In Memoriam: Mike Kelley1954–2012
"I knew by the time I was a teenager that I was going to be an artist. There was no doubt about that. There was nothing else for me to be."
Mike Kelley: A Conversation with Art21
ART21: How much do psychological theories factor into your work?
KELLEY: I don’t think it’s something that’s there all the time. In certain projects it is. In the Uncanny project, it’s there because Freud wrote (really) the only essay on the uncanny, so I used that as a reference point.
ART21: What role does beauty play in your work?
MCELHENY: The question of beauty is a very funny one to me because, basically, either beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or there is no beauty at all. If beauty is determined by somebody else, I want nothing to do with it.
ART21: What makes you come to your studio?
ROTHENBERG: No place else to go. (LAUGHS) No, I feel very strongly about putting time in, whether you’re working or not; reading a book is fine. But if you’re not here, it might pass you by. And sometimes you just throw your book down to the floor, march up to the painting, and say, “...
ART21: Talk about what influenced this painting, Red Studio.
ROTHENBERG: Matisse’s Red Studio. I had just come back from having a show in New York. I didn’t want to be in the place where you can’t continue what you are doing and don’t know what you’re going to do. I had never tried to do an interior this specific, but I didn’t...
ART21: What is the role of the viewer in your work?
HUBBARD: Embedded in how we make and exhibit and how we think about these works is the requirement that a viewer participate in the authorship of the story. I don’t want you to lose yourself in the same way that you’re being taken on a rollercoaster ride, which is the common...
"My approach tends to be from experiments. I need the challenge. If I know how to do something well, there's no need to do it all the time because it becomes a little monotonous. So I like to find a challenge."
