“At that time, it was the most despicable thing you could be”, said Mike Kelley when looking back at his decision to become an artist, which led to a break with his father. Kelley is now regarded as one of the most influential artistic figures of the millennium.
Kelley joined CalArts in 1978, the now famous arts institute near Los Angeles, where he studied under John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler and Laurie Anderson, amongst others. He founded the punk band DAM (Destroy All Monsters) with fellow student Jim Shaw. Artistic collaborations often feature on Kelley’s CV: including with Paul McCarthy in 1992 for the video ‘Heidi’, a spoof of the eponymous book from 1881; and with Tony Oursler in 1997 for an installation at Documenta X in which they reflected on their time in CalArts with the noise band The Poetics. Later too, Kelley continued to be a link between the L.A. art and music scenes.
In the late 1970s, Kelley debuted with solo performances, paintings in which he combined image with text, and installations. He puts an end to the idea that an artist needs to excel at one specific medium. Kelley made his breakthrough in the 1980s, first in Europe and later also in America. From that period onwards, many works reveal his research into memories and traumas that may or may not be supressed, and into the influence of education, cultural environment and American culture. With soft toys, blankets, and typical American school yearbooks and other second-hand material, he elevates his self-examination to a collective level.
Kelley’s biography certainly influenced his art, but his fierce resistance to an overtly biographical reading of the work makes it difficult to interpret within an art historical context. In any case, he was one of the first to develop the installation medium into a dense environment in which we are exposed to diverse multi-media impulses and objects that challenge our moral certainties and artistic sensitivities. Perhaps that was actually Kelley’s intention: to deny us a handhold and instead throw us back upon our own contradictory emotions.
Kelley did not wait for the opening of his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2013. In despair about the role of art and reeling from a relationship breakdown and the loss of his mother and brother, he took his own life in 2012. The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, founded by the artist in 2007, awards grants for innovative projects connected to Kelley’s practice. ‘Mobile Homestead’ (2006-‘13), a posthumously completed replica of the house in which the artist grew up, is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. A fixed part of it is reserved for artists and “secret rituals of an antisocial nature”, and a mobile section for local community activities. With this work, Kelley wanted to reflect how someone must hide their own longings and convictions behind a façade of socially-acceptable lies.
