About a week ago I read in shock as my twitter feed delivered news of Mike Kelley's death. It was enough to move me to devote my first ever tweet to him, in which I said that he is the reason I am an artist. Below is a more detailed version of that sentiment that I couldn't fit into 140 characters.
Admittedly, my first exposure to the work of Mike Kelley was not in an art context. While I was still at school around 1992, I bought the Sonic Youth album
Dirty. The bizarre hand-made stuffed toy on the cover was intriguing, cute and frightening all at once. Sonic Youth had, up to this point, always interesting covers: Raymond Pettibon's cool post-pop rebellious youth comic style cover for the previous album
Goo and one of Gerhard Richter's candle paintings for
Daydream Nation. However it wasn't until I got
Dirty home and played it that cover art really stood out as much more than a decorative image. The cover unfolded revealing a series of more mugshot-style portraits of similar stuffed toys. The odd thing was though, that this was a lot of space to give to the cover art, there were very few liner notes and no song lyrics, just these toy portraits. But there was also a picture of an adolescent kid with acne and longish black hair staring out, not smiling. To top this off there was an image behind the orange transparent piece of plastic onto which the CD was mounted, of something very... well... dirty! I later found out that the people in the image getting dirty with the stuffed toys were the performance artist Bob Flanagan and his wife Sheree Rose.
There is a line in a Smog song that I relate to: "While I listen to a record/ I stare at the cover/ don't come over." Back then when you could actually hold album covers, I could get lost in those private moments of listening to an entire album doing nothing else but staring at the cover. Despite there not being that much to read on the cover of
Dirty, found myself fixated on this cover for months trying to figure what the fuck was going on in the Bob Flanagan picture and why the images of a pimply kid and some stuffed toys disturbed me so much. But it wasn't until about five years later when I started art school that this all started to make sense. I should have figured it out earlier because unlike most other albums that credit an artist with the "cover art", the credit on
Dirty simply read: "Art: Mike Kelley". What they had done was actually include a complete work of art in, or even as, the album packaging.
The Bob Flanagan image was one of two images Kelley took in a collaboration with him, not part of the
Ahh Youth! series of stuffed toys but they worked together under the 'dirty' theme of the album context. This I found out once I started art school, as I managed fit Kelley into any project I could, I had constant library fines from always keeping the only three books they had on Kelley in a continual state of "overdue".
What I learned from Kelley in those undergraduate years are many of the values that I teach my students today. Art should not be an easy answer to a question, art should challenge its viewers, and also its creator. Kelley's work embodies all of this. The incongruity of the adolescent self portrait in amongst the children's stuffed toys is simple yet completely captivating device. What is the relationship between the adolescent (or adolescence) and the children's toys? Are they his? Were they his? At what point do we let go of such toys? Is this moment as precise as that captured in the photograph, is it that locatable in memory? In
Ahh... Youth the ambiguous and confusing experience of "growing up" is communicated on a visceral level, beyond the reach of words or numbers, like the child's height measurements etched into the door frames of family homes over time. Not only does Kelley's work communicate this
experience, it simultaneously emphasises the inadequacy of the linguistic labels of "child", "adolescent", "adult" in attempts to differentiate and categorise these lived physical and emotional states.
That is the kind of thing I want art to do, and Mike Kelley is what I want artists be. Let's hope that is his legacy.
Mike Kelley, Ahh... Youth!, 1991
