Michael Kelley (October 27, 1954 – c. January 31, 2012) was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
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Early life
Kelley was born in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to a working-class Roman Catholic family in October 1954. His father was in charge of maintenance for a public school system; his mother was a cook in the executive dining room at Ford Motor Company. In his early years he was involved with the area's music scene and was a member of the noise band Destroy All Monsters. In 1976, Kelley graduated from the University of Michigan and then moved to Los Angeles. In 1978, he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a Master of Fine Arts, where he admired the work of his teachers John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler and fully embraced the ideals of the avant-garde.
Work
During his time at CalArts, Kelley started to work on a series of projects in which he explored works with loose poetic themes, such as The Sublime, Monkey Island and Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, using a variety of different media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, video, and writing. In the 1980s, he became known for working with another type of
material: crocheted blankets, fabric dolls and other rag toys found at thrift stores and yard sales. The introduction of textiles in his work drew significant inspiration from feminist art, particularly the “femmage” technique developed by Miriam Schapiro, a form of collage combining painting, textiles, and paper that sought to elevate traditional modes of women’s handcraft. Perhaps the most famous work in this vein, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin from 1987, featured a mess of used rag dolls, animals and blankets strewn across a canvas, a way of investing a fictional childhood scene with some visceral pathos which was first shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1988, Kelley created an installation called Pay for Your Pleasure, which featured a gallery of portraits of men of genius – poets, philosophers and artists included – subverted at the end by a painting created by a convicted criminal. In From My Institution to Yours (1988) and Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (1992), Kelley appropriated photocopied drawings and other ephemera of vernacular office humor and moved it into more formalized environments where such crude materials are normally not seen.
Kelley often employed soft, tangled toys as a satirical metaphor for Expressionist art. In Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991–99), an installation sculpture made from untidy clusters of toys suspended from the ceiling, a dozen monochrome plush-toy spheres, linked by a system of cables and pulleys across the ceiling, orbit around a central, rainbow-colored blob; ten large, geometrically faceted, brightly colored wall-reliefs are actually monumental dispensers of pine-scented air freshener, which automatically send their cleansing spray into the room at timed intervals.
In 1995, he produced Educational Complex, an architectural model of the institutions in which he had studied, including his Catholic elementary school and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the work's selective inclusion of institutional locations and features responds to "the rising infatuation of the public with issues of repressed memory syndrome and child abuse... The implication is that anything that can't be remembered is somehow the result of trauma." In 1999, he made a short video in which Superman recites selections from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
Exhibitions
Kelley began having regular solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures Gallery in Manhattan in 1982, and at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles the following year. He subsequently started to gain recognition outside Los Angeles in the mid-eighties with the sculptural objects and installations from the series Half-a-Man. In 2002, Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City showed "Mike Kelley: Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Editions" from November 2-December 7. In 2005, he had his first solo show at Gagosian Gallery in New York City, which was representing him at his death. A retrospective, "Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes," appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 and traveled to Los Angeles and Munich; a second retrospective appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997; and a third was at the Tate Liverpool in 2004. In 2006, his show "Profondeurs Vertes" was presented at the Musée du Louvre (2006). A major retrospective exhibition was held after the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2012, and traveled to the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2014. The many group exhibitions he participated in include the Whitney Biennial (1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2002, and 2012), Venice Biennale (1988 and 1995), Carnegie International (1991), Documenta 9 and 10 (1992 and 1997), and SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2004).
In 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit received a grant to complete Kelley's unfinished project Mobile Homestead, a large-scale replica of the artist's home in suburban Detroit. The detachable facade of the home, set on a street-legal trailer, is meant to travel from city to city hosting art, educational and social services initiatives. During its exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Mobile Homestead hosts a series of "public service activations," including a lunch-making workshop led by the Local United Network to Combat Hunger, a School on Wheels donation drive, an American Red Cross Blood Services event and an L.A. Human Right to Housing Project/Community Action Network-hosted Rent Control Tenant Meeting.
The Watermill Center staged an exhibition of Kelley's video and sound installations, as well as works from the "Kandor" series in 2012. The Exhibition, "Mike Kelley: 1954-2012," was voted "Best show in a non-profit gallery or alternative space" in 2012 by the International Association of Art Critics.
On October 13, 2013, the largest exhibition of Kelley's works opened in the MoMA PS1 in New York City. On December 14, 2015, a selection of Kelley's videos as well as collaborative pieces were screened at REDCAT in Los Angeles. From November 3 - December 23, 2016, Hauser & Wirth in New York showed "Mike Kelley: Memory Ware."
Collections
During the artist's lifetime, German art-book publisher Benedikt Taschen and Los Angeles-based businessman Kourosh Larizadeh were the principal collectors who bought Kelley's work in depth. In 2001, Kelley himself donated three works by fellow artists William Leavitt, Franz West and Jim Isermann to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Selected public collections
Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit
Fonds National d’Art Contemporain
Fundación “la Caixa”, Madrid
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Louisiana Museum, Humleback, Denmark
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Mönchengladbach, Germany
Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Stedelijke Museum, Eindhoven
The Art Institute of Chicago
Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Awards
2006 Wolfgang Hahn prize, Society of Modern Art, Museum Ludwig2003 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship2000 The California Institute of the Arts Distinguished Alumnus Award1998 The University of Michigan School of Art and Design Distinguished Alumnus Award1997 Skowhegan Medal for Mixed Media1990 National Endowment for the Arts Museum Program Exhibition Grant1987 Awards in the Visual Arts Grant1986 Artists Space Interarts Grant1985 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant1984 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant
Art market
The artist's most expensive works sold at auction:
$3,301,000 – Memory Ware Flat #1, 2000. Christie's, May 10, 2016.
$2,887,500 – Memory Ware Flat #16, 2001. Christie's, May 17, 2017.
$2,853,000 – Memory Ware Flat #24, 1954-2012. Christie's, November 11, 2015.
$2,400,000 – Deodorized central mass with satellites, 1991. Phillips, November 16, 2006.
$2,348,462 – MEMORY WARE FLAT #29, 2001. Sotheby's, March 7, 2018.
Contributions
2008 Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International
Publications
Mike Kelley. (1999). Essays by Isabelle Graw, John C. Welchman and Anthony Vidler. Phaidon Press. ISBN 9780714838342.
Heinz-Norbert Jocks. (2001). Dialoge: Kunst und Literatur: Mike Kelley im Gespräch. Cologne: DuMont. ISBN 3-7701-5096-1
Foul Perfection. (2003). Essays and criticism, edited by John C. Welchman. M.I.T. Press. ISBN 9780262611787.
Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (1986-2004). (2005). Interviews by Mike Kelley, edited by John C. Welchman. JRP Ringer. ISBN 9783905701005.
Daniel Sherer. (2008). "Heidi on the Loos. Ornament and Crime in Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy's Heidi." PIN-UP 3, 59–62. Reprinted in Y. Safran, ed. Adolf Loos Our Contemporary (New York: Columbia GSAPP, 2012).
Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008. (2009). Edited by Mike Kelley and Anne Pontegnie. JRP Ringer. ISBN 978-3-905829-80-8.
Mike Kelley. (2013). Eva Meyer-Hermann, Ann Goldstein, Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-5241-1.