Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley, based in Los Angeles, has created a provocative and far-reaching body of work that includes performance art, installation, and sculpture. His work treads a highly charged terrain of desire, dread, and dysfunction in everyday American life while attempting to dispel the cynicism and self-satisfaction that has accompanied the triumphs of the "American century." He often reinvents childhood toys and everyday objects, investing them with subversive meanings. A raging satirist, Kelley has used the freewheeling intermedia approach of Conceptual Art to forge a series of inventive works that challenge prevailing notions of taste, influence, moral authority, social responsibility, and art's transcendent function. In Fresh Acconci (1995), Kelley, in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, remade video-art pioneer Vito Acconci's performance works from the 1970s, using B-movie actors as performers. Fresh Acconci alludes both to the resurgence of the 1970s in pop culture and the art world and to Hollywood B movies and the soft-core porn made in the Hollywood Hills. The work raises questions about the avant-garde as a style to be adopted, discarded, or revised like any other. This book also includes a reproduction of a double-sided poster that the artist created for his 1999 exhibition at Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles. A sharp satire on America's celebrity culture and sexual dysfunction, it includes three texts. The first, written by Kelley, is a hilarious send-up of the roles of pleasure, sex, and celebrities in the post-Clinton scandal era. The second is a London newspaper's report on the 1998 passage of an anti-paparazzi law in California. Finally, Kelley collages together several slightly different media reports on an incident involving director Steven Spielberg and a man who staked out his Los Angeles home. At once hilarious and chilling, this piece points to the slippage between fiction and truth in a town that specializes in illusion. A collaborative work by Kelley and Tony Oursler was included in documenta X in 1997.