New york magazine mike kelley

I have always been, primarily, interested in abstract monsters-the blob monster. I thought the blob monsters in films and comic books were what genitals must look like, so such monsters were very sexual to me. They were not purely repellent-they were mystifying and alluring. Mike Kelley. MK: From the response I was getting to my works with stuffed animals and craft materials-people went on about how the work was about child abuse. What was my problem?

Why was I playing with these toys? Had I been abused? Was I a pedophile? But when I did a bit of research, I discovered how culturally omnipresent this infatuation with child abuse was. Since everybody seemed to be so interested in my personal biography, I thought I should make some overtly biographical work-pseudo-biographical work.

I was thinking of it specifically in relation to the McMartin Preschool child-abuse scandal. I filled in the blanks with pastiches of things that had affected me when I was a child: cartoons, films, and the kinds of stories one finds in the literature of repressed memory syndrome-horrible stories of sexual abuse. I just mixed all that up. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious. MK: I have experienced that often.

Who would claim that his work is no different than what he plagiarized? GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.

And the corporate entertainment industry is trying to stop it from happening. Think about it: Andy Warhol could not have a career now. He would be sued every two seconds. MK: Copyright laws are terrible for culture. It should be the opposite: Everybody should have to respond to it. This is what should be taught in the public school system. William S. Most people are not aware of the white noise they exist in. Tape recording and photography allowed people to become aware of what was invisible to them for the first time.

GO: You put together a book of interviews a few years ago which I think has a lot of interesting things in it. MK: She said you can have a crush on art, but it cannot be of the intensity of the infatuation one has for a pop song. I really disliked that when she said it, though I understood what she meant.

They want to be artists. MK: Rock stars do get laid more than artists-at least they used to. Young people who would have previously gone into careers in indie rock-which is one of the few arenas where a young person with no particular talent can make some money-can now accomplish the same thing in the art world.

But, with the economy collapsing, maybe this will change now. GO: After Robert Rauschenberg died last May, we republished an interview that he did for us, and he was talking about a conversation he had with Brice Marden. And they fully expect to make a living from being an artist. I chose to become an artist because I wanted to be a failure. When I was young, if you wanted to really ostracize yourself from society, you became an artist.

MK: I feel very lucky to have grown up during that period, where you were surrounded by a lot of people doing very innovative things. And because of a strange fluke in the culture industry, a lot of this stuff made it onto records, and you could hear it because you had to kind of ride the youth culture.

And so, with the success of the Beatles-which nobody expected-all of these record companies went out and put basically anybody who had a band onto vinyl and into every Kmart in the country. That was a fluke of history. They were artists working in some folkish way-some of them very, very intelligent people who were trying to do interesting things. And then there was this whole shift in class with the rise of heavy metal-rock became sort of right-wing instead of left-wing.

And punk was a reaction against that, trying to go back to this earlier model, but more nihilistic. I know that I was very bitter that I had missed the hippie thing and all of that fun. All I was surrounded with were empty factories and horrible, shitty country-rock. And I wanted to make something really, really ugly.

That was my plan. An inflated market like this cannot last forever. Though, I do believe that class distinctions have changed to such a great degree that we might now be in a permanent situation of having a super-rich upper class, like royalty, who are not affected by economic shifts. It is more of a complex maze of tunnels, ladders and cubbylike rooms, a sort of habitable sculpture. By this time, Kelley — who left Detroit in to attend CalArts in Valencia — was considered the quintessential West Coast artist, but he remained devoted to Michigan.

He would revisit the tension between the visible and the unseen, the conscious and the unconscious, in much of his work. The only thing most people know of the space, since no photo of it has been publicly released, is that it is reached through one of two hatches, one inside the house, the other out front. That the basement is essentially invisible only adds to its power, casting the entire project as a series of unanswerable questions: If an artist creates an intricate underground studio beneath a replica of his childhood home and virtually no one is able to see it, does it exist?

Who is it for? What is it for? As the years went by, Kelley was doubtful the project would ever be completed, according to various people who helped with it; there were too many moving parts. Perhaps because people have a short attention span you can get away with illogical developments if you make them unfold over a long period of time.

JM I think that really gets at the ideological function of art, the way traditional art is set up to invite investment or belief. MK I always said the performances were about belief systems. I thought of them as propaganda-gone-wrong. I think that after doing the performances for a number of years, and always denying that I had had a belief system of my own, they started falling apart. I started seeing throughout my work that a lot of these traditional, low comedy forms and subject matters were operating.

I wanted to start to deal with that in a more conscious way. In much of the early work, I was accused of being apolitical or even of being a terrible person or a racist because I worked with inflammatory material and denied a point of view. MK When I first started working with crafts they were invisible to me also.

That was because the primary discussion in the art world at that time had to do with commodification. It might not be money, but he owes you something. Basically, gift giving is like indentured slavery or something. The commodity is the emotion. So what? MK He missed the point. JM That was his point. In his terminology the distinction turned on it being a more conspicuous kind of consumption. MK Yes, that aggression is obvious. Anyway, after these craft objects accumulated for awhile I started to become aware of them as discrete objects—the particular morphologies of them.

This is where my formal training came back. MK Yes, but I wondered what the psychology was. Why is this object formalized in this way? JM When you first started doing the arrangements on the blankets and the afghans, you joked that they were like Haim Steinbach sculptures.

I was thinking a lot about Haim Steinbach when I did them. Except I was trying to put all the things into them that I felt Haim left out of his.

What I saw Haim Steinbach doing was working with the ideal—art about the commodity in terms of a classical notion of perfection. To do that you have to separate the objects from the world, put them on a stage or in a frame, like theatre or a movie.

What I wanted was to have something that was worn yet not nostalgic. That was my problem, because in the tradition of most modern art things worn become a cypher for time. Worn things become a metaphor for…. MK They become nostalgic. It was made maybe last week. JM These craft items are supposed to be nostalgic by their very design. Dolls are designed to be projected onto as generically human. Handmade toys have a really strange presence especially when you compare them to the commercially made ones that are standardized.

The makers of the standardized things have gone through and excised anything that looks vaguely personal or idiosyncratic. That effect is produced through removal. Classical objects have that feel. Courtesy of Metro Pictures. When were these done? I made them and was very confused about them. I wanted them to be contemporary but invisible, and to be about something that people would associate with college life. I was worried about being typecast as someone who just deals with kitsch.

So I decided to use college handouts, bulletin-board fliers.