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Mike Kelley: (dis)obedient student

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Mike Kelley: (dis)obedient student

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i

MIKE KELLEY: (DIS)OBEDIENT STUDENT

by

Sarah E. Williams

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTERS OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Sarah E. Williams

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Conceptualism and Systems Esthetics 5

Chapter Two: Mike Kelley as Conceptual Art’s (Dis)obedient Student 15

Chapter Three: Kelley’s Use of Abjection 27

Conclusion 35

Bibliography 37

ii

iii

Abstract

In Mike Kelley: (Dis)obedient Student, aspects of Mike Kelley’s artistic
practice are considered in relationship to the artistic trajectories of both
Conceptual Art and Systems Esthetics. My analysis of Kelley’s work—including
Educational Complex, Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set, and Educational
Complex—demonstrates that he is aligned with a history of conceptual and
systems based artistic practices while maintaining playfully antagonistic
discourse with them. It is suggested that through a strategy of abjection, Kelley is
able to challenge the modes and models of his predecessors as well as the
social systems and structures they were critiquing. The discussion interrogates
the stakes of theoretical social constructions and the art practices that reference,
themetize and aim at deconstructing them.
iii

1

Introduction

The center of Mike Kelley’s Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set is a fuzzy
stuffed white tube that runs from the ceiling of the gallery and rests with its tail on
the floor. At the top, the serpent shape has a white cartoon lion’s head, with a
rainbow ball made of stuffed animals and dolls sewn together that separates the
head from the ceiling. Along the length of the white tube are five other clumps of
stuffed animals in coordinated colors: a ball of gray, green, red, tan, and yellow.
What can be assumed from the title is that the white tube represents the
kundalini, a Sanskrit terms that means a conscious, instinctive or libidinal force,
and the balls are chakras, considered the energy centers of the body, of which
there are seven
1
that run along the kundalini.
2
The clumps of dolls that hang from
the center snake-like animal are piled on top of each other, the Frankensteined
stuffed animal globs are not innocent, but “taken out of a child’s world and
returned to the adult domain from which they originated.”
3
Despite the outright
strangeness of the work, which calls to mind child abuse or trauma, it diagrams
the layers of Kelley’s work. The construction is not without a sense of logic or
order as the structure is based on the conception of a natural system within a
specific belief structure, and the stuffed animals can be related to familial
structures or adult-child relationships within western society. The shock value of

1
Susan G. Shumsky, Exploring Chakras (Franklin Lakes, NJ: The Career Press Inc, 2003): 37.

2
Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 99.

3
John C. Welchman, “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay for Your
Pleasure”: 15.

2

initial interaction with this work, as with many of Kelley’s, is an affecting mask for
the deeper social and artistic implications evoked by Kelley’s oeuvre.
Through an examination of his practice, Mike Kelley can inspire a singular
dialogue between Louis Althusser’s theory of the ideological apparatus, an
engagement in systems esthetics, and a consideration of how the abject
operates to challenge the logic structure of these sets of theories within a
conceptual art trajectory. His performances, videos, and installation works—
which often involve an eerie, sexually charged, eccentric or grotesque thematic—
are seemingly dissimilar from the neat, logical and at times almost scientific
presentation of most conceptual art or work interested in systems. However,
Mike Kelley and much of his practice can be located within a conceptual art
trajectory that can be discussed in reference to the structural systems of society
as they are proposed in Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State
Apparatus” (1970-71) and experimented with in art practices interested in
systems esthetics. Kelley’s practice can be located at the discursive intersection
of these types of practices while introducing a third element that even further
challenges social structures – the abject.
This essay will consider Kelley’s trajectory in three distinct sections. The
first will create a framework by addressing the relationship of Althusser’s theory
of the Ideological Apparatuses, outlined in his essay “Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatus” to systems esthetics art practices defined in Jack
Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay, “Systems Esthetics.” This conversation is
supported by the evidencing of a pluralistic definition of conceptual art put forth

3

by Benjamin Buchloh in his retrospective essay “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969:
From the Critique of Institutions to Institutional Critique” and Rosalind Krauss’
1973 essay, “Sense and Sensibility.” This varied definition allows for the
incorporation of systems esthetics practices into a discussion of conceptual art
that with Althusser creates a platform for the introduction of Kelley’s work into this
discourse.
The second section begins by placing Mike Kelley, as both chronologically
and thematically, following an interest in the types of practices referenced in
Chapter One. This relationship has a significant connection to the place and time
of his emergence, in the mid-seventies in the legacy of West Coast Conceptual
Art.
4
A range of Kelley’s works from his Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991) and
Three Projects: Half a Man, Pay For Your Pleasure and From My Institution to
Yours (1988) to Educational Complex (1995) will be considered in the context of
their relationship to the conceptual framework outlined in Chapter One, regarding
social construction and subject formation.
Lastly, Chapter Three will locate the relationship between Mike Kelley’s
practice and the abject, with definitions coming from both Julia Kristeva’s The
Powers of Horror and Rosalind Krauss’ description of Georges Bataille’s account
of the abject, in Formless: A User’s Guide, originally taken from unpublished
documents written in the 1930s. Read in tandem, these texts elucidate the ways
that Kelley utilizes the notion of abjection within his artistic practice to challenge

4

the prevailing methods for interrogating societal systems as well at the methods
of analysis themselves.
The critiquing of social systems remains a prevalent method and
productive theme for art practice. Kelley exemplifies a continuation of the
conversation started by the previous generation of artists focused on
conceptualism and what was eventually defined as Institutional Critique. Kelley
illustrates that although the direct critique of art institutions has generally fallen
out of fashion or has perhaps become exhausted, there are ways of examining
how the structures or apparatuses of society continue to mold and assimilate
subjects. Instead of examining the social structure on its terms and in its
accepted language, Kelley utilizes the elements of society that the system wants
to reject to hold a mirror to its processes and modes of production. By exhibiting
the waste product of the system—what is cast out—Kelley offers a distinct and
perhaps more intensive interrogation of the methods and ends of structural
production than his predecessors.

