Queer Spirits

yucontemporary:

We revere Mike Kelley in a way that he would advise against, in fact would probably repudiate outright, hard: as something of the godhead of contemporary art. Maybe I should say here that I think the ‘craft’ of ‘art’ has a lot more to do with being off-line than with being on-line, a whole lot more, and nobody was more off-line and way gloriously out there than Mike Kelley. He was so way far out at the bow of things. Take his noise music, or his materials, or the simple fact that he wrote his own criticism, in fact, he hijacked the critics bent-little-baton and re-framed the way we view and talk about his work. He re-tacked us. And our love is not so weak that we can’t say he was loud and inimitable. He was loud and inimitable. 

Mike Kelley died today at the age of 58.