Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Mike Kelley Artist



This is from the artwolf.com
The writer is explaining the artwork depicted accompanying photo. Sounds incredible--I wish the detailed picture were not blurry. It is something that needs to be in detail and sharp focus. The larger picture is entitled Memory Ware Flat #29. The writer talks about a MWF#18. Maybe the artist made several of these and numbered them.
I will post more photos from this artist who I just found out about on the sublime PBS series Art 21.
On a pop-culture level, Mike Kelley's art is featured on a couple of Sonic Youth Albums. John Baldessari was a teacher of his at CalArts in Valencia.

I clearly remember my first direct contact with Mike Kelley's works. It was in an occasion which I had the opportunity to attend an exhibition about the little known and very complete collection Herbert, featuring contemporary masters such as Hans Hofmann, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, or important sculptors as Eduardo Chillida or Sol Lewitt. There, in one of the last rooms, I suddenly faced the Memory Ware Flat #18 (2001). The spectacularity of the work was so that it surpassed every other work in the room: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pieces of imitation jewellery, metal plates, keys, key rings, and other daily objects supposed an exciting challenge for the spectator, taking it to an impossible debate between the possibility of facing the work in its totality, or in the partial contemplation of the infinity of daily and easily recognizable objects. It was frankly peculiar that the union between cheap, out-fashioned earrings, a few plastic flowers, pins of almost every pop band of the 80s, and a funny Flubber pic could suppose a comparable to a complete set of Quianlong dishes.

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