptualist widely agreed to have been one of the most radical and influential American artists of recent decades, was credited by some with helping to put Los Angeles on the art world map.
Yet, throughout his career, Kelley’s art incorporated familiar elements of the middlebrow anti-culture of his American Midwestern youth. After abandoning an early aspiration to be a novelist, he found expressive outlets first in punk rock and later in just about every conceivable visual art medium. He produced a vast body of paintings, sculptures, installations and performance pieces that resonated with the confrontational angst of his teen years and the kitsch of its blue-collar, heartland setting, while also drawing from history, decorative arts and politics. He also curated shows and wrote for art and music journals.
Mike Kelley was born in 1954 in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to a working-class Roman Catholic family. His father was a maintenance supervisor in public schools and his mother worked as a cook. In high school Kelley immersed himself in Detroit’s heavy metal subculture. Then, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he helped to form the noise band Destroy All Monsters with his fellow artists Jim Shaw, Cary Loren and Niagara. Their “anti-rock” ensemble crashed parties and performed on broken and scavenged instruments and household objects.
Kelley graduated in 1976, moved to LA in 1978 and attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he completed his Master of Fine Arts and, with a fellow student, Tony Oursler, formed another band, the Poetics. At Cal Arts, if at first somewhat warily, Kelley absorbed the ideology, dominant at the place and time, of conceptual art and theory, studying with such teachers as John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson.
Kelley’s references to head-shop paraphernalia and other staples of rank stoner dorm rooms appeared in works that often left viewers baffled. Yet attuned members of a particular generation found them strangely moving, so universal were the adolescent wounds the artist exposed. In 1992 the band Sonic Youth used Kelley’s work for the cover of its album Dirty.
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Kelley had started showing at Metro Pictures in Manhattan ten years earlier and, soon thereafter, at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in LA.
Europeans embraced his work early on, which some ascribed to the fact that the tasteless “bad America” he depicted played to stereotypes of a debased culture that they held dear. In 1993 a major retrospective, Mike Kelley, Catholic Tastes, was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York, and it then travelled to LA and Munich. Other important exhibitions followed — at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the Tate Liverpool and the Louvre. A big show opening at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam this year will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Despite critical praise — and the prices of his work edging up into the millions — Kelley retained the aura of a subversive outsider, suspicious of the cultural and intellectual Establishment, even while becoming part of it. His 1988 installation Pay for Your Pleasure featured a portrait gallery of great thinkers including poets, philosophers — and a painting by a convict. Some of his work incorporated scatology and sadomasochism, or evoked clandestine teen rituals. He produced more masterly versions of the drawings that apathetic 16-year-olds scrawl on desks in after school detention, and assemblages of pitifully tattered toys and blankets whose placement in monumental museum spaces only added to their pathos. They could be taken as meditations on innocence and nostalgia, or as something out of a child-neglect crime scene.
“I’m constantly going back to the world I grew up in and I’m probably doomed to spend the rest of my life trying to sort out certain aspects of that world,” Kelley said in 1993. In the 1980s he had started working with crocheted blankets, rag dolls and stuffed animals found at jumble sales and charity shops, the detritus of a ruined nursery. For More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Wages of Sin (1987) he crammed the toys and blankets together in a compulsively dense assemblage. These handmade found objects, Kelley said, might signify a “massive amount” of love, or be “inducers of guilt”, representing more love than the recipient could ever pay back. Depending on the viewer, he concluded, the effect could either be “super loveable” or “super creepy”.
In one of his more famous installations, Educational Complex (1995) Kelley addressed “repressed memory syndrome”, a controversial diagnosis often offered in suspected child abuse cases. He pieced together architectural fragments of several schools he had attended over the years, including his Catholic elementary school and the University of Michigan, and the house he grew up in, resulting in a clean and formally striking assemblage he dubbed an “überschool”. He omitted the rooms and spaces he had “forgotten”. The result looked “orderly”, the artist noted, not at all “dysfunctional”, but he guessed that the blank spaces would lead viewers to ask: Why can’t Mike Kelley remember?
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While growing up, Kelley said, he “desperately wanted high culture.” He believed intellectuals were paradoxically less snobbish than the working class, who mistrusted “eggheads”. But he was later disillusioned. Academia, he discovered, was eager to protect its status by relying on arcane terminology and ideas unrelated to reality. In 1993 he told a reporter, “most critics are hacks”, no different from “any other crack-pot backyard philosopher”.
Kelley was a workaholic who eventually gave up performing (he later said he had to drink a lot of alcohol in order to perform). On a memorial page of the website of Gagosian, the New York gallery that was representing him at his death, Kelley outlined his philosophy thus: “We’re living in the post-modern 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.”
One of Kelley’s champions, Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, described his as “an intellectual force of nature” and a “catalyst for a generation of artists”.
In recent months Kelley was reported to have been suffering from depression.
Mike Kelley, artist, was born on October 27, 1954. He was found dead on January 31, 2012, aged 57