MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with monash art design & architecture
Mike Kelley: 1954-2012
Wednesday 22 August
Pop-up lecture cycle on the life and work of Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley
A collaboration between
Monash University, National
Gallery of Victoria and the
University of Melbourne.
10am: Extracurricular activities:
Mike Kelley's Day is Done (2005)
Lecture theatre G1.04, Monash
University, Caulfield campus
Three public lectures on Mike
Kelley, celebrated and recently deceased Los Angeles contemporary artist, delivered by co-director
of the Mike Kelley Foundation
for the Arts and Kelley scholar,
Professor John C. Welchman,
University of California, San Diego.
3pm: Mike Kelley's Mobile
Homestead (2005- )
Clemenger Auditorium, National
Gallery of Victoria International,
180 St Kilda Road
All lectures are free; no bookings
required.
5.30pm-6.30pm: Mike Kelley and
the Comedic
Ian Potter Museum of Art,
The University of Melbourne,
Swanston Street
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
John C. Welchman is Professor
of art history, theory and criticism
in the Visual Arts department at
the University of California, San
Diego. He is also Founding Director of the Mike Kelley Foundation
for the Arts, and Advisor,
Rijksakademie van Beeldende
Kunsten, Amsterdam. His
books on art include Modernism
Relocated: Towards a Cultural
Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen
& Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours:
A Visual History of Titles (Yale,
1997) and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s
(Routledge, 2001); he is co-author
of Dada and Surrealist Word
Image (MIT Press, 1987) and of
Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999);
and editor of Rethinking Borders
(Minnesota UP/Routledge, 1996).
His most recent book is On the
Beyond: A Conversation between
Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and John
C Welchman, ed. John C. Welchman, [Kunst und Architektur im
Gespraech/Art and Architecture
in Discussion] (Vienna and New
York: SpringerWien New York,
2011). He is also finalising two
books on the relation between
art, film and the representation
of faces (The Celluloid Face and
Faces and Powers); and a monograph on Mike Kelley.
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm
Mike Kelley, Day is done 2005
Gagosian Gallery, New York
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with monash art design & architecture
10AM–12PM: EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: MIKE KELLEY’S DAY IS DONE
(2005)
Venue: Lecture theatre G1.04, Monash Art Design & Architecture, Monash University Caulfield campus
Mike Kelley, Day Is Done 2005, Gagosian
Gallery, New York
Mike Kelley’s epic Day is Done (2005) or Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #2–32 (2004–2005),
takes the form of a rambunctious musical-cum-vaudeville video review chopped into thirty-some choreographed
numbers and distributed across a series of twenty-five sculptural viewing stations, that are also locations and paraarchitectures, composed of props from each shoot. Continuing and complicating Kelley’s investigation of the relation
between memory, repression and architectural and institutional space that commenced with Educational Complex
(1995), the project interrogates a compelling range of locative conditions in the off-duty construction of extra-urban
Americana. On a performative level, Day is Done is a cross between low-end community theater, free-fall pantomime,
and off-Broadway musical—trading in dozens of sonic forms from church organ to hard-core rap, from techno to
tambourines; from the point of view of the structures it appropriates, invents and repurposes, Day is Done conjures
up a critically paranoid vision of the niches and micro-spaces inhabited by provincial leisure practices, in order to
offer a disturbing commentary on the core of vernacular America.
Presented by MUMA and the Graduate Fine Art Program, MADA
3.00PM–4.00PM: MIKE KELLEY’S MOBILE HOMESTEAD (2005- )
Venue: Clemenger Auditorium, National Gallery of Victoria International, 180 St Kilda Road, Southbank,
Melbourne
Mobile Homestead at former Kelley Residence,
Westland, Michigan, 2010
Conceived in 2005 in collaboration with ArtAngel (London), Kelley’s first and last public art project, Mobile Homestead, was inaugurated at the Museum of Cotemporary Art, Detroit (MOCAD) in September 2010 with the unveiling
of a mobile home modelled after the suburban house in which Kelley was raised. Work on a permanent replica of
the house—to which the mobile component will be docked—located on a site adjacent to MOCAD, commenced
in summer 2012. The home will be used for temporary exhibitions, community projects and as a home for the
education department of MOCAD. Three feature-length videos documenting the homestead’s journeys to and from
the “mother ship“ house along Detroit’s ethnically diverse Michigan Avenue premiered in May 2012 at the Whitney
Biennial, which was dedicated to Kelley. “Perhaps the failure of the Mobile Homestead project . . . after being filtered
through the institutions of the art world and community services,” he noted in the Whitney catalogue, “is successful as a model of my own belief that public art is always doomed to failure because of its basic passive/aggressive
nature.”
Presented by the National Gallery of Victoria in collaboration with the School of Culture and Communication and the
Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne
5.30pm–6.30pm: Mike Kelley and the Comedic
Venue: Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Swanston Street, Parkville
Mike Kelley, Proposal for The Decoration of an
Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room)
for the Chiat/Day Advertising Agency
Designed by Frank Gehry (1990-92)
Comedy and its numberless affiliations, liaisons, and progeny are as important to the work of Mike Kelley as to the
practice of any artist in the current generation—or, for that matter, any artist working during the last century. The
comedic resources that define and disorder Kelley’s inter-generic projects with corrosively insistent bravado include
parody, irony, and caustic satire; black and blue humor; farce and unstinting word-play. Throughout Kelley’s performance work, beginning around 1976, and later video-based pieces culminating in Day is Done (2005), it is equally
clear that the artist’s acid tongue, vented in a legion of voices and surrogates, found its most chiseled groove when
planted firmly in the cheek. Kelley invested his pervasive senses of humor in even the most recalcitrant of objects,
including performance props and other found or “assisted” materials. He was part, in fact, of a select band of modern and contemporary artists who have somehow infiltrated sculpture or three-dimensional forms with a mischievous
comedic substrate. Kelley laid down an early marker on this satirical trail with a sequence of opaquely absurdist
birdhouses, the formal elaborations of which are deviously yoked to gratuitously highfalutin religious principles or the
unstable machinations of common wisdom.
Presented by the Ian Potter Museum of Art in collaboration with the School of Culture and Communication and the
Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm