Dialogue, #5 (One hand clapping)

Mike Kelley's work combines found objects which have complex emotional histories such as children's toys with cassette recordings that evoke his own work as a musician and performer. Kelley's upbringing as a Catholic and his distrust of the repressive structures of the Church inform his work. The blankets and toys are both formal components and a record of the unappeasable emotional debt owed to the adults by the children who had been given them. "Unlike many of his peers, Kelley chose not to appropriate media imagery but instead registered the devastating effects, the shame and degradation, wreaked on the image and object consumer. Kelley doesn't simply depict the pathetic--his works are so limply anemic, so plainly suffering from a case of rejectionitis, that you can almost feel sorry for them as art objects. Despite evidence of the artist's secondary personas, there's no coyness or sense of psychological remove. In a society fueled by pictures of success, these images of failure generate the anxiety that surrounds the taboo." (R. Rugoff, Mike Kelley Catholic Tastes, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1993, p. 171)

Mike Kelley defined these pieces:

"In my work, the system and the anti-system aren't about architecture versus the material contained by it, they're more about social systems... The placement on the floor makes you think of certain historic formal discussions. Yet the materials themselves deny that discussion because the materials relate to hearth and home, and developmental kinds of issues." (Mike Kelley interviewed by John Miller in Mike Kelley, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 44)