5

Chapter One: Conceptualism and Systems Esthetics

Based on visual and ideological similarities as well as flexibility in the
definition of Conceptual Art, this chapter aims to locate systems esthetics
practices as outlined in Jack Burnham’s “Systems Esthetics,” within a certain
trajectory of conceptual art practices. The connection between conceptual art
and systems esthetics, will be made through Rosalind Krauss’ proposal of
conceptual practices where meaning is produced through the participation of the
viewer to assert the works’ existence as opposed to an intention-as-work
definition of conceptual art. Through engagement with Krauss’ consideration of
conceptual art, a renewed sense of weight is given to the role of the viewer as a
necessary element for completion of the work and their role in this respect, as
subject. This connection of the viewer to the artistic production within systems
esthetics, and many conceptual practices focused on social systems, can
additionally be seen as having roots in the propositions of Louis Althusser’s
“Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” Engagement with Althusser’s
suggestions of the societal construction of an ideological apparatus as
overlapping interpellating structures implies certain understandings and beliefs
about the subject’s place and function within society as well as in artworks
dealing with social and subject construction. This idea of the subject was not
abandoned in the generation of artists following the initial inception of conceptual

6

art, but adapted, absorbed, provoked and challenged often by engaging with the
format and themes of earlier conceptual practices in a critical way.
5

Conceptual Art, from its introduction through its offshoots into the present,
has a diversely asserted history and multiple definitions. Since the inception of
the term artists such as Joseph Kosuth argued for their work and intention-of-art-
as-definition
6
to be viewed as the archetypal understanding of conceptual art
while others splintered from the term with alternately intentioned idea-based
practices. With equal levels of divergence, writers and critics such as Benjamin
Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss historicized ranges of practices in the service of
creating coherent trajectories and relationships of artist’s intentions. Despite the
diverse opinions, which tend to become apparent at the point of intention rather
than on a visual plane, conceptual practices can generally be characterized as
materialistically minimal, using elements that were not previously prevalent in
high art such as documentary-style photography and text, and focused on
privileging a concept over material objects and esthetic concerns.
In his 1990 essay “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Critique of
Institutions to Institutional Critique”
7
Buchloh outlines his proposition of the

5
Succeeding the late 60s – 70s when Krauss, Burnham and Althusser wrote
their referenced works.

6
This concept can be seen as taken from Joseph Kosuth’s idea of art as analytic
proposition in “Art after Philosophy” (Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Pholosophy” Art in
Theory (Oxford: Backwell Publishing, 2003): 852- 861)

7
Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Critique of Institution
to Institutional Critique” October (Winter, 1990): 105 Buchloh identifies this as

7

progression of Conceptual Art through Minimalism, attributing the variation in
practice and goals of conceptual artists to their relationship to the “different
readings of Minimalist sculpture”
8
and its equivalents in painting. Buchloh aligns
conceptual artists with the minimalist traditions they grew out of, creating a
trajectory from minimalism through conceptualism and eventually into Institutional
Critique. For Buchloh, conceptual art continued the minimalist discourse around
the role of the author and the redefinition of the “conditions of receivership and
the role of the spectator.”
9
Buchloh elaborates on the idea of art as analytic
definition that he historicizes: “the proposal inherent in Conceptual Art was to
replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition
alone (a work as analytic proposition), it thus constituted the most consequential
assault on the status of the object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form
of distribution.”
10
This definition of conceptual art accepts without a great deal of
scrutiny the ability off the artist to deem ideas art at the point of intention.
On the other hand, Krauss’ 1973 essay “Sense and Sensibility,”
11

proposes a drastically different consideration of the trajectory conceptualism.
Krauss identifies two terms for practices succeeding minimalism, post-minimalist

being approximately 20 years after Conceptual Art. (Buchloh “Conceptual Art,”
105)

8
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 108

9
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 107

10
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 107

11
Originally published in Artforum

8

and dematerialization—both of which she dislikes, in part, because they fail to
positively imply the content or meaning of the work.
12
Additionally, she proposes
they have a “shared notion about the prerequisites for a model of meaning,”
based on analytic propositions.
13
Krauss asserts that this model of meaning
production is entirely different from works that rely on a process that necessitates
viewer involvement and in turn institutional validation for completion. She
disagrees with the defining of an art object (or non-object) based on the artist’s
assertion “because to do so would leave them trapped within the privacy of
mental space . . . the space in which they exist…which they must vouch, is
precisely one in which meaning is present as it maps itself onto reality and in
which the art they create must do the same.”
14
Following from Krauss, what
ultimately allows for the definition of an artwork, or even the participation of the
viewer, is the presentation of the work within an appropriate context where it is
validated as a work of art. Through this definition, the structures surrounding art
production and the viewer as subject become indivisible elements of the
consideration of conceptual art.

12
Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ‘60s Sculpture”
Artforum (November, 1973): 149.

13
Joseph Kosuth “Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed with
their content –as art—they provide no further information what-so-ever about any
matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s
intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art.” (Krauss,
“Sense and Sensibility,” 151) This is the model of Conceptual Art that Buchloh
discusses.

14
Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” 156

9

Krauss’ notion of conceptual art in many ways in anticipated by a historical
foundation explained in Jack Burnham’s construction of systems esthetics. In
“Systems Esthetics” Burnham describes an interest in social, biological and
scientific systems that had become thematically and materially prevalent in art
production. He sees this not only as a major concern of contemporary art
practice, but also within the sciences and humanities, proposing a general shift
from an “object oriented to a systems oriented culture” catalyzed by systems
analysis. Within this perceived constellation of overlapping and interconnected
systems that create society, Burnham describes the art practices that this
discourse produces as process-based works that challenges objecthood and
create works of art as proposition or a network, a definition that anticipates
Krauss’ definition of conceptualism.
Burnham’s discussion of process-based works of art evokes systems
theory, which some artists, such as Hans Haacke, identify as being a significant
influence on their practice. Systems theory can be described as the overarching
investigation of natural, social and scientific systems, aimed at identifying how
various elements work together to produce some kind of result. The analysis of
systems focuses on the taking apart, (whether physically or theoretically) and
putting together of elements of systems to determine how they function. Despite
an overarching interest in systems by certain artists, a divergence between
natural and social systems becomes necessary because while natural systems
are a given, meaning whether they are fully understood or believed by people
they will continue to operate. On the other hand, social systems are constructed

