Mike Kelley Educational Complex

John Miller: Mike Kelley Educational Complex by Whitney Moon 
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...Since the 1970s, architecture has served as the site and subject through which a radical rethinking of the visual arts has occurred. The plethora of artists who produce sculptures and installations akin to architecture—Michael Asher, Wim Delvoye, Thomas Demand, Dan Graham, Josiah McElheny, Michael C. McMillen, Roxy Paine, Tom Sachs, Rachel Whiteread, Andrea Zittel, and so on—suggests an ongoing fascination with the capacity for buildings to operate as both literal and conceptual vessels for subjective expression.8 But what are the implications of artists working in the guise of architectural production, and more specifically, how might artists expose architects to the conceptual (i.e., discursive) potential of the architectural model?

     For artist Mike Kelley (1954–2012) and his self-proclaimed “bias against architecture,” the architectural model operates as a rhetorical instrument to express subjective ideas through a seemingly objective guise.9 In Educational Complex (1995)—a gridded tabletop model (8’ w x 16’ l x 50” h) composed of scaled representations of all the institutions where he attended school, as well as his childhood home in suburban Detroit, all constructed from memory—Kelley deployed seemingly banal architectural forms not so much as an appraisal of architecture per se, but rather as a vehicle to launch multiple forms of institutional critique. A collection of white generic buildings, encased in Plexiglas and resting on sawhorses, the sculpture also features a mattress placed on the floor beneath a hole cut into its base, suggesting that this is not an architectural model as we know it...
...A sculpture masquerading as an architectural model, Educational Complex is described by Miller as “cool and detached” and Kelley’s “most impersonal work” (p. 17).

     According to Miller, “The antagonism between Kelley and his audience, both real and imagined, concerns the dynamics of projection” (p. 16). Although at first glance the sculpture looks like a pristine composition of modern buildings, a closer inspection reveals a network of nonsensical spaces, representative of the artist’s incomplete memory. Rather than an accurate rendition of the buildings in which Kelley was educated and raised, Miller discusses how “the piece is fundamentally incoherent; Kelley asks his viewers to contemplate what is not there, the identifiable parts serve primarily to frame this gaping absence” (p. 18). Educational Complex employed “not only generic forms of architecture, but also the popular fantasies associated with ritual sexual abuse and false memory syndrome” (p. 94). Kelley, who was frustrated by the critical misreading of his earlier works as nostalgic and traumatic, conceived of this “pseudo-biography” to taunt his viewers (p. 16)...