Mike Kelley: "Day Is Done"

Mike Kelley’s burlesque masterpiece, Day Is Done, is a work in progress conceived in three hundred and sixty-five separate chapters. Chapters 2 to 32 were staged as a complex and spectacular mixed-media installation—which Kelley scripted, scored, shot and sculpted—at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2005. To mark the first stage of this ambitious project, Kelley has edited an elaborate visual catalogue of Chapters 2-32. This richly illustrated book includes video stills and installation views, Kelley's libretto and selected writings and notes on key aspects of the project, and a critical review by John Welchman.
Each video chapter imaginatively reconstructs scenes from photographs of “extracurricular activity” that Kelley found in high school yearbooks. Over many years he has collected hundreds of such images and grouped them into categories referring to common forms of folk entertainment: plays, thematic costume days, holiday festivities, religious spectacles, hazing rituals, and so on.  Though not a standard narrative, Day Is Done features recurring characters and some semblance of narrative flow in a provocative look at the formative effects of school on the adolescent psyche.

Mike Kelley’s burlesque masterpiece, Day Is Done, is a work in progress conceived in three hundred and sixty-five separate chapters. Chapters 2 to 32 were staged as a complex and spectacular mixed-media installation—which Kelley scripted, scored, shot and sculpted—at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2005. To mark the first stage of this ambitious project, Kelley has edited an elaborate visual catalogue of Chapters 2-32. This richly illustrated book includes video stills and installation views, Kelley's libretto and selected writings and notes on key aspects of the project, and a critical review by John Welchman.
Each video chapter imaginatively reconstructs scenes from photographs of “extracurricular activity” that Kelley found in high school yearbooks. Over many years he has collected hundreds of such images and grouped them into categories referring to common forms of folk entertainment: plays, thematic costume days, holiday festivities, religious spectacles, hazing rituals, and so on.  Though not a standard narrative, Day Is Done features recurring characters and some semblance of narrative flow in a provocative look at the formative effects of school on the adolescent psyche.

D. Bryant - Library Journal

Kelley's art is often BIG. So, too, is this book, which tries to be, via still photographs and two music CDs, a record of Kelley's 365-chapter mixed-media installation at New York City's Gagosian Gallery in 2005. Described as "a work-in-progress," it seems a lifetime of images already. Kelley takes high school yearbooks as source material then builds his art through sculpture, actors in costume, sound, dance, and silhouettes, giving tribute to holiday festivities, student hazing, and student life. He includes notes on various aspects of the project, while Welchman (visual arts, Univ. of California, San Diego), who has written other books on Kelley, contributes a critical review. A work this big can either be grand and epic or an ego-driven self-indulgence. The latter seems to prevail here. We all have high school yearbooks and high school memories; Kelley's transforming them into a huge brew of images and sounds, with visuals posed and added, just because he could may have startled, thrilled, or disappointed viewers in installation form at the Gagosian Gallery; as a book, it simply disappoints. Not recommended.

Mike Kelley was born in Detroit and lives in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the world, include Tate Liverpool (2004), MACBA Barcelona (1997), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1993).

John Welchman is professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California at San Diego. He is the author of several books on Mike Kelley as well as Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles, published by Yale University Press.