Lot Essay
"To parents, the doll represents a perfect picture of the child--it's clean, it's cuddly, it's sexless, but as soon as the object is worn at all, it's dysfunctional... It then becomes a frightening object because it starts to represent the human in a real way and that's when it's taken from the child and thrown away." (Mike Kelley interviewed by Ralph Rugoff, Basel 1992, p. 86)
That's also when it starts to interest Mike Kelley, who began using worn and soiled stuffed dolls as representation of human nature in 1987, placing them on the floor on crocheted afghans or blankets (Arenas, 1990), sewn together and hung upside down on the wall (Estral Star #2, 1989), or placing them in boxes (Empathy Displacement series, 1991).
In Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991, certainly one of his most important works, Kelley ends his "stuffed animal" work by "killing" the dolls, arranging them in a coldly clinical installation "to remove all vestiges of empathy--to deal with the pure "material nature" of the crafts (Mike Kelley, Carnegie International 1991, p. 94).
Craft Morphology Flow Chart was done in two forms. The first one, made for the 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, consists in a huge room-sized installation where 113 dolls were treated as dead relics, arranged according to types on 13 simple folding tables and documented and measured in 60 individual identification photographs (Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago--gift from the Lannan Foundation)(figure 1).
This piece, the second form of Craft Morphology Flow Chart, is the complete and unique set of photographs existing outside of the Carnegie installation. It is composed of sixty black and white photographs, each of a single stuffed toy placed next to a ruler. The pictures are categorized (in twelve sets composed of one to eleven images) by type of toy, e.g. "sock monkeys," "humanoids," "aquatic figures"... Kelley has treated these simple discarded handmade toys as pseudo-scientific relics.
That's also when it starts to interest Mike Kelley, who began using worn and soiled stuffed dolls as representation of human nature in 1987, placing them on the floor on crocheted afghans or blankets (Arenas, 1990), sewn together and hung upside down on the wall (Estral Star #2, 1989), or placing them in boxes (Empathy Displacement series, 1991).
In Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991, certainly one of his most important works, Kelley ends his "stuffed animal" work by "killing" the dolls, arranging them in a coldly clinical installation "to remove all vestiges of empathy--to deal with the pure "material nature" of the crafts (Mike Kelley, Carnegie International 1991, p. 94).
Craft Morphology Flow Chart was done in two forms. The first one, made for the 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, consists in a huge room-sized installation where 113 dolls were treated as dead relics, arranged according to types on 13 simple folding tables and documented and measured in 60 individual identification photographs (Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago--gift from the Lannan Foundation)(figure 1).
This piece, the second form of Craft Morphology Flow Chart, is the complete and unique set of photographs existing outside of the Carnegie installation. It is composed of sixty black and white photographs, each of a single stuffed toy placed next to a ruler. The pictures are categorized (in twelve sets composed of one to eleven images) by type of toy, e.g. "sock monkeys," "humanoids," "aquatic figures"... Kelley has treated these simple discarded handmade toys as pseudo-scientific relics.