Contemporary Art

Mike Kelley's Work

[Name of Student]

Mike Kelley's Work

Introduction

Born in Detroit (USA) in 1954, Kelley grew up sheltered from a conservative family that imposed a strict upbringing if not suffocating. With it collided curiosity, creative talent and the need to experience a budding artist and a place, the capital of the state of Michigan, which not only met all the attributes of the specifically American (a matter which would run throughout his work , from its beginnings to the enormous project of Day is Done, 2005) but was becoming the center of a countercultural movement that wanted the hippie sixties antidote, silly rant of free love and soft indolence. As Auschwitz at the time, Vietnam were now in place and offered the real dimension of human achievement. In the Detroit of the seventies, under an acute economic crisis, Kelley was part of numerous bands like Destroy All Monsters, more likely to praise the death sweetened singing the virtues of love and, since the early seventies, the music seeped into his blood forever.

Discussion

Start the exhibition on the ground floor of the new extension to the museum to continue at the top, the exterior of which is popularly known as bath. The tour offers a rigid chronology except in its initial phase, where the work of the late seventies and eighties are mixed creating a slight bewilderment. We face, start, the series Half a man, his known soft toys and rag dolls made between 1987 and 1992 (Kelley developed large blocks of work always dilated in time), a review of gender roles and patriarchal systems . The thing came from afar. At sixteen years a hairy Kelley was busy making rag dolls at home to annoy his father, he preferred a short-haired macho be devoted to more manly chores. Kelley, however, that Half a man came not so much by a need to add to the gender issues as to pose a critique of capitalism and lack of scruples of making art goods. This was another issues that obsessed the artist, so for years conducted a type of work based on manual labor, unsophisticated, as opposed to minimal industrial impeccable and the amateur tradition of DIY (do it yourself). And so in the seventies made their huts painted wood bird that can be seen at the beginning of this show, with which he faced also the conceptual formal lightness. But are not ...