10

through history by social and power relationships. However, like natural systems,
social systems can still be seen as processes that have levels of production and
end products. Evidenced in the discourse surrounding many conceptual and
systems based practice, artists and writers often attack this seeming
naturalization of social systems by the constructing forces of society.
According to Burnham, Hans Haacke, largely considered a conceptual
artist, is one of the definitive practitioners of art focusing on a systems esthetic.
Haacke’s definition of system as “a grouping of elements subject to a common
plan and purpose”
15
aligns with the natural, social and biological systems
discussed in “Systems Esthetics.” Each element of the system functions in the
service of a shared goal and is necessary to the overall process, to the extent
that removal of any aspect would destroy the entire system. Haacke reinforces
Burnham’s discussion in an interview for the publication of Haacke’s
retrospective at Akademie der Künste, Berlin asserting that, “the world is one
super-system with a myriad of subsystems each one more or less effected by the
others.”
16
This overarching interest can be seen to have fueled Haacke’s artistic
work with biological as well as social systems.
17

15
Matthias Flügge, Hans Haacke, for real: works 1959 - 2006 (Berlin: Richter,
2006): 252.

16
Flügge, Hans Haacke: for real, 252

17
The repeated assertion of interwoven systems by members of diverse groups
and interests can serve as an example of Louis Althusser’s notion of
Overdetermination, meaning multiple forces active at once in a given political
situation, not simplifying them to “contradictory” but implying that it is the

11

Haacke’s John Webber Gallery Visitor’s Profile 1 (1972) can be used as a
point of reference for discussing some of the larger concerns related to
conceptual systems practices. It presents the almost scientific sterility of systems
esthetics practice with the presupposition that once a system is initiated it unfolds
without the participation of the artist. The work was developed for a one-man
exhibition at John Webber Gallery in New York, Profile 1 began with a
questionnaire printed onto one side of a piece of paper that was filled out
manually by visitors to the gallery.
18
The poll consisted of 20 questions, ten of
which were demographic in nature and ten of which inquired about socio-political
issues of the day. The questionnaires were set in file trays at opposite ends of a
long table.
19
Examples of the demographic questions include: “How old are
you?” “Do you have a professional interest in art (e.g. artist, dealer, critic, etc.)?”
and “Are you enrolled in or have you graduated from college?”
20
Examples of the
socio-political questions are: “Would you bus your child to integrate schools?”
and “Do you think the bombing of North Vietnam favors, hurts or has no effect on

reflection of conditions of existence. (Louis Althusser, “Contridiction and
Overdetermination”)

18
John Webber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 1 was ultimately followed by John
Webber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 2, exhibited the following September in a group
show at the same gallery.

19
Jack Burnham, Howard S. Becker and John Walton. Hans Haacke Framing
and Being Framed, 7 works 1970-75 (New York: New York University Press:
1975) 16.

20
Hans Haacke, John Webber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 1, Jean Brown Collection,
Getty Research Institute, Special Collections: 1369-476.

12

the chances for peace in Indonesia?”
21
Once a visitor had completed a
questionnaire, the form was deposited into a box with a slit on top.
22
The results
of the questionnaires were taken and tabulated throughout the exhibition and
converted into pie charts and bar graphs, printed on sheets of paper and hung on
the gallery walls.
23

The necessity of the gallery visitor to complete the work exhibits a literal
engagement with Krauss’ notion of conceptual art, that the work of art cannot
exist simply in the mental space of the artists, but must somehow come into
contact with the viewer to validate it. This connection between viewer and
artwork, facilitated by the larger structure of the art exhibition, ultimately creates a
system, a connection where all elements are necessary for the completion and
contextualization of the work that deems it art. Although Profile 1 could have
been presented in the gallery without participation as a conceptual work of art, it
is the activation of the viewer that activates the work, and their involvement is
solidified as a necessary element of the system set in place.
The relationship of the individual to a system and how they are
encouraged to participate within it is at the crux of Althusser’s “Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatus.” The most influential aspect of this work is an
addition to the theory of philosopher Karl Marx’s concept of The State,
encouraging a renewed consideration of the ideological influences on society by

21
John Webber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 1, Getty Special Collections: 1369-476

22
Haacke, Framing and Being Framed, 16

23
Haacke, Framing and Being Framed, 14

13

looking critically towards institutions outside of the repressive legal and court
systems that had previously been examined, including education, religion and
culture, which exercise ideological as opposed to violent control over members of
society. To describe the effect of these apparatuses on the individual, Althusser
introduces the term interpellation, defined as the process by which ideology
addresses the (hypothetical) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing
him or her as subject proper.
24
Through the systems of society—religion,
education, family, etcetera—people are conditioned and produced as normal
members of society.
This concept of interpellation or some sort of structurally conditioned
participation in society can be applied to works of art and the process of viewing
them as well. The interpellation of viewers within the work of art can be seen as
one of the elements at play in Haacke’s Profile 1 where viewers execute the
system. They participate in the system in the proposed manner, in turn they
exhibit themselves as the proper gallery-going public. The viewers are
interpellated through the work in Profile 1, and Haacke additionally points
towards the larger interpellation processes of society. The conclusions of Profile
1 are that the gallery going public is largely who they are expected to be, and it
can be implied that this is because it is due to certain modes of production that
certain members of society become gallery goers. Upon entering the gallery, the
visitors continue to operate within their proper position within society that is then

24
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983): 218.

14

co-opted by Haacke to the ends of exhibiting an element of this process of
interpellation within his work.
The presented pluralistic definition of conceptualism, systems esthetics
and Althusser’s theory of the Ideological Apparatus will frame the succeeding
discussion around the position of the subject within the structural systems of
society and specifically art practice. This discourse will be used as a lens through
which to consider Mike Kelley’s indebtedness to conceptual and systematic
methodologies and vocabularies that additionally engage concerns of Ideological
Apparatuses. Yet, Kelley’s progression and disruption of this conceptual
foundation and continued provocation of the role of the subject within society and
art opens an opportunity to reconsider the systematic construction of society.

