A driving force of contemporary art, Mike Kelley produced an eclectic and prolific oeuvre during his four-decade long career that included photography, painting, sculpture, video, performance, music, curatorial projects and a formidable body of critical and creative writing. His work conflates high and low forms of popular culture through an examination of social relations, cultural identity and systems of belief, which are underscored by Kelley’s idiosyncratic approach to art making. In ‘Duck & Goose’ (1990), Kelley has sewn together two stuffed animals—a large, floral-patterned goose and a smaller orange duck. Fully connected by their abdomens, the duck and goose’s necks extend outwards in opposite directions, curling slightly at the head so that both birds’ beaks point inwards towards each other. Kelley has given the duck a large, cartoonish eye drawn in black as well as floppy webbed feet, while the goose boasts a delicate pearl eye and a bonnet. Simultaneously endearing and unsettling, Kelley’s stuffed animal artworks represent a major element of his practice.
Kelley's stuffed animal pieces confront the rigid hierarchies of formalism and the myth of childhood innocence. To create them, Kelley typically chose toys that were soiled, worn or particularly silly-looking—the sort of playthings fashioned by loving hands for a grandchild or a neighbourhood church sale. Such toys can embody the sentimental elements of childhood that many adults hold dear. In ‘Duck & Goose,’ the modification of the stuffed animals’ shapes into a singular, amorphous form creates an uncanny and disquieting effect. By toying with an iconic element of childhood—using stuffed animals that are stained or missing limbs, reconfiguring their bodies—Kelley interrogates the adult notion of youth as quintessentially pure, fresh and uncontaminated.
‘The handmade objects I found in thrift stores were, most likely, not sold. I started hoarding them; I had never really looked at dolls or stuffed animals closely before. I became interested in their style—the proportions of them, their features. That’s when I realized that they were monstrosities. But people are not programmed to recognize that fact.’
—Mike Kelley [1]
About the artist
Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture.
[1] Mike Kelley quoted in Glenn O’Brien, ‘Mike Kelley,’ Interview Magazine, December/January 2009
Portrait of Mike Kelley. Photo: Cameron Wittig