| Artist: | Mike Kelley |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Ah...Youth | |
| Date: | 1991 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodernism | |
| Movement: | Pathetic Art | |
| Materials: | stuffed animals | |
| Subject: Mike Kelley includes his own unidealized, high school picture among the images of the pathetic dolls that make up Ahh. . .Youth. The late 20th C. artist recast not as the hero or the celebrity, but as pathetic, less than ideal and sacred; the pathetic as the anti-sublime and the flip side of Jeff Koons's glossy surface. Grunge. See also the other image of this work and its extended description. 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. | ||
