| Artist: | Mike Kelley |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Ahh...Youth | |
| Date: | 1991 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodernism | |
| Movement: | Pathetic Art | |
| Materials: | stuffed and crocheted animals | |
| Subject: pathetic, second best, orphan dolls, handmade cast-offs, Ferbie wanna-bes; they signify a nostalgia for youth and innocence that needs to be critically re-considered; less than ideal; deconstructs the nostalgic notion of lost innocence by pointing to dysfuntionality and a gift culture where every exchange, no matter how innocent, is made with demands: love me, obey me, do what I want . . . Style: Kelley does not make the dolls himself; he buys them in thrift stores and re-contextualizes them by putting them into his art. Uses these pathetic objects conceptually, thus, to make us critically question romantic notions that mystify or mask dysfunctional realities and to re-consider how complexly embroiled human interpersonal relations are. Context: late capitalistic, consumer-oriented society in which object-lust masks or cloaks an underlying state of human degradation; lifts up the slick, shiny surface of the hyperreal to see what might be lurking underneath--the pathetic and the abject (those aspects of the body or the real that we prefer to repress); the end of utopia; grunge. | ||
