Mike Kelley was born on 27th October, 1954 in Wayne, in Detroit, Michigan in the United States. He spent his childhood in Detroit where he grew up being exposed to a suburban music atmosphere that produced MC5 and other such garage bands. He founded a band called Destroy All Monsters in 1973 that was an experimental ‘anti rock’ noise band. Subsequently in 1976, he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts to attend college. His artistic style took him through piecemeal and scattershot multimedia installations with a keenness for imposed nostalgia and repressed memories from lower parts of the mainstream in the US. He worked on soft sculptures. As an artist he usually collaborated with other artists on several projects. These artists include Paul McCarthy and Raymond Petti bon, with whom he shared an emotional response overwhelmed with psychological repression, nostalgic irony and pop cultural tatters. Kelly’s employment of an assortment of media in his practice of writing, performance, curating, sculpture, painting and installation is evident in his creations such as Half-a-Man; From My Institute to Yours produced in 1988. Kelley coarsely brought into play a subverted folk visual comprising stuffed animals copulating, and felt banners that were... show more

Mike Kelley was born on 27th October, 1954 in Wayne, in Detroit, Michigan in the United States. He spent his childhood in Detroit where he grew up being exposed to a suburban music atmosphere that produced MC5 and other such garage bands. He founded a band called Destroy All Monsters in 1973 that was an experimental ‘anti rock’ noise band. Subsequently in 1976, he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts to attend college. His artistic style took him through piecemeal and scattershot multimedia installations with a keenness for imposed nostalgia and repressed memories from lower parts of the mainstream in the US. He worked on soft sculptures. As an artist he usually collaborated with other artists on several projects. These artists include Paul McCarthy and Raymond Petti bon, with whom he shared an emotional response overwhelmed with psychological repression, nostalgic irony and pop cultural tatters. Kelly’s employment of an assortment of media in his practice of writing, performance, curating, sculpture, painting and installation is evident in his creations such as Half-a-Man; From My Institute to Yours produced in 1988. Kelley coarsely brought into play a subverted folk visual comprising stuffed animals copulating, and felt banners that were offensive. These figures were in conjunction with fetishistic art sensibilities. He integrated a lenience towards multimedia in his installations, embracing the carnivalesque with disco lights, automated furniture, shrieking voices and music. His productions epitomize a spontaneous fixation with childhood and regression. Kelley scrutinizes the hallucinatory snippets of heroic and lost moments taken from the annals of high school yearbooks and related source material, and then restages them with a cutback of disturbing ceremony. In this fashion he recognizes the incongruity of wistfulness in preference to any innate reality in it, emphasizing the habitual approach that society uses to fantasy. Additionally, he investigates this matter using video shots with adults repeatedly playing children’s roles. This lays emphasis on the compulsive projections of society on teenage sexuality. Kelly thus confronts the legitimacy of values, like those of the church, the family, and the school, by challenging them with the oddity of their own suppositions. Mike Kelley’s works of art include: Monkey Island: Symmetrical Sets created between 1982 and 1983; Pay for Your Pleasure produced in 1988; Half-a-Man; From My Institute to Yours created in 1988; Blackout produced in 2001; A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark's film; Porky's created in 1987; the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with Morton Subotnik's Electronic Composition ''The Wild Buff." and Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room created in 2002; Day Is Done (Extracurricular Activity Projective; Reconstruction #2-#32) produced between 2004 and 2005.
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