Description

On the influence of Mike Kelleys work, art historian and critic John Welchman writes much contemporary art that trades in abjection and the pathetic, scatter art, neo-junk, bad-girl provocations, a thousand reformulations of the body, have all passed, here and there, through the viscerally abstruse filtration system of Kelleys imagination. For this conversation, the two discuss Kelleys remarkable career, focusing on his large-scale video work the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series, started in 2000. An ambitious project, the series is a group of 365 videotapes and video installations related to his 1995 sculptural work, Educational Complex. Through restaged photographs of activities found in high school yearbooks and newspapers, the videos address issues of repressed memory, abuse, and the culture of victimization.

Kelleys work encompasses sculpture, performance, video, and installation. His piece Four Part Butter-Scene NGanga (1997) is on view in the exhibition Urban Cocktail in the Medtronic Gallery. Welchman is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of California, San Diego.

Part of Contemporary Art in Conversation.

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