15

Chapter Two: Mike Kelley as Conceptual Art’s (Dis)obedient Student

I see a lot of art now that mimics popular culture, the look of advertising
or fashion photography, modernist design, and so on . . . there is some
investment in mass culture on the level of desire. I’m of another
generation. I have a more critical relationship to mass culture. I’m not
solely interested in arresting visuals; I’m more interested in questioning
the conventions of reading within a given genre. I’m constantly giving
clues that there’s some kind of rhetorical or critical interest operating in
my work. That’s where it becomes fuzzy; and that is where you find
poetics- which include the critical. I’m not an anti-critical artist as some
would propose.
25
– Mike Kelley

As exemplified through works such as Craft Morphology Flow Chart,
Three Projects and Educational Complex, this chapter will position Mike Kelley
as working with many of the same critical considerations as a prior generation of
artists engaging in conceptual or systems based approaches. Additionally,
Kelley’s utilization of religious, educational and domestic forms of representation,
will be discussed in regards to their engagement of Althusser’s concept of
ideological apparatuses. Like the artists discussed in the previous section, Kelley
can be argued to have ties to Althusser’s concerns and views of societal
construction. These works by Kelley disrupt with the notion of social
interpellation, but his techniques for interaction with viewers also evokes a sense
of breaking down or questioning of these traditional constructions by producing
acts of counter-interpellation, or disruptions of standard modes of systematic
subject production in favor of the presentation of an alternate system. The

25
Isabella Graw, John C Welchman, and Anthony Vidler, “Isabella Graw in
Conversation with Mike Kelley” Mike Kelley, (London: Phaidon Press Limited)

16

discourse Kelley creates not only maintains interest in the role of the individual,
but often proposes a more emotional engagement with the concepts surrounding
systems and ideological apparatuses than his predecessors, which make these
concerns all the more potent to the individual viewer.
Despite the visual disparity between works of art generally considered
conceptual (or participating in systems esthetics) and Mike Kelley’s practice, he
maintains an important role in the trajectory of conceptual art. This is in part
because he earned his M.F.A. at Cal Arts during the mid-seventies, “a period
many romanticize as its conceptual heyday.”
26
His professors were some of the
most influential artists of Conceptual Art: Michael Asher, John Baldessari and
Douglas Huebler. Although admittedly a fan of Huebler’s, the Oedipal
implications of his 1997 essay, “Shall We Kill Daddy?” for the introduction to a
catalogue of Huebler’s work are explicit and indicative of Kelley’s antagonistically
playful relationship to conceptualism.
27
At Cal Arts, Kelley found himself at odds
with his initial advisor, who was eventually replaced by Huebler, and claims to
have been generally uninterested in the brand of conceptualism being produced
at Cal Arts at the time. As historian and critic, John C. Welchman, writes in his
essay, The Mike Kelleys, “His blue-collar background, counter-culture proclivities

26
Mike Kelley, “Shall We Kill Daddy”,
(http://www.strikingdistance.com/c3inov/kelley.html): 2.
“Shall We Kill Daddy” is an essay written for a catalogue of Douglas Huebler
exhibition

27
Published in conjunction with the “Origin & Destination” exhibition series at the
Société des Expositiasdu Palais de Beaux Artsin Brussels.

17

and multi-media experimentation left him creatively at odds with the more
stylized, academic photo-text conceptualism and Institutional Critique of Cal Arts
faculty members such as M(ichael) Asher, J(ohn) Baldessari and D(ouglas)
Huebler.”
28
However, it should be in no way implied that Kelley’s work was any
less rigorous than his predecessors. It in many ways would have been
impossible to continue to participate in the same type of practices because it
would have quickly become critically bankrupt.
However, Kelley’s practice hardly abandons the concerns of
conceptualism to which he was intensely exposed. He can be seen to have
adopted what he liked about his Cal Arts conceptual background while calling
attention to what he did not to the ends of critiquing its formats and strategies.
Like a disobedient but intelligent student, he challenges the rules of
conceptualism through his work with a goal of finding a break or shortcoming in
conceptual logic, and in turn suggests a way of accomplishing some of the
previous goals with new techniques while poking fun of them. If Conceptual Art
“constituted the most consequential assault on the status of the object,”
29
as
Buchloh indicated, then Kelley, found a new, playful and defiant way to assault
the object on his own terms a generation later.
As previously noted, the most significant break between Kelley and his Cal
Arts predecessors is the difference in stylistic technique. The lineage through

28
John C. Welchman, “The Mike Kelleys,” Mike Kelley, (London: Phaidon Press
Limited: 1999)

29
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 107

18

which Kelley becomes connected to Asher, Baldessari and Huebler is built
through method over morphological resemblance. However, there are instances
of Kelley’s experimenting with the forms of systems and conceptualism that are
intended to provoke critique of the same elements of society as his
predecessors, but also of their method for doing so. Kelley’s 1991 work Craft
Morphology Flow Chart is an example of him poking fun at the strategies of
Conceptual Art and systems esthetics practices. The work consists of 114
homemade stuffed animals and dolls of various dimensions spread out on folding
tables and “grouped according to pattern, some according to texture, some
according to size, others according to no perceptible similarity at all.”
30

Additionally, “each doll is photographed separately lying next to a ruler, thereby
producing it as an ‘individual’ within statistical set that is being established by
means of measurement in order—as in some weird riff on physical
anthropology—to produce a norm.”
31
The photographs of the stuffed animals
next to the ruler are hung on the walls of the exhibition space. In addition to the
photographs there is also a large drawing of a few of the stuffed animals next to
a ruler.
32

