Tainted memory Repetition and reconstructions in Mike Kelley’s performative practice

This thesis outlines and discusses the proposition that Mike Kelley’s performative practice, which began in the 1970s, provided a crucial impulse for the configuration and development of new forms of memory in his artistic work and critical thinking. The ways in which we understand and inhabit memory cannot be seen as predicated on memory conceived as a data repository, but rather as an ongoing emotional and imaginative exercise, reactivating cultural stimuli in a continuing reconstruction of shared imaginaries. The formation of memory I foreground here sees it as a dynamic, action-based process rather than as something static.
The American artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012), imagined performative acts as iterative processes of rewriting and repetition that involved both objects and rituals used to stage shared imaginaries. My argument is that key aspects of the ephemerality and immateriality of Kelley's early, largely undocumented, performances, were re-arbitrated in his later artistic practice. What resulted was a new concept of memory, tainted by a co-dependency between fictional forms and the contingencies of daily life.
As to show the importance of repetition, reuse, de- and reconstruction, in Kelley’s work in a broader artistic and cultural context, I will examine some hardly noticed interactions, continuities and transitions, from Kelley’s earlier career to his major works: Educational Complex (1995) and the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series (2000-2012). Tainted Memory analyses how and on what terms this notion is articulated by examining a wide range of primary and secondary documents and sources and bringing them to bear on a constellation of material and discursive elements—props, photographs, press releases, scripts, articles and notes—along with detailed reconstructions of seminal performances using oral histories and eyewitness accounts.