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拍品专文
The found object assemblage Arena #7 is of immense importance to the development of Mike Kelley’s distinctive artistic voice, created at a pivotal point in his career as he shifted away from a largely performance-based practice to a more tangible sculptural style which emphasizes the role of everyday objects as ciphers of broader cultural values. Packed with narrative meaning, Arena #7 expresses the deep impact of the myth of childhood innocence which had originally been woven into the worn-out fabric objects, stuffing, and yarn, the work’s highly composed nature and sophistication generating an unanticipated emotional potency from its highly charged positioning of the dilapidated dolls around a machine-made blanket. Emerging from the sprawling Half a Man project, which sought to locate issues of gender-specific imagery and the family through object-based psychodrama, Area #7 is an early use of the stuffed animal in Kelley’s oeuvre, its significance explained by the artist as “the stuffed animal is a pseudo-child, a cutified… being that represents the adult’s perfect model of a child” (quoted in C. Levine, Mike Kelley Arenas, exh. cat., Skarstedt Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 7).
Arena #7 is configured into a complex formal scenario, with five plush creatures sat around a square blanket, the ordered arrangement of dolls suggesting a social occasion such as tea party, picnic, a meeting or conference. Each figure, obtained from secondhand stores and garage sales, outwardly exhibits evidence of a lifetime of loving use, frayed edges and stains revealing the bedraggled existence inherent to children’s toys. Appropriated from a juvenile world and placed within an adult context, the dolls retain a certain personification, where an intricate exchange of expressions appears to occur between participants; the reserved smile and raised eyebrows on the two yellow bears perched on a miniature bench appear to pass judgement upon the teddy bear opposite, with his broad goofy grin stretched across his face. Meanwhile, the opposing monkeys appear astonished at their ursine companions. Seemingly innocuous, the series title and the objects’ positions connotes a more confrontational and aggressive vista.
Reflecting on his personal history with stuffed animals, Kelley remarked that “there is a photo of me, when I was around fifteen or sixteen, holding a crude doll that I sewed. But I had no desire to learn to sew; I only sewed the doll in order to anger my father. He kept trying to force me to do these masculine activities that didn’t interest me” (quoted in E. Meyer-Hermann, “Interview with Mike Kelley,” in Mike Kelley, eds. E. Meyer-Hermann and L. G. Mark, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2013, p. 369). Kelley was intrigued with the audience response to his first work which utilized stuffed animals, More Love Horus Than Can Ever Be Repaid and Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set. The artist describes that “the responses I received on the first works revealed the incredible amount of sympathy viewers had for stuffed figures. Many people told me they felt sorry for the dolls in these works—which seemed to be trapped in the positions they were organized in. The Arena series resulted from this response. I decided to work with the figures in a more singular manner. Plush figures were positioned on blankets laid on the floor. These objects were arranged very simply, generally in quite obvious formal relationships. But despite the formality of the arrangements, viewers tended to read them narratively; they tended to see the objects interacting with each other in the manner of a drama” (op. cit.).
Drawing upon his viewer’s internal connotation of the found objects he employs, Kelley creates a work that, while seeming utterly banal, hides a deep well of complex emotions and reveals societal aspects typically concealed from view. The discomforting effects of the work are the result of the adult audience projecting mature emotions, be it eros, pity, longing or dread, upon a seemingly silly configuration of dilapidated dolls, collapsing a seemingly fundamental binary between childhood and adulthood. Describing the work’s irresistible effect, Kelley states that “The funny thing about dolls is that you don’t notice their scale because you project into them. Your relationship is sort of an interior one, a mental one. No matter how fucked up it is, you look at the doll and you see this lump of material as human, totally ignoring its material nature” (quoted in C. Levine, op. cit., p. 3).
Arena #7’s significance to both Kelley’s broader oeuvre and broader currents in contemporary art is evinced by its prodigious exhibition history, appearing at the artist’s influential retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Whitney, LACMA and MoMA PS1. Mike Kelley’s position as one of the most innovative artists of the era was solidified in a recent retrospective Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, held at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London. The artist’s Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, created a year after Arena #7, is currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the work’s tightly sewn bundles of stuffed animals denoting the continuing influence of found objects to his practice.
Arena #7 is configured into a complex formal scenario, with five plush creatures sat around a square blanket, the ordered arrangement of dolls suggesting a social occasion such as tea party, picnic, a meeting or conference. Each figure, obtained from secondhand stores and garage sales, outwardly exhibits evidence of a lifetime of loving use, frayed edges and stains revealing the bedraggled existence inherent to children’s toys. Appropriated from a juvenile world and placed within an adult context, the dolls retain a certain personification, where an intricate exchange of expressions appears to occur between participants; the reserved smile and raised eyebrows on the two yellow bears perched on a miniature bench appear to pass judgement upon the teddy bear opposite, with his broad goofy grin stretched across his face. Meanwhile, the opposing monkeys appear astonished at their ursine companions. Seemingly innocuous, the series title and the objects’ positions connotes a more confrontational and aggressive vista.
Reflecting on his personal history with stuffed animals, Kelley remarked that “there is a photo of me, when I was around fifteen or sixteen, holding a crude doll that I sewed. But I had no desire to learn to sew; I only sewed the doll in order to anger my father. He kept trying to force me to do these masculine activities that didn’t interest me” (quoted in E. Meyer-Hermann, “Interview with Mike Kelley,” in Mike Kelley, eds. E. Meyer-Hermann and L. G. Mark, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2013, p. 369). Kelley was intrigued with the audience response to his first work which utilized stuffed animals, More Love Horus Than Can Ever Be Repaid and Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set. The artist describes that “the responses I received on the first works revealed the incredible amount of sympathy viewers had for stuffed figures. Many people told me they felt sorry for the dolls in these works—which seemed to be trapped in the positions they were organized in. The Arena series resulted from this response. I decided to work with the figures in a more singular manner. Plush figures were positioned on blankets laid on the floor. These objects were arranged very simply, generally in quite obvious formal relationships. But despite the formality of the arrangements, viewers tended to read them narratively; they tended to see the objects interacting with each other in the manner of a drama” (op. cit.).
Drawing upon his viewer’s internal connotation of the found objects he employs, Kelley creates a work that, while seeming utterly banal, hides a deep well of complex emotions and reveals societal aspects typically concealed from view. The discomforting effects of the work are the result of the adult audience projecting mature emotions, be it eros, pity, longing or dread, upon a seemingly silly configuration of dilapidated dolls, collapsing a seemingly fundamental binary between childhood and adulthood. Describing the work’s irresistible effect, Kelley states that “The funny thing about dolls is that you don’t notice their scale because you project into them. Your relationship is sort of an interior one, a mental one. No matter how fucked up it is, you look at the doll and you see this lump of material as human, totally ignoring its material nature” (quoted in C. Levine, op. cit., p. 3).
Arena #7’s significance to both Kelley’s broader oeuvre and broader currents in contemporary art is evinced by its prodigious exhibition history, appearing at the artist’s influential retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Whitney, LACMA and MoMA PS1. Mike Kelley’s position as one of the most innovative artists of the era was solidified in a recent retrospective Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, held at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London. The artist’s Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, created a year after Arena #7, is currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the work’s tightly sewn bundles of stuffed animals denoting the continuing influence of found objects to his practice.