Mike Kelley

It's no coincidence, I think, that Kelley started out in a band, a punk band before there was such a thing. He was a founder of the legendary Detroit group Destroy All Monsters, a group that everyone heard about but few people actually heard. Just as that band pushed music across borders into strange new territory, his art has cut a wide swath through the formally and sometimes preciously defined precincts of art. He is an intellectual who operates from gut instinct, a thinker who's not afraid of stupidity.

Borrowing from pop culture and things that resonate from his childhood such as stuffed animals, and comic books as his materials I feel a close connectin to Mike Kelley’s work. In relation to making work that references comic books, Kandor 13, (2007) Is a sculpture based off of a city in the Superman comic. When asked about the details of this piece Mike Kelley states that: The story has been changed over time by the publishers of the comic to make it appeal to different generations of readers-but, yes, initially the city was stolen by Brainiac and shrunken. I don't remember why. To tell you the truth, I'm not interested in the story; I'm not a fan of Superman comics. I just like the idea of being burdened with one's past.

This helped me understand some of the feedback I’ve received on current works where I borrowed from media that I did in fact “like” but that’s not good enough there has to be something else beyond that surface.

Concidering responses to work, everyone reads what they want into the work we make but Mike Kelley’s response is one that I am learning to adopt. Doing research into the things that you did not intend to portray in a piece you can expand yourself intellectually and be better prepaired for the questions that arise when people look at your work. Kelly says, “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? I didn't understand what they were talking about. 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. That's when I decided to build the Educational Complex-the model of every school I had ever attended. I was thinking of it specifically in relation to the McMartin Preschool child-abuse scandal. I would leave out all of the parts of the schools that I could not remember and then these areas would be filled in with recovered "repressed" memories-which would simply be personal fantasies.

Lopez, Ruth. "Mike Kelley Goes Home Again." Http://www.theartnewspaper.com. The Art Newspaper, 11 Oct. 2010. Web.

O'Brien, Glenn. "Mike Kelley - Page 4." Interview Magazine. Web. 08 May 2011. .

Welchman, John C., Isabelle Graw, Anthony Vidler, and Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley. London: Phaidon, 2002. Print.