Movies: Mike Kelley

Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical...

In Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath an actor portrays Superman and does exactly what the title describes. In a dark no-place evocative of Superman's own psychic 'Fortress of Solitude' the alienated Man o...

Since the 1960s, other disciplines, cultures, and artists previously excluded from modernism's privileged canons have become absorbed into an ever expanding field of activity and influence. Younger artists are a new breed of cultural scavengers, anyt...

Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Bunuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosex...

Steeped in irony, Made in Hollywood depicts the personal and cultural mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials to The Wiz...

Three teenagers from the industrial part of Los Angeles try to form a punk rock band in Hollywood, in this feature length film by renowned artist Raymond Pettibon....

“CINDERELLA is a musical treatment of the fairy tale. I have broken apart the story and set it as a mechanical game with a series of repetitions where CINDERELLA is projected back and forth like a ping-pong ball between the hearth and the castle. She...

A collaborative work based on Joanna Spyri's novel, Heidi.. The entire work consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set. The set was inst...

Out O' Actions documents Kelley and McCarthy's preliminary activities in organizing a project for the Visitor's Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during the inaugural exhibition of "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Obje...

"This is my only truly solo video project. The tape is an exploration of character and was done in direct reaction to my performance work at the time, which was characterless. Video seemed a good way, by virtue of it not operating in 'real' time, of ...

This collaborative video project is based on a short story by H.G. Wells called "The Country of the Blind"—about a man who travels to a country of blind people and attempts to dominate their sensual, feminine culture with his male, sight-derived powe...

Grow Live Monsters is a selection of 8mm, super-8, and 16 mm film phantasies from the period 1971-76. While still at high school Cary Loren started a correspondence with underground filmmaker, actor, and performance artist Jack Smith, which led to a ...

In this video, dancers move about a set designed by Mike Kelley, interacting and silently commenting on various choreographies: Martha Graham’s “mythological” dances, gestures derived from the observation of monkeys’ behaviours in Harry Harlow’s expe...

Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, Garage Sale II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfil their desires through prosthetics, masturbatio...

Following the piece Heidi, a loose interpretation of Joanna Spyri’s novel by the duo of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Kelley performed four dances with just an apparently innocent basket as a prop....

Continuing his series restaging photographs of “extracurricular activities” found in high school yearbooks and newspapers, Vice Anglais features an unsettling but humorous satire that collides psychosexual and sadomasochistic drama with a repertoire ...

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's feature-length video A Voyage of Growth and Discovery follows the existential journey of Baby IKKI over several days at Burning Man, a festival of "radical self-expression," famous for its presentations of large-scale ...

Mobile Homestead is a public artwork by Mike Kelley consisting of a full-scale replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland, built upon a complex of secret subterranean tunnels and rooms. Located on the grounds of the Museum of Con...

Legend Trip, a teenager’s story about exploring a haunted site at night, reconstitutes a childhood memory of Mike Kelley’s. It retraces, step by step (initiation – completion – retrospection), an invocation of Satan and a divination using the melted ...

"Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene)" 2000, 29:44 min, b&w, sound Kelley has constructed a half-hour drama inspired by a photo found in a high school yearbook. The original, a still from a school play, depicts two ...