Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley is best known for his sculpture work.  He is most famous for his work with worn, dirty soiled stuffed animals in sexual positions in cold, clinical settings.  Kelley has been a major figure in contemporary American art in the later half of the twentieth-century.  Kelley’s work ranges from the highly symbolic and ritualistic performance piece to the studies with stuffed animals.  He also has done wall-size drawings, to multi-room installations that restage environments such as schools, zoos, and public places.  He also has done work with other artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and the band Sonic Youth.  If anyone in the art world has done it all, it is Mike Kelley.

Kelley also writes for art and music journals, and has organized numerous exhibitions incorporating his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects.  By doing this, he is not only promoting his own work, but the work of others, helping people see what work is out there.  Kelley’s work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values and systems of authority.  He attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes towards family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education.  This all plays an important role in his art because it undermines what the normal society would deem appropriate for art, and he blows it out of the water.   

What makes Mark Kelley a fine artist is his ability to take societies norms and undue them to a point where changes people’s views on a subject, such as stuffed animals being loving and nurturing for children.  Through his work he redefines what is acceptable in the art society.  Through his own work, he has shown the art world different views on normal objects that we may have not thought to use them as before.   

   

Arena #7 (Bears) 2010



Memory Ware Flat #18 2001, full view



Memory Ware Flat #18 2001

Riddle Sphinx 1991