Details, details
The late, great LA art maverick’s work is likely to make you think: “What the hell am I looking at?” In one room is a sprawling mass of concrete, sprayed with dingy polka-dots and studded with buckets and grinning Buddhas. In another is a brick and chainlink enclosure. It’s a replica of a famed wishing well in LA’s Chinatown that has seen better days.
Dazed and confused
The attraction for Kelley is just that: confusion. It has for him a psychosexual charge, linked to the infant’s “nothing space of presexual consciousness”. Excavations of everyday culture, from garbage drawings to photos of cuddly toys – see the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty – are underpinned by psychoanalytic theory.
Setting the scene
More literally, the wishing well was a spot that visitors to Chinatown’s 1980s punk clubs – Kelley included – might have ducked behind for a hook-up. Underneath his sculpture, the artist has added a “fuck room” with lube and candles.
Out of your mind
The separated frame/fence and unwieldy mass could possibly be a metaphor for ego and id, the white cube and the creative process or the restriction and exclusion imposed on the Chinese community in America.
