Mike Kelley - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, March 4, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Jablonka Galerie, Cologne/Berlin

  • Catalogue Essay

    The pulsating animation of the present lot contains the iconic image of a bottled city from Mike Kelley’s series Kandor.  Kandor is the capital of comic book hero Superman’s home planet Krypton that was miniaturized by nemesis Braniac and kept safe in a bottle by Superman. With the pop sensibility of its comic book style imagery and the cooing baby noises emanating from the bottle, Mike Kelley mines our pop culture mythology to create the psychologically compelling work, Animation 6 (Baby).
    "It serves Kelley as abstract code for the fact that Kandor, as a lost paradise, also stands for a feeling of insurmountable Otherness (not just for  Superman, the alien who will always remain an outsider on Earth). And for depression—Kelley also mentioned Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963), in which she writes: ‘Wherever I sat…I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my sour air.’ The evocation of a clean, airtight prison had to be perfect.
    And is Kelley himself, whose own underdog biography is so often projected onto his work, not a kind of Superman of contemporary art? “Superman,” says David Carradine in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), “is the only superhero born with his superhuman powers—he must disguise himself as a little nobody to get by on Earth.” Kelley uses the ruins of formerly popular myths to address major questions on a grand scale, examining the link between narcissism and alienation, tragedy and buffoonery, trash and art," (H. Liebs, “Mike Kelley,” Frieze, London January/February 2008).

14

Animation 6 (Baby)

2007

20 minute loop animation on a flat screen monitor with speakers.

22 x 14 x 3 in. (55.9 x 35.6 x 7.6 cm).
This work is from an edition of five and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 Mar 2010
New York