30
Rosalind Krauss, “Conclusion,” Formless, A Users Guide, 252

31
Rosalind Krauss, “Conclusion,” Formless, A Users Guide, 251

32
Isabella Graw John C Welchman & Anthony Vidler, Mike Kelley, (London:
Phaidon Press Limited: 1999)

19

In Formless: A User’s Guide, Rosalind Krauss provides the above
description of Craft Morphology,
33
suggesting the production of a norm that can
be connected to Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Craft Morphology
periodically utilizes the scientific style prevalent in Haacke’s Profile 1 and works
like it, while questioning the validity of that type of systems based work. Haacke
was interrogating the modes of social production that determine which members
of society construct the gallery going public and polling to produce some range of
a norm within the statistics and exhibiting their interpellation. In a similar manner,
Kelley is experimenting with the array of types of stuffed animals and dolls,
creating some sort of arbitrary organizational strategy by grouping them, and
mirroring the scientific processes of systems esthetics and much of conceptual
art through the measuring and photographic documentation of the individual
entities to produce a normal standard and range of meaningless statistics. While
the semi-scientific production of many of Haacke’s artworks lend some sort of
validation to his conclusions, Kelley’s Craft Morphology creates a playful critique
of this type of analysis in artwork. This structuring suggests the somewhat
capricious nature of formatting information in this way and through artworks.
Obviously, Kelley’s work is contingent upon Haacke, et al: proposing art as
another system. Additionally, the systematic interpellation of the stuffed animals
into groups, forming a spectrum of normality, replicates on a more absurd scale

33
Formless: A Users Guide will be discussed in more detail in the succeeding
chapter.

20

the interpellating of members of society, emphasizing that it is based on
constructed systems, no matter how normalized, as opposed to a natural order.
Through the use of materials like stuffed animals and banners Kelley’s
work inspires a sense of familiarity and then twists it to the point where the
mundane becomes uncomfortable, erotic, or grotesque. Three Projects, is an
example of this. Exhibited in 1988. Three Projects consists of Half a Man
34

(which is itself a number of works displayed together), Pay for Your Pleasure,
and From My Institution to Yours. Half a Man’s individual elements are: Plush
Kundalini and Chakra Set which was described in the introduction and More Love
Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, both from 1987 and made up of dolls and
stuffed animals sewn and crocheted together. Antiqued (prematurely aged)
consists of a chest of drawers painted a bright, pastel pink and then rubbed with
a dark stain to make it look antique with birth control pills, a sex education book
and a diary set on a mirror on top of the chest. Incorrect Sexual Models (1987)
are black and white symmetrical drawings of paired organs, kidneys, eyes, lobed
brain with intestines around the edge of the frame and lastly, Seventy-four
Garbage Drawings and One Bush, which true to its title, is seventy-four drawings
derived from Sad Sack comic book panels, where everything but the garbage is
left out of the picture.
Throughout these projects there are countless examples or connections to
Althusser’s Ideological Apparatuses, and the interpolating process of society that

34
Exhibited at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago from May 4
– June 30, 1988

21

Kelley seems to take pleasure in corrupting. For example, More Love Hours
Than Can Ever Be Repaid is a large,
35
disheveled, cluster-fuck of stuffed
animals, dolls and afghan blankets crocheted and sewn together. The top or
bottom can only be determined through its hanging orientation. As the title
implies, these hand made objects took many loving hours to originally make and
are passed down to a child who will likely not be in a position to repay the person
who gave them the gift. Art historian, Howard Singerman elaborates on the
extended reference of this work combined with Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set
in “Mike Kelley’s Line” . . .
The unequal pair is the most powerful relationship in the
exhibition, and it is repeated as the relationship between children
and adults, between church members and mother church,
between folks and culture. Throughout the currency is much the
same, born owing, already in debt to the long hours clocked by
parents and history, what is expected is payment in kind, in
gratitude, in devotion.
36

This verbal construction, by Singerman, evokes the systems that
Althusser describes in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” for which
members of society enter, are permanently indebted to, and continue to
perpetuate. While Haacke’s Profile 1, and other works like it, document
ideological systems which exist, their critique falls short in simply bringing
awareness as opposed to actually aiding in deconstruction. Kelley’s monstrosity

35
Size: 96 X 127 X 6ins

36
Howard Singerman, “Mike Kelley’s Line,” Exhibition Catalogue for Three
Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay For Your Pleasure
(Chicago: The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, 1988): 10-11

22

with its nihilistic title cuts to the unpleasant underbelly of the situation, suggesting
that perhaps this type of system is not worth the cost. Instead of a logical,
cognitive suggestion of this, the interaction with Kelley’s work is more aggressive
and uncomfortable challenging familiarity and ease of operation within these
ideological apparatuses within which the viewer is used to functioning.
Pay For Your Pleasure also utilizes the lure of the familiar, consisting of
floor to ceiling wall paintings of famous philosophers, poets, and artists. Each
painting is captioned with a quotation relating art-making to criminal activity, from
Oscar Wilde’s statement “The fact of a man being a poisoner says nothing of his
prose” to Edgar Degas’ statement, “a painting is a thing which requires as much
cunning, rascality and visciosness as the perpetration of a crime
37
.” At the end of
the hall of portraits there is a small painting on canvas board done by Chicago-
area serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
38
To each side of Gacy’s work is a collection
bin for local victim’s rights organizations through which visitors are suggested to
donate. The work highlights the historical connection between art production and
criminal activity, utilizing painters and writers who talk about murder and a serial
killer who paints. The reference to the repressive apparatus of the prison system
in the ideological apparatus of the cultural realm is disorienting and displacing. In
addition, the posters “resemble the kind of literary quotation posters often found

37
Singerman, “Mike Kelley’s Line,” 10-11

38
When this work is presented in other places, a local criminal’s work takes the
place of John Wayne Gacy’s making is specific to the site of exhibition.

23

in schoolrooms, but blown up to the size of circus banners.”
39
In this piece Kelley
uses mechanisms from the ideological systems of education and the media to
build a sense of comfort to be disparaged by quotes about killing and being in the
vicinity of John Wayne Gacy via the imagined aura of his painting.
Kelley additionally suggests that Pay for Your Pleasure, offers “a situation
where we can at the same time condemn Gacy and have access to his crimes.”
40

The payment serves as “guilt money” to “allow us to stare safely at the
forbidden.”
41
The viewer is affirmed of their positive and productive place in
society while being able to satisfy their curiosity of the abject, or desire for a
glimpse outside of their normal subjective function. The societal construction that
elevates artists and condemns criminals, keeping them very ideologically
separate, is the norm understood by members functioning within the system.
Kelley’s altering of this separation, moving art and criminal activity closer
together while the viewers are engaging in an art context, creates a rift in the
system that is then alleviated by the payment, allowing the viewers to assert their
subject position as “good” or “proper” members of society. This enacts a
relationship to Haacke’s Profile 1, because it too allows participants to locate
themselves within a range of acceptable possibilities within the system as gallery
goers.

