With the talk of Marina Abramovic, I was thinking of other artists whose work deals with ritual abuse. I'm not saying the artist Mike Kelley has anything to do with PizzaGate, but I thought his work would be of interest.
Mike committed suicide several years ago. His art used stuffed animals in some of his work, and people thought it was because he had been abused as a child, but he denied it. Mike talked about this in an interview on YouTube that I can't find at the moment. This is one of his breakthrough works: http://collection.whitney.org/object/7317
One of his last works was called Mobile Homestead. From MOCA Detroit "Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead is a permanent art work by the late artist Mike Kelley, located on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It is a full-scale replica of the single-story ranch-style house located in the Detroit suburb of Westland in which Kelley grew up and created to serve as a community gallery and gathering space." - http://mocadetroit.org/mobile-homestead/
From WNYC: "What sits beneath Mobile Homestead is a completely different story. Kelley designed a basement level of bunkerlike rooms that can only be reached by a series of ladders and tunnels. This is definitely private space — it does not meet any kind of code for safety — that Kelley intended for “rites and rituals of an aesthetic nature.”
“It makes you feel like you’re lost,” says Kelley’s friend and bandmate Cary Loren, “even though you’re maybe 20 feet into it or 30 you kind of lose your equilibrium. You just don’t feel entirely safe in there.”
What are these tunnels? Kelley “was obsessed with this idea of subterranean space” according to John Welchman. He became increasingly agoraphobic. And he was intrigued with stories like that of the McMartin Preschool, where childcare workers were falsely accused of bizarre rituals and sexual abuse in tunnels below the preschool. Kelley made a work called Educational Complex influenced by that trial. He designed models of every school he attended from memory; the spaces he couldn't remember he left blank, and filled in those spaces with videos representing traumatic experiences that might have happened there.
Kelley explicitly denied that he himself had been victimized. But his obsession with the subject is complicated by serious depression that led to his suicide in January 2012 — immediately after he finalized arrangements for the piece. Kelley left no note; what he left was Mobile Homestead. John Welchman sees a complex psychological metaphor in the piece. “The very fabric of Mobile Homestead, the base on which it stands, is the idea that public art may in the end be based on lies and deception, it may be based on wishful thinking at the very least.” Some part of Mike Kelley’s psyche was as dark and unsafe as the tunnels he built below his house." From http://www.wnyc.org/story/309521-the-secrets-of-mobile-homestead/
I've read that Mike Kelley committed suicide due to depression, a relationship ending, and some issues with his career. He was very anti-mainstream, and toward the end of his career he chose to be represented by Gagosian Gallery, the biggest gallery in the world. I read it was mainly because that gallery offered the most space for his increasingly growing installations.
Mike may just have been making art based on art horrible things that exist in our society, and this may have no connection to PizzaGate. Still, I thought it would be of interest.
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scaryshit ago
Very much of interest.