Tony Matelli - Sleepwalker, 1997
Michael "Mike" Kelley (27 October 1954 – 31 January 2012) was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. Writing in
The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Kelley_%28artist%29
Paul McCarthy
- Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure, c.1990
In the Uncanny Kelley acts as a curator, a 'film director' of sorts,
overseeing the historical presentation of a substantial number of
polychrome figurative sculptures. Different ways of representing the
figurative are related to each other; this includes non-art objects such
as ancient Egyptian grave furnishings, figures used for rituals, cults,
and religious worship, anatomical models, wax figures, objects taken
from popular art, stuffed animals, as well as contemporary
hyperrealistic sculptures. The show features contemporary artists such
as Paul McCarthy, Judy Fox, Tony Matelli, Ron Mueck, Paul Thek, Tony
Oursler, and many others. The spectacular section of sculptures is
complemented by Mike Kelley’s own collection The Harems. These consist
of 15 different object types which the artist associates with his
childhood and adolescence, ranging from marbles and squeezy toys to
hundreds of bubble gum cards, postcards, record covers, magazines, and
found church banners. The Harems comprises objects typical of our
consumer societies, and it is by accumulating and standardizing their
presentation that their 'uncanny aura' is disclosed. Some of the objects
on display, taken from various subcultures or fields of science, are
quite spooky, and in connection with morbid and macabre artworks they
tap into the potential of the uncanny, haunting our artistic
aestheticism with dark secrets.
Achim Hochdörfer
http://www.mumok.at/program/archive/exhibitions/2004/mike-kelley/?L=1
Dieter Roth -
Portrait of the Artist as Bird-Seed Bust, 1968
Taking its cue from the resurgence of figurative sculpture in the late
1980s and early 1990s, and from Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’
(1919), the exhibition brings together mannequin-related art works,
mostly from the 1960s onwards, with objects from disparate cultural
contexts that engender a similar sense of unease in the viewer: medical
dolls, anatomical waxworks, religious statues, pagan figurines,
ventriloquists’ dummies, sex dolls, taxidermy and so on. These are
joined by photographs that illustrate objects and art works that
couldn’t be loaned (Francisco de Goya’s Straw Dummy from 1791-2 or Oskar
Kokoschka’s life-size fetish doll that acted as his mistress), that
document bizarre incidents (‘an accidental suicide during auto-erotic
stimulation’) or that have an impact as physically intense as the
sculpture (Hans Bellmer’s Poupée from 1935, and Cindy Sherman’s ‘Sex’
pictures from 1992).
Kelley attributes the lifelikeness of the diverse vernacular objects in
‘The Uncanny’ to the fact that many once acted as doubles for actual
human bodies: sexual partners (fetishistic dolls), Catholic saints
(religious statues), film actors (stand-ins used in violent scenes),
dissected corpses (anatomical wax models) and servants who would
otherwise have been put to death in order to wait on an important person
in the afterlife (Egyptian figurines and the ‘terracotta army’). As
such, they dimly recall taboos that have been individually or
collectively repressed: perversion, idolatry, grizzly violence, human
sacrifice, mortality in general and the Oedipal drama. Hence our
discomfort.
Alex Farquharson
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/the_uncanny/
Nayland Blake -
Magic, 1990-91, mixed media with puppet and armature
It is important to me, first of all, that the objects displayed maintain
their physical presence, that they hold their own power in relation to
the viewer. I decided, therefore, to exclude miniatures–smaller than
life-size statues, dolls, toys, figurines, and the like–from the
exhibition. Generally, I believe that small figurative objects invite
the viewer to project onto them. By this, I mean that the viewer gets
lost in these objects, and that in the process of projecting mental
scenarios onto them they lose sense of themselves physically. The
experience of playing with dolls is a case in point. The doll becomes
simply an object to provoke daydreams, and its objecthood fades into the
background. Once the fantasy is operating, it could be replaced by any
other object. On the other hand, I am interested in objects with which
the viewer empathizes in a human way–though only as long as the viewer,
and the object viewed, maintain their sense of being there physically.
The disposability of the venerated substitute has modern correlatives
[...] Then there are whole classes of figures designed specifically to
be destroyed in use: car-crash dummies, the effigies of hated political
figures hung and burned at demonstrations, the mannequins that people
the perimeters of nuclear test sites, and the electrified human decoys
recently used in India to shock man-eating tigers into losing their
taste for human flesh. In a way, all these figures ask to be mistreated.
The iconoclast, the one who feels compelled to destroy images, knows:
statues invite violence. Like the vampire, they desire a violent death
to relieve them of the viewer-projected pathos of their pseudo-life.
Mike Kelley
http://theendofcollection.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/from-playing-with-dead-things-on-the-uncanny-by-mike-kelley/
The Uncanny brings together a wide range of figurative sculptures,
mannequins, dummies and sex-dolls, animatronic puppets, body-casts and
anatomical body fragments and models, religious statuary, stuffed
animals, photographs, film stills and photographic archive material; as
well as Kelley's own oddball collections of ephemera, which he calls his
"harems", and which are now in the possession of another Los Angeles
collector.
Kelley's intention is not just to collide high culture and low, or
sacred and profane, or even good art and bad, or art and other kinds of
objects. He has arranged all this stuff as a giant warehouse tableau, as
though it all existed as an inventory in the mind of an insane
collector. I sense a deep, and perhaps deliberate confusion here, not
only in the flouting of categories, and Kelley's piecemeal borrowing of
such a disparate collection of art and artifacts. Is The Uncanny a Mike
Kelley show, or a show curated - straightfaced - by Mike Kelley? Is the
artist switching roles and playing curator, or is his curatorship itself
a guise, and the premise of the exhibition itself a kind of fiction?
Should we regard the show's catalogue, with its footnote-laden essays
(including Kelley's original 1993 essay, and a new introduction by
himself), and its trudge through psychoanalytic literature, as evidence
of dispassionate research, or a further level of Kelley's artistic
meta-fiction, another trapdoor into Kelley's world? He is a sly artist
at the best of times.
Adrian Searle
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/feb/24/1
