Mike Kelley: Bad Boy | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #117: Mike Kelley sets the record straight about being called a "bad boy" throughout his career, describing the shifting tastes of critics and artists towards abject art in recent years.

Mike Kelley's work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic performance pieces, to arrangements of stuffed-animal sculptures, to wall-sized drawings, to multi-room installations that restage institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos), to extended collaborations with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and the band Sonic Youth. His work questions the legitimacy of 'normative' values and systems of authority, and attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education. He also comments on and undermines the legitimacy of the concept of victim or trauma culture, which posits that almost all behavior results from some form of repressed abuse. Kelley's aesthetic mines the rich and often overlooked history of vernacular art in America, and his practice borrows heavily from the confrontational, politically conscious "by all means necessary" attitude of punk music.

Learn more about Mike Kelley: http://www.art21.org/artists/mike-kelley

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Norbert Arnsteiner & Nancy Schreiber. Sound: Stacy Hruby & Ullrich Vlasak. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Mike Kelley. Special Thanks: MUMOK, Vienna.

Mike Kelly: Bad Boy

Over and over and over not so much now, but throughout my early career

it was this bad boy thing. Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy, and was just like, I don't think I was ever a bad boy

I don't think my work was about being a bad boy, it wasn't about being like a snotty teenager or this or that

or that I was an anti-intellectual.

Obviously I'm not an anti-intellectual, and yet I felt that these kind of terms were used to put me in my place

because my work didn't fit the cannon of work that was popular at that moment.

It was simply like a cheap put down.

Because I was associated with this so called, abject art movement, in which notions of failure came to play

in the discusion of art, and because a lot of my work looks towards so called, low forms

like folk art or lower and mass culture.

I think a lot critics of my work tend to confuse my use of that work with some kind of investment,

or I'm raising that up, or that this is some kind of blue collar aesthetic.

Well, I might come from that, but I have no love of it, but the art world has changed a lot because recently

such things have found a place in the art world when, you know, fifteen years ago, you never see, in every gallery in New York

some kind of, mass culture referent. Now every gallery has such things, and so all this discussion of slackers has become a positive term

rather than a negative term, and it's like all this kind of discussion doesn't interest me whatsoever because who defines these things.

If I'm a bad boy, there's a thousand times worse bad boys and girls and it's an academy, so, I'm grandpa when it comes to that.

I don't need to think about it anymore.

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