39
Kelley, Mike, Ed. John C. Welchman, “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My
Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure” Minor Histories: Statements,
Conversations and Proposals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) 2004

40
Kelley, “Half a Man,” 10-11

41
Kelley, “Half a Man,” 10-11

24

By recreating, the mechanisms of the ideological apparatus, such as the
quotation paintings from school, Kelley is able to foster a sense of familiarity and
comfort within the system, as it is the normal social position. Following this set-
up, distress sinks in, and the informed viewer is left with two modes for
consideration and reaction, which likely combine. There is a sense of discomfort
from viewing, being in the vicinity of murder in Pay for Your Pleasure or in the
seeming degenerate sexuality of the clumps of stuffed animals in Plush Kundalini
and Chakra Set and there is the cognitive reorganization of the elements to
understand the commentary on social structures and to attach them to their place
within culture. Using this strategy Kelley can reveal that no single ideology is
truth as it can be disrupted and viewers counter-interpellated. More traditional or
obvious systems esthetics practices imply that their stripping away of less logical
“ideologies” such as culture, religion or education makes way for some sort of
truth, almost in a scientific sense. Kelley’s work seems to deny that there is even
a universal truth that is attainable, that understanding is subjective and
individually informed by personal experience and history is affected by larger
systems of ideology or societal structures.
Unlike Haacke, Kelley suggests that ideological or functional systems can
be and are constructed, but that they can also be broken down and stepped
outside of in some regards. The experience with Kelley’s work is not always as
comfortable as with Haacke, but through demanding more, viewers are left with a
reference point for identifying and questioning ideological apparatuses and social
construction. In an interview with Isabella Graw, Kelley asserts the demand on

25

his viewers and how he views this element of art making, saying: “I think that the
practice of art is an experiment of visual communication. People have to
recognize visual culture as a constructed language, a language that acquires
meaning through its construction. The art viewer should not simply be a patsy
who performs a set of knee-jerk reactions”
42

This construction relates to Kelley’s affirmation in the previous paragraph
that he intends the work to be a constructed language. Educational Complex
(1995) is Mike Kelley’s recollection of the schools and educational facilities of his
past, combined to form an architectural model with the areas he could not
remember left unfinished.
43
Kelley suggests that, “the blank sections are
supposedly the result of some ‘trauma’ that occurred in those spots,” which has
caused a repression of their memories.
44
It is also important to note, as Kelley
does, that the entire work is obviously very concerned with formal organization,
even in the blank areas, which Kelley suggests are supposed to imply his
“formalist art education itself as a possible trauma.”
45
Educational Complex can
be discussed in several ways; one of these is in reference to systems analysis.
As previously noted, the analysis of systems focuses on the taking apart, and
putting together of the elements of systems (whether physically or theoretically)

42
Mike Kelley, “Interview with Isabella Graw” Mike Kelley, (London: Phaidon
Press Limited, 1999): 19

43
Kelley, “Interview with Isabelle Graw,” 19

44
Kelley, “Interview with Isabelle Graw,” 19

45
Kelley, “Interview with Isabelle Graw,” 19

26

to determine how they function. Another is through the trajectory of the critique of
institutions, which Kelley points to in Educational Complex in an admittedly
mocking fashion. It is in this guise of the critique of institutions that Kelley talks
about the work as addressing the ‘abuse’ of his arts education.
46

Kelley exhibits the process of his production as an artist by recollecting the
individual elements of his education and then compiling them into one model that
represents the totality of his education. He utilizes the architectural model as a
norm that within society is read as logical or informative but he encodes it with
personal alterations based on his own faulty and biased memory. He presents a
critique of the interpellating structure of art school, which can be expanded to
larger systems of society. He also presents a method of logical presentation that
is in fact not, logically reinforcing the inability of this type of exhibition and
actually the system itself for taking into account and representing individual
experience—whether this is a traumatic individual experience of repression or
the difficulty in breaking from these systems. The third chapter will further
discuss the personal, subjective relationship to systems through the investigation
of the abject in relation to normal social function and production.

46
Kelley, “Interview with Isabelle Graw,” 19

27

Chapter 3: Kelley’s Use of Abjection

One of the strategies that can be identified for Kelley’s addressing
society’s systems of subject production is through his incorporation of the abject.
The definition of abject has shifted slightly over time, but can generally be used
to describe that which is dispelled or cannot be absorbed by societies or
systems. This chapter will outline the strategies of abjection introduced by
Georges Bataille and then expanded by Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror,
focusing on the differences in their argument using the conclusion of Formless: A
User’s Guide by Rosalind Krauss. Within this framework Kelley’s work can be
talked about in relation to both definitions of the abject and how he utilizes what
is unacceptable to society to exhibit the process and production through which
elements and members of society are organized as well as the resulting waste
product of these systems.
Krauss identifies Julia Kristeva’s definition of abject put forth in The
Powers of Horror as having “been influential in the recent theorization of this
concept in relation to contemporary art practice.”
47
Informed by psychoanalytic
and structuralist theory Kristeva defines the abject, as a breakdown in
understanding which was originally meant linguistically, but having been
expanded in her writing (and later the writings of others) it has come to also
mean a collapse in the relationships between subject and object and the
definitions of self and other. Kristeva suggests that when these relationships,

47
Rosalind Krauss, “Conclusion,” 237

28

which are constructed through the conditioning and interpellation of individuals
into society, are disrupted or ruptured it can be violent, unpleasant and even
traumatic for those who experience it. The abject becomes a metaphor for what
is socially rejected. The language she uses to describe the experience of
abjection appeals to a sensory over conceptual understanding, it “both attracts
and rejects,”
48
“does not cease challenging its master,” and
49
“draws [one] into a
place where meaning collapses.”
50
There is a sense of emotional rather than
logical disruption of systems of power and the creation of a space where these
newly altered relationships, which turn old ones on their head, exist—where “the
clean and proper becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished,
fascination into shame.”
51

Kristeva presents an anecdote to clarify her theory:

she explains why a
corpse causes feelings of abjection while a flat line on an encephalograph does
not.

