Mike Kelley

A parable of the Hollywood image-making industry told through a pastiche of narrative cliches.

A set of quintuplets have had their lives documented on television. Now they are adults with professional lives

Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Bunuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully "degraded" forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.

Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that form a loose, fractured narrative. The video comprises parts 2 through 32 of Kelley's multi-faceted project Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, in which trauma, abuse and repressed memory are refracted through personal and mass-cultural experience. The source material is a series of high school yearbook photographs of "extracurricular activities," specifically those that represent what Kelley has termed "socially accepted rituals of deviance." Kelley then stages video narratives around these found images.

“CINDERELLA is a musical treatment of the fairy tale. I have broken apart the story and set it as a mechanical game with a series of repetitions where CINDERELLA is projected back and forth like a ping-pong ball between the hearth and the castle. She never succeeds in satisfying the requirements of the ‘Cinderella Game’. The film was shot MOS, the dialogue is lip-synched, and along with the out-front score and effects track magnifies the film’s sense of alienation.” — E.B. 1984 - Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2017.

This collaborative video project is based on a short story by H.G. Wells called "The Country of the Blind"—about a man who travels to a country of blind people and attempts to dominate their sensual, feminine culture with his male, sight-derived power. Following this theme, "Blind Country" begins with animated fruit dancing over Mike Kelley's body and the admonition of "Northerners" to "refill the quickly emptying sack." In the male-dominated land of the North, candy-spurting pinatas stand as phallic symbols. Presumably castrated, and stripped of his authority, Kelley acts the buffoon as he is led through the murky land of the South, a "female," earthy, "realm of the senses" opposing the phallocentric world of the North.

"This is my only truly solo video project. The tape is an exploration of character and was done in direct reaction to my performance work at the time, which was characterless. Video seemed a good way, by virtue of it not operating in 'real' time, of dealing with character and psychological motivation. 'The Banana Man' was a minor figure on a children's television show I watched in my youth. I, myself, never saw this performer. Everything I know about him was told to me by my friends. The Banana Man is an attempt at constructing the psychology of the character — problematized by the fact that the character is already a fictional one, and by the fact that none of my observations were direct ones."

Experimental video about child abuse. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."

Mobile Homestead is a public artwork by Mike Kelley consisting of a full-scale replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland, built upon a complex of secret subterranean tunnels and rooms. Located on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) in Downtown Detroit, the sculpture functions as a community gallery with a removable, street legal façade that is mobilized periodically to provide various public services in and around the city. Three Mobile Homestead videos document the maiden voyage of the mobile façade’s journey from MOCAD to Kelley’s childhood neighborhood and back again in 2010. What emerges is a poignant portrait of the post-recession Motor City, speaking to the city’s cultural diversity, history, and socioeconomic stratification, and detailing local establishments that run the gamut from a motor-themed strip club to the Henry Ford Museum.

“THE BROKEN RULE is my reaction to the American education system, where learning blocks must be acquired by the group before any individual can progress to the next level. My film pictures learning blocks as relay races conducted by male players, where the girls are scores, and the goal is to enter the working world by the end of the game. Mike Kelley, the lead player in my film, makes a ritual out of his mistakes to escape the consequences of his mistakes. In this film, one person’s work is another person’s play, and play creates competition, a component of work.” — E.B. 1979

Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, Garage Sale II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfil their desires through prosthetics, masturbation, manipulation and S&M.

An evening of performance and music by Mike Kelley presented at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 2009. Including: The Judson Church Horse Dance and The Horse Dance of the False Virgin, and live performances of instrumental soundtrack from Kelley’s Day is Done, composed in collaboration with Scott Benzel. Plus: the world premiere of The Offer (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33), a composition for 12 horns and vocalist.

"Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene)" 2000, 29:44 min, b&w, sound Kelley has constructed a half-hour drama inspired by a photo found in a high school yearbook. The original, a still from a school play, depicts two young men in a shabby apartment. From this image Kelley has re-staged a 'Domestic Scene': the protagonists' unnerving, at times histrionic, relationship.

Grow Live Monsters is a selection of 8mm, super-8, and 16 mm film phantasies from the period 1971-76. While still at high school Cary Loren started a correspondence with underground filmmaker, actor, and performance artist Jack Smith, which led to a meeting in the summer of 1973. Shortly after that the artists’ band Destroy All Monsters was formed by Mike Kelley. Jim Shaw, Cary Loren, and Niagara. Most films on this DVD revolve around this group of friends and the music they produced in basements and during live performances.

Three teenagers from the industrial part of Los Angeles try to form a punk rock band in Hollywood, in this feature length film by renowned artist Raymond Pettibon.

In a dark no-place evocative of Superman's own psychic 'Fortress of Solitude' the alienated Man of Steel recites those sections of Plath's writings that utilize the image of the bell jar. Superman directs these lines to Kandor, the bell jar city that represents his own traumatic past, for he is the only surviving member of a planet that has been destroyed. Kandor now sits, frozen in time, a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape that past, and his alienated relationship to his present world. For us, Kandor is an image of a time that never was — the utopian city of the future that never came to be.

Following the piece Heidi, a loose interpretation of Joanna Spyri’s novel by the duo of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Kelley performed four dances with just an apparently innocent basket as a prop.

Continuing his series restaging photographs of “extracurricular activities” found in high school yearbooks and newspapers, Vice Anglais features an unsettling but humorous satire that collides psychosexual and sadomasochistic drama with a repertoire of parodic clichés derived from British Hammer Horror films. 2011. Video, color/sound, 24:15 min

Out O' Actions documents Kelley and McCarthy's preliminary activities in organizing a project for the Visitor's Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during the inaugural exhibition of "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979." Mimicking the editing structure of Kurt Kren's documentation of Otto Muehl's action Mama und Papa (1964), the documentation of Kelley and McCarthy's curatorial preparations is presented as performative activity itself.

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's feature-length video A Voyage of Growth and Discovery follows the existential journey of Baby IKKI over several days at Burning Man, a festival of "radical self-expression," famous for its presentations of large-scale displays of fire, held in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Baby IKKI, pre-lingual and of ambiguous age, is a character that artist Michael Smith has been performing for over thirty years.