MIke Kelley, Catholic Tastes

The male artist ( or criminal) - Kelley, that is - must partly disappear , becoming half man. But where did the other half go? In the furniture works, a narcicissitic circle developed in which Kelley is both woman and man, both subject and object of his own desire. As such, the works signal what Kelley has called leitmotif: "failed eroticism". pg 27

- handmade, colourful, over random configuration... replaces male energy with a female alternative... applied to fetishized objects of childhood and domesticity... pg 28

Kelley never appears in drag. Instead, he appropriates forms of domestic labor and production traditionally seen as the cultural property of women, bending gender in a more complex and confusing way.  Kelley charts the parameters of powerlessness, chronicling the fears and insecurities around which we build our fortified identity. pg 162

Of corse dolls are mostly adult fabrications to begin with, expressing and adult ideal: the child as a cuddly and sterile creature devoid of genitals, incapable of recalling the grown-ups guild over their own sexuality. Kelley's well fingered playmates deflate the dysfunctional idealization, returning us to the childhood scene where the doll is less a screen for a projected alter ego than  a tactile object to be sucked, squeezed, humped, and drooled on until its last erotic delights have been yielded and it has become literally filthy.
pg 165

Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set, 1987

Exhibited in an adult context where your no suppose to touch anything

Life always overtakes art..... Kelley relentless honesty and poetics of the body discovers an understanding of character that ultimately reveals the quality and possibility go of the human condition... pg 231

Mike Kelley Cathotlic Taste,  Elisabeth Sassman, Whitney Abrams 1994