While the flat line still signifies death, the stopping of a formally beating heart,
it can be scientifically comprehended; it is understood then reacted to or
accepted.
52
It is scientific and appeals to logic. While the corpse is recognized as

48
Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York:
Colombia University Press: 1982) 2

49
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2

50
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2

51
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 8

52
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 3

29

human and is “rejected, but cannot be separated from,”
53
because it is
understood that the corpse was once living, as the viewer of it is, and that in turn
one day, the viewer will be like the corpse. Kristeva implies the sight of the
corpse extends beyond the cognitive understanding of death that the flat line
signifies, “it is it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but
what disturbs identity, system, order.”
54
There is a disruption in the basic
understanding of subject and object. The viewer as subject understands that the
corpse was once another subject, but cannot fully perceive of the corpse as
object and no longer as another subject and it is this disruption of order that
causes abjection.
This definition of abjection can be applied to some of Kelley’s work that
contains an excremental element such as Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence
of Childhood from 1990, a performance in which stuffed animals and paint (which
ended up representing fecal matter) were used for pseudo-sexual activities or
Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set. In the latter work, the stuffed animals and dolls
sewn in to clumps reference children, at least through the association of use if
not through anamorphic representation. The relayed sexual nature of the work
aligned with the association of children and additionally simply the dirtied factor
of used stuffed animals causes a sense of abjection for the viewer. There are
elements that would usually be attractive, but cause rejection in this context. A

53
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 3

54
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 3

30

meaning cannot be constructed, the familiar objects cannot be made sense of in
the accepted model of social meaning.
Georges Bataille’s definition of abjection maintains some of the same
basic characteristics of Kristeva’s but has a subtle shift in intended meaning.
Krauss explains that Bataille introduces the term abjection, in a group of
unpublished texts from the mid-to-late 1930s, titled “Abjection et les formes
misérables” (Abjection and the Forms of the Miserable).
55
Bataille’s term is
characterized as having more of a social context than Kristeva’s definition. His
definition states that "what a system cannot assimilate it must reject as
excremental," and that it is the operation of repulsion from the system where the
abject is based. By emphasizing the rejected over the accepted the social norms
of society are challenged. By analyzing what is socially rejected in light of the
systems that construct what is acceptable, the abject becomes byproduct, the
excrement of the system.
Formless: A User’s Guide, was originally intended as the catalogue
to accompany the exhibition L’informe: Mode d’ emploi, at the Centre
Pompidou.
56
Both the exhibition and book center around George Bataille’s
conception of the informe (formless) and apply it to an array of modern and
contemporary art practices. In the conclusion of Formless Krauss suggests that,
“if abjection is to be invoked in relation to Kelley, it must be done in a far more

55
Rosalind Krauss, “Conclusion,” 236

56
May 21 – August 26, 1996

31

operational way than is current in discourse of the art world, with its insistence on
themes and substances.”
57
She goes on to describe Kelley’s Craft Morphology
Flow Chart, focusing on the way in which this construction is related to Michel
Foucault’s The Order of Things or Bataille’s addition to his suggested social
structure, that assimilation produces its own waste through the production of a
norm. In Craft Morphology Flow Chart, Kelley reveals how a norm is constructed,
proving it to be a somewhat arbitrary process, and therefore also addresses how
society produces what is not accepted in relation to this norm. Krauss is weary to
let Kelley fall into the simplified understanding of abject art through the utilization
of an excremental thematic. Instead in these works the abject becomes a
metaphor for what is socially unacceptable. Krauss asserts that Kelley’s interest
in the abject is much more rooted in the systematic assimilation and thus un-
absorbable elements of society, the subtle privilege here is in process over
material. It is not the physically cast out element that represents the abject but
the process in which it is deemed excremental in relation to normal society.
In Education Complex Kelley engages one of Althusser’s Ideological
Apparatuses—the educational system. The work in the form of architectural
model represents the recollection and accumulation of every school that Kelley
attended, the system that produced him as an artist. The blank or un-constructed
sections represent the ‘trauma’ of these experiences and perhaps the areas
where Kelley was not properly interpellated. Kelley’s work in some ways
represents what the system of his education, conceptualism, Cal Arts, could not

57
Rosalind Krauss, “Conclusion,” 251

32

produce in its image what threatened to work outside of the system. In this work,
the trauma of Kelley’s experience represents the abject. What cannot be worked
into the system of this apparatus, it is this inability of the system to assimilate that
causes trauma.
Trauma is the experience of breaks in the structured system of society.
The personal account laid over a logical, structure system exhibits the inability of
these systems to adequately normalize everything. In Educational Complex
Kelley alters the system to present as it was experienced (or his proposition of
how it was experienced) as opposed to the structural order of what it should be. It
is the breaking down of systems once they have been exposed that furthers
Kelley’s investigation into the structures that create society and what is at stake
within this proposition.
As noted earlier within the discussion of Althusser, Kelly’s work can be
aligned to the disruption of the systems of society in a similarly disturbing
manner. This separates the viewer from the orders that they are familiar with,
leaving them wanting to both return to the comfort of it and remain outside of it, in
some sort of knowing state. Kelley’s works, such as Three Projects, operate on a
spectrum of engagement with these concepts. Specifically, Pay For Your
Pleasure can be discussed in the same manner as Krauss does Craft
Morphology Flow Chart, through an interest in analyzing what is rejected by the
system of society.
Through coupling art production and criminality in society, as Kelley does
in Pay For Your Pleasure, the artist is exhibiting the physical vicinity of, but

