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One Work
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex
An illustrated examination of a 1995 work by Mike Kelley that marked a significant change in his work.
One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art—relentless examinations of subjectivity and of society that are both sinister and ecstatic. With a wide range of media, Kelley's work explores themes as varied as post-punk politics, religious systems, social class, and repressed memory. Using architectural models to represent schools he attended, his 1995 work, Educational Complex, presents forgotten spaces as frames for private trauma, real or imagined. The work's implications are at once miniature and massive. In this book, John Miller offers an illustrated examination of this milestone work that marked a significant change in Kelley's practice.
A “complex” can mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome, or a political apparatus, and Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of inquiry, considering the making of the work, examining it in terms of education and trauma (sexual or otherwise), and investigating how it tests the ideological horizon of art as an institution. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands his political and aesthetic focus, including not only such artifacts as generic forms of architecture but (inspired by the infamous McMartin Preschool case) popular fantasies associated with ritual sex abuse and false memory syndrome. Through this archaeology of the contemporary, Miller argues, Kelley examines the mandate for education and the liberal democratic premises underpinning it.
One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art—relentless examinations of subjectivity and of society that are both sinister and ecstatic. With a wide range of media, Kelley's work explores themes as varied as post-punk politics, religious systems, social class, and repressed memory. Using architectural models to represent schools he attended, his 1995 work, Educational Complex, presents forgotten spaces as frames for private trauma, real or imagined. The work's implications are at once miniature and massive. In this book, John Miller offers an illustrated examination of this milestone work that marked a significant change in Kelley's practice.
A “complex” can mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome, or a political apparatus, and Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of inquiry, considering the making of the work, examining it in terms of education and trauma (sexual or otherwise), and investigating how it tests the ideological horizon of art as an institution. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands his political and aesthetic focus, including not only such artifacts as generic forms of architecture but (inspired by the infamous McMartin Preschool case) popular fantasies associated with ritual sex abuse and false memory syndrome. Through this archaeology of the contemporary, Miller argues, Kelley examines the mandate for education and the liberal democratic premises underpinning it.
- GenresArt
120 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 30, 2015
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About the author
John Miller
6 booksJohn Miller is an artist, writer, and musician, as well as a Professor of Professional Practice in the Art History Department at Barnard College, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 23, 2017
Educational Complex is an architectural model of every school Mike Kelley ever attended, with the sections he couldn't remember left blank. It's a pivotal artwork in Kelley's career, marking the end of his stuffed toy period of dirty childhood fixation and the beginning of a more measured, controlled scrutiny of the culture at large. John Miller's study here takes in the 80s and 90s childhood abuse hysteria of the McMartin preschool scandal, Freudian psychoanalytical theory and Kelley's own ambivalent relationship to his art education. Afterall's One Work series is an imprint that demands close examination of a single object, and Miller's forensic analysis is well up to the task.
January 18, 2021
A must read for fans of Mike Kelley and John Miller (such as the person who's writing). One of the strongest installments in the precious One Work book series by Afterall.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews