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拍品专文
“The complete title is: Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove). 2nd and 3rd Remove refers to the second and third removal from the platonic archetype of the human. The first remove would be your body. The second remove would be the doll. The third remove would be the image of the doll. So we're getting at some notion of the human only through a second and third remove, and even then there's all these levels of displacement. You realize that the whole function of empathy is displacement. That's what I was trying to do in these pieces." (M. Kelley, quoted in M. Kelley and J. Miller, Mike Kelley, New York, 1992, p. 51)
Mike Kelley’s legacy stretches like a dark shadow in the twilight of contemporary art. As the twentieth century came to a close, there was probably no artist more deeply concerned with and unflinchingly committed to the scrutiny and dissection of human psychology. Kelley was committed to mining the vast, often disorienting pop-cultural landscape for symbols and signifiers of our most disturbing, starkly Freudian drives and desires. Subjects that most artists would understandably avoid were not only beacons to Kelley, but cornerstones of his artistic practice. Over the course of more than three decades, Kelley produced a tremendous body of work across many media, including music, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting, video, and photography. With a probing eye and a cutting wit, Kelley studied the complex systems of identity, faith and control that direct popular culture, all the while subverting conventional notions of art-making.
The present lot, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove) #8, belongs to a series of fifteen works that were originally exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles in 1990. Each of the works in the series pairs a black and white acrylic painting on panel of a handmade doll with a small, black wooden box in which the doll depicted in the painting is interred. The works are installed on the floor, with the paintings leaning against the wall and their respective boxes placed in front of them. The mostly smiling faces of the dolls are faintly charged with dread and menace, not unlike John Wayne Gacy’s haunting self-portraits as a clown. Installed in a long row against the gallery wall, the works together appear like a lineup of criminal suspects, or curious grave markers. The proximity of the paintings and their boxes suggests a “faint promise of visual reunion” which cannot be fulfilled, resulting in “an oddball reflection on the processes of emotional exchange and empathetic investment bound up in the production, circulation and reception of the craft object” (J. C. Welchman, Mike Kelley, 2008, pp. 217-218). Kelley’s equation of empathy and displacement is mediated by the doll’s funereal presentation alongside its vaguely memorial painted portrait. The Minimalist connotations of the paintings’ colorless palette and the sculptural quality of the boxes resonate coldly, with sharp notes of cynicism and a dull drone of absurdity.
The Empathy Displacement series can be understood more broadly as a meditation on death, its pathos or lack thereof. Like the famed gold death mask of Agamemnon, the paintings in this series function as unique records of identity, taking the place of a body rendered inaccessible. In the case of the dolls, death is simulated, or at least gestured at, by the coffin-like boxes in which they have been horizontally sealed. The faces of the dolls can be glimpsed through a miniscule window that can be accessed beneath a small hatch on top of the box, undermining and complicating the inaccessibility that we naturally associate with death. The absurdity at the heart of the series lies in its literal subject: the craft doll. Kelley’s choice to incorporate these found objects is rooted in the tradition of the Duchampian readymade, and not entirely unlike the appropriation strategies of the Pictures Generation. However, whereas Marcel Duchamp famously re-contextualized a neutral, everyday object, Kelley’s dolls are melancholic, discarded vessels that have been imbued with unknowable personal narratives. Inviting the viewer to consider the finality of death through the metaphor of an inanimate (albeit anthropomorphic and emotionally charged) object is obviously an outlandish proposition. But it is precisely this sense of ultimate dislocation that allows the viewer to consider the mechanics of empathy and its function of displacement, the central goal of the series.
Mike Kelley’s legacy stretches like a dark shadow in the twilight of contemporary art. As the twentieth century came to a close, there was probably no artist more deeply concerned with and unflinchingly committed to the scrutiny and dissection of human psychology. Kelley was committed to mining the vast, often disorienting pop-cultural landscape for symbols and signifiers of our most disturbing, starkly Freudian drives and desires. Subjects that most artists would understandably avoid were not only beacons to Kelley, but cornerstones of his artistic practice. Over the course of more than three decades, Kelley produced a tremendous body of work across many media, including music, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting, video, and photography. With a probing eye and a cutting wit, Kelley studied the complex systems of identity, faith and control that direct popular culture, all the while subverting conventional notions of art-making.
The present lot, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove) #8, belongs to a series of fifteen works that were originally exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles in 1990. Each of the works in the series pairs a black and white acrylic painting on panel of a handmade doll with a small, black wooden box in which the doll depicted in the painting is interred. The works are installed on the floor, with the paintings leaning against the wall and their respective boxes placed in front of them. The mostly smiling faces of the dolls are faintly charged with dread and menace, not unlike John Wayne Gacy’s haunting self-portraits as a clown. Installed in a long row against the gallery wall, the works together appear like a lineup of criminal suspects, or curious grave markers. The proximity of the paintings and their boxes suggests a “faint promise of visual reunion” which cannot be fulfilled, resulting in “an oddball reflection on the processes of emotional exchange and empathetic investment bound up in the production, circulation and reception of the craft object” (J. C. Welchman, Mike Kelley, 2008, pp. 217-218). Kelley’s equation of empathy and displacement is mediated by the doll’s funereal presentation alongside its vaguely memorial painted portrait. The Minimalist connotations of the paintings’ colorless palette and the sculptural quality of the boxes resonate coldly, with sharp notes of cynicism and a dull drone of absurdity.
The Empathy Displacement series can be understood more broadly as a meditation on death, its pathos or lack thereof. Like the famed gold death mask of Agamemnon, the paintings in this series function as unique records of identity, taking the place of a body rendered inaccessible. In the case of the dolls, death is simulated, or at least gestured at, by the coffin-like boxes in which they have been horizontally sealed. The faces of the dolls can be glimpsed through a miniscule window that can be accessed beneath a small hatch on top of the box, undermining and complicating the inaccessibility that we naturally associate with death. The absurdity at the heart of the series lies in its literal subject: the craft doll. Kelley’s choice to incorporate these found objects is rooted in the tradition of the Duchampian readymade, and not entirely unlike the appropriation strategies of the Pictures Generation. However, whereas Marcel Duchamp famously re-contextualized a neutral, everyday object, Kelley’s dolls are melancholic, discarded vessels that have been imbued with unknowable personal narratives. Inviting the viewer to consider the finality of death through the metaphor of an inanimate (albeit anthropomorphic and emotionally charged) object is obviously an outlandish proposition. But it is precisely this sense of ultimate dislocation that allows the viewer to consider the mechanics of empathy and its function of displacement, the central goal of the series.