33

incredible ideological separation between these two types of subjects. The style
of the paintings, which mimic literary quotation posters found in high school
classrooms, work to represent the structures through which members of society
are interpellated into a certain value system that places artists and writers on a
certain pedestal. This process rescues them and gives value to their
eccentricities and rejection of certain social norms, through this method the
system finds a way to incorporate them.
As the viewer passes through the corridor where the portraits have been
painted, they not only participate in an artwork, but through this are aligned in
someway with criminal activity. They pass on to the small Gacy painting and are
confronted face-to-creation with the criminal. This evokes discomfort in the
alteration of the normal system where artists are “good” and productive members
of society while criminals are “bad.” The question in the difference between
artists and a murderer who is also an “artist” of some manner comes to the
forefront. It is the donation at the end of the work that allows for the viewer to
return the system to normal, to be a “good” member of society because they are
in opposition to criminality. However, the payment is based on a donation, so the
appropriate amount is not predetermined. This returns to Singerman’s quote
regarding inequality in power relationships between parents and children, people
and culture, church and parishioners—there is an unspecific level of
commitment, of paying back, that can never be determined or ultimately fulfilled.
They also reassert their place within the work and their relationship to art

34

production as patrons of culture, asserting this system as a normal, proper social
system.
Perhaps the perfect analogy to end this discussion is the image of the
deposit box in Haacke’s Visitors Profile 1 next to Kelley’s donation bins in Pay
For Your Pleasure. While Haacke’s box represents the visitor or subject
adequately completing their necessary role in the prescribed system, Kelley’s
leaves things a little more ambiguous. In line with the rest of his works discussed
throughout the essay, Kelley distorts the role of the subject within the systems of
operation to the point of incomprehensibility. More Love Hours Than Can Ever
Be Repaid comes to represent his nihilistic suggestion of the subject’s position
within these systems. No amount of indebtedness can repay history,
government, the church, family for the time that has gone into constructing, one
can never know if they are adequately fulfilling their roles within these systems.
The donation box can be seen as representing the viewer’s role in completing the
systems within which they participate, but unlike with Haacke, the proper amount
is never known.

35

Conclusion

Through the analysis of Mike Kelley’s practice set forth in this essay, his
work is positioned within a framework of conceptualism as it relates to an esthetic
based on systems, specifically those critical of the systems that make up the
structures of society. Within the context of the essay, this interest is associated
with Louis Althusser’s theoretical construction of these social systems in
“Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” Kelley interrogates the
understanding and conception of these proposed systems as well as their
functions. His works are critiques of the structures of society, but never in the
straightforward method that had previously been utilized. Instead Kelley distorts
the structures of the systems, manipulating the process and in turn the product of
production. Through the employment of what is usually rejected by society—the
abject—Kelley turns the social systems inside out and exhibits their function via
their byproduct. This disruption of systems and of the usual methods of critiquing
them, Kelley offers a perhaps more potent interrogation of the workings of society
than what came before. He offers a suggestion not only of how systems are
constructed, but of how they can be broken down.
As Haacke’s display of systems can represent his goals of provoking
consideration of the construction of systems (specifically related to art), Kelley’s
work exhibits the signs of rebellion, against this method of investigation
representative of his conceptual education. Kelley’s work exhibits the weak
points of the system, where the structure can break, but it begs the question of

36

whether the breaking down of a system can really be viewed as any more an
endpoint than the display of one. It can be assumed or at least hoped, that as
Kelley responded to systems esthetics and conceptualism, those who follow him
will continue to push the dialogue and further challenge the construction of
systems and subjects and what is at stake in that. But as far as Kelley is
concerned, true to the nature of his work, the systems and modes for reading
and understanding are left scrambled and ultimately there are more questions
than answers.

37

Bibliography

1. Althusser, Louis. “Contridiction and Overdetermination”
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/appendix.htm) 1962,
March 9, 2009

2. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” On Ideology,
(New York: Verso) 1971, 2008

3. Bois, Yve-Alain & Rosalind Krauss, Formless, A User’s Guide (New York:
Zone Books) 1997

4. Buchloh, Benjamin. “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Critique of
Institution to Institutional Critique” October (Winter) 1990

5. Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press) 1996

6. Flügge, Matthias. Hans Haacke, for real: works 1959 - 2006 (Berlin: Richter)
2006

7. Graw, Isabella, John C Welchman & Anthony Vidler, Mike Kelley, (London:
Phaidon Press Limited) 1999

8. Burnham, Jack, Howard S. Becker and John Walton. Hans Haacke Framing
and Being Framed, 7 works 1970-75 (New York: New York University Press)
1975

9. Kelley, Mike. “Shall We Kill Daddy”,
(http://www.strikingdistance.com/c3inov/kelley.html), March 9, 2009

10. Kelley, Mike, Ed. John C. Welchman, “Three Projects: Half a Man, From My
Institution to Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure” Minor Histories: Statements,
Conversations and Proposals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) 2004

11. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ‘60s Sculpture”
Artforum (November) 1973

12. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York:
Colombia University Press) 1982

13. Kosuth, Joseph. “Art after Pholosophy” Art in Theory (Oxford: Backwell
Publishing) 2003

38

14. Shumsky, Susan G. Exploring Chakras (Franklin Lakes, NJ: The Career
Press Inc) 2003

15. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
1983

16. Singerman, Howard “Mike Kelley’s Line,” Exhibition Catalogue for Three
Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, Pay For Your Pleasure
(Chicago: The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago) 1988)

Abstract (if available)

Abstract In Mike Kelley: (Dis)obedient Student, aspects of Mike Kelley’s artistic practice are considered in relationship to the artistic trajectories of both Conceptual Art and Systems Esthetics. My analysis of Kelley’s work—including Educational Complex, Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set, and Educational Complex—demonstrates that he is aligned with a history of conceptual and systems based artistic practices while maintaining playfully antagonistic discourse with them. It is suggested that through a strategy of abjection, Kelley is able to challenge the modes and models of his predecessors as well as the social systems and structures they were critiquing. The discussion interrogates the stakes of theoretical social constructions and the art practices that reference, themetize and aim at deconstructing them.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Williams, Sarah E. (author)

Core Title Mike Kelley: (dis)obedient student

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 10/23/2009

Defense Date 09/11/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,Mike Kelley,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Holte, Michael Ned (committee chair), Anastas, Rhea (committee member), Decter, Joshua (committee member)

Creator Email sarah.e.wil@gmail.com,sarahwil@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2683

Unique identifier UC1274158

Identifier etd-Williams-2742 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-271298 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2683 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Williams-2742.pdf

Dmrecord 271298

Document Type Thesis

Rights Williams, Sarah E.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu