A look at: Mike Kelley

Information is most helpful when it is presented in an organized manner, which is why we have compiled the basic information about an artist's life in this category for anyone who wants to learn more about them – as a convenient starting point for further study of this artist and their work:

Mike Kelley was born on October 27, 1954, and died (presumably) at the age of 57 on January 31, 2012.

Place of birth, parents, school

Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, the once-famous Motor City in the American state of Michigan. His family is known to have raised Kelley and his four siblings in a strict Roman Catholic faith; his father was a school janitor, and his mother worked as a cook in the Ford factory cafeteria.

First signs of artistic talent

Mike Kelley reportedly showed an interest in and talent for art even as a schoolboy, but was labeled an oddball at the Detroit school where his father worked as a janitor. He never forgot the repressed suburban environment and the humiliations it caused, and often processed these experiences in his early works, but he didn't want to be reduced to his biography.

Training to become an artist

Mike Kelley initially studied art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he graduated with a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in 1976, and then moved to the California Institute of the Arts , Valencia, where he received his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 1978.

At the California Institute of the Arts, painting and photography, music and video, performing arts and theory were taught under one roof – a very unusual approach for the time, and one in which Kelley explored all the possibilities.

The path to your own style

His early works show Kelley still in the midst of rebelling against his upbringing ; he processes images from childhood and buried memories, and deals with the subcultures into which he had escaped in his younger years.

The restrictive intolerance of his petit-bourgeois upbringing grew in Kelley into a tremendous aversion to the mainstream , to the clean-cut types in America.

Even his early works criticize American mass culture and trash art, which he maliciously mocked in his installations with worn-out stuffed animals.

Throughout his life, Kelley fought back with double-edged photos and videos of high school traditions, bizarre images of beauty pageants and costume parties, with videos and performances, paintings and pictures made from “pleasing material”, always controversial and attacked not only by those whose cultural garbage he was mocking.

The artistic breakthrough

It was precisely such installations that finally brought Kelley to the attention of the wider public around 1986: entire room installations with biting kitsch , crocheted doilies and old plush toys and flea market dolls, which came together to form irritating to disturbing groups.

The series “Half a Man” (1987–1991), also in this style, finally brought him international recognition. In 1992, the band Sonic Youth featured one of his crocheted creatures on the cover of their new album “Dirty,” and the first pressing included a photograph of Kelley depicting performance artists Sherry Rose and Bob Flanagan naked, in provocative poses with nearly life-size fabric dolls. This brought even more popularity to these “artistic creations” and their creator.

Kelley didn't really see his stuffed animals as animals, but as babies, as "genderless humanoids," clean, plush, and cute. Stuffed animals were given to babies to tell them how they should be.

Such goals are absolutely classic and inhumane. For Kelley, they represented the pursuit of a kind of Christian perfection that is unattainable, especially for babies, as he once said in an interview.

Famous artworks by Mike Kelley

There are many famous works of art by Mike Kelley, especially from the years 1986 to 1992:

• Animal Self and Friend of the Animals, 1987
• Black-Eyed Susan, 1987
• Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988
• The Renaissance Society, 1988

They are always multifaceted and imaginative, never simply pretty and never immediately understandable.

What kind of art does Mike Kelley make?

Every art form he could think of, with every material he could think of. His broad education, not limited to one field, gave him a wide variety of expressive possibilities, his inclination towards the underground with a wealth of quirky ideas.

Mike Kelley is classified as an installation artist and performance artist , influenced by pop culture, mass culture and porn culture; his works and texts deal with worldview systems as well as the psychological dependencies of people trapped in these worldview systems.

Mike Kelley was also interested in music and in a connection between music and art . In the mid to late 1970s, disco and country rock reigned supreme, and pop music had lost any “avant-garde” relevance, while the music of the time before (jazz, folk, psychedelic) was openly connected to the world of art and art production.

Lecturers at art schools were largely convinced that all forms of popular culture were in decline, students were uninterested, rock music was for dancing at parties and definitely not art.

Then came British punk , which breathed new life into pop art, but with the rise of "design bands," it quickly lost all connection to art again. Mike Kelley wanted to change that; he went to the California Institute of the Arts to study with Morton Subotnik , one of the leading figures in electronic music .

This eventually led to the formation of "The Poetics" with Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, the first "art band" to emerge from the California Institute of the Arts. For Kelley and Oursler (especially from 1977 to 1983), "The Poetics" served as both a space for experimenting with art and a punk band, resulting in numerous installations, some of which were exhibited by Tony Oursler in 2013 as "The Poetics Project" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Exhibition of Mike Kelley at MoMA

What art style does Mike Kelley represent?

As mentioned, installation art and performance art, but also graphic art on paper and painting, video installations and films, and music art projects.

His name is closely associated with the New Gothic Art , which takes its name from a Neo-Gothic art manifesto Gothic artist Charles Moffat in 2001. This subculture was about rebellion against normality , and Mike Kelley was involved in the Gothic exhibition held in Boston in 1997, which shaped the style of the group of artists.

It was an exhibition by the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston , in which, besides Kelley, Robert Gober, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gregory Crewdson, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman and Kelley's friend Tony Oursler exhibited.

also considered part of the Lowbrow style , the "unpretentious art" that artists of his time developed "surf culture" and "kustom culture" of the 1950s and the beginnings of underground comics "Pop Surrealism," suited Kelley's work well; it is characterized by paintings, sculptures , and installations in which material from pop culture is playfully and wickedly processed, following the example of the Surrealists and Fantastic Realists.

Mike Kelley's role models

Kelley had important teachers, the conceptual artist John Baldessari and the performance artist Laurie Anderson , who are said to have left their mark on his work. Kelley himself stated that he was impressed by Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci and the Viennese Actionists.

Key supporters of Mike Kelley

Kelley's supporters include not only his well-known teachers, but also Paul McCarthy , who is about 10 years older and made a number of co-productions with Kelley that further increased Kelley's prominence in the early 1990s.

Mike Kelley as a political artist

Mike Kelley was a political artist of the first rank , whose work repeatedly explored the repressed and subcultural phenomena. Kelley's politics was social politics, the interplay of people, which he considered the foundation of all political development.

Kelley caricatured edifying art with the message: “Let’s talk about disobedience”, adapted the children’s book “Heidi” to depict child abuse, and redrawn children’s comic characters into works about castration, the Oedipus complex, and broken family structures.

Interview with Mike Kelley from 2004 (in English)

A standout in Mike Kelley's life's work

Mike Kelley is an artist who exceptionally engages all the senses of his viewers. An artistic synesthete , he presents the recipient with haptic, visual, auditory, and olfactory challenges, often with unsettling effects.

Important exhibitions and awards of Mike Kelley – an overview

Kelley has exhibited frequently in Germany, including at Documenta 9 in 1992, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1995, and together with Tony Oursler at Documenta X in 1997. In 2007, he caused a sensation at the Skulptur Projekte in Münster with his “Petting Zoo”.

In 2008, his work was featured in the Goetz Collection in Munich, in 2011 in solo exhibitions at Haus Lange Krefeld and the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, and in total he was featured in around 100 exhibitions in Germany.

Kelley's work was exhibited almost 300 times in the USA, about 50 times in France, and around 40 times in Italy and Great Britain.

Kelley has received numerous awards:

• 1984 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
• 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant
• 1987 Awards in the Visual Arts Grant
• 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Museum Program Exhibition Grant
• 1986 Artists Space Interarts Grant
• 1997 Skowhegan Medal in Mixed Media
• 1998 The University of Michigan School of Art and Design Distinguished Alumnus Award
• 2000 The California Institute of the Arts Distinguished Alumnus Award
• 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
• 2006 Wolfgang Hahn Prize

Scandals surrounding Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley caused many scandals with his art, but the biggest scandal was his death : He was found lifeless in his Los Angeles home on January 31, 2012, and the police assumed it was suicide.

How much does a work of art by Mike Kelley cost?

Never a small sum: In 2007, his 1991 “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites” Phillips de Pury & Company for $2.7 million. Since his suicide, his works have continued to increase in value on the international market.

A quote from Mike Kelley about his art

Mike Kelley's most famous quote is surely the one about the plush toy, which he describes as the "ideological model a baby is given to tell it how it should be ."

He also reportedly said: “I used to understand why artists were popular or successful – even if I didn’t like their work. Today everything seems so arbitrary.”

Legacy and lasting impact on the world today

Mike Kelley is regarded as one of the most important contemporary artists in the world ; his works not only sell for high prices but are also highly sought after in international museums.

He has a great influence on the following, current generation of artists, even if they practice resistance somewhat more gently than Kelley did in the eighties.

The artist's current ranking

In 2014, two years after his death, Mike Kelley's work was ranked No. 17 on Artfacts.net's international "bestseller list of art".

Recommended reading about the artist and his time

exhibition, “Hidden Stories: Armin Boehm, Olaf Breuning, Nigel Cooke, Mike Kelley,” offers interesting reading, particularly for German art enthusiasts. Here, Kelley's work is juxtaposed with that of Berlin-based Armin Boehm, the work of Swiss artist Olaf Breuning, who lives in New York, and the work of American artist Nigel Cooke, all three belonging to the generation after Kelley.

Like Kelley, all three explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, consciousness and concealment, rationalism and abstraction, creating, like him, critical yet utopian counter-narratives to reality, visions of freedom that keep Kelley's work alive. Published by Kerber Verlag, first edition July 19, 2012.

…more recommendations for this artist:

Interesting links about Mike Kelley

The most exciting link is certainly always the one to the original: At mikekelley.com you will find the artist's website, with many pictures of his works and much more information.