MIT Press

Afterall Books

Chapter Title: The Making of Educational Complex

Book Title: Mike Kelley

Book Subtitle: Educational Complex
Book Author(s): John Miller
Published by: MIT Press, Afterall Books. (2015)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17kk73h.4

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1. The Making of Educational Complex
One person’s utopia can be another’s nightmare. Ever since Thomas More
coined the term from the Greek roots ou (not) and topos (place) as the title of
his novel of 1516, it has carried contradictory yet overlapping meanings:
that of a ‘no place’ and that of a perfect place. This contradiction implies that
perfection can only ever be imaginary. Plato’s Republic (c.360 BCE) is the
first written example of what now may be considered a utopian scheme.
Plato proposed dividing society into a set structure, from lowest to highest,
of iron, bronze, silver and gold social classes. At the top, the gold citizens
were to enrol in an extended educational programme that ultimately would
yield enlightened leaders.1 Plato saw education as the basis of social
hierarchy.
Mike Kelley’s solo show ‘Toward a Utopian Arts Complex’, which
opened at Metro Pictures in New York on 21 October 1995, revolved around
the theme that so concerned Plato: how society can be structured through
education.2 Its centrepiece, Educational Complex (1995, fig.1–17), marked a
decisive shift from everything Kelley had done before, and it would serve
as a touchstone for much of his work to come. This sculpture features a
collection of architectural models representing all the schools the artist ever
attended plus his childhood home. Curiously, it looks cool and detached,
at odds stylistically with what previously had been an acerbic yet bluntly
proletarian body of work. Offsetting the work’s seemingly dispassionate
objectivity is an involved rhetorical framework about what the models
represent and how viewers should understand them. To some extent this
framework functions as an extension of the work itself, blurring lines
between intention, reception or signification.
The material form of Educational Complex comprises the archi-
tectural models arranged in grid formation on a composite sheet supported
by sawhorses and protected by a Plexiglas cover. The entire construction is
eight feet wide, sixteen feet long and fifty inches high. The base sections are
assembled on site and the models are arranged on the base before setting the
vitrine in place.3 Directly beneath, placed on the floor, is a mattress. The
models represent:

1) Kelley residence, Westland, Michigan;

2) Harvey Street Kindergarten, Westland, Michigan;

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 3) St. Mary School, Wayne, Michigan;
4) Stevenson Middle School, Westland, Michigan;
5) John Glenn High School, Westland, Michigan;
6) Old Art and Architecture Building, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, Michigan;
7) Art and Architecture Building, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, Michigan;
8) California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Valencia, California.

The appearance of these combined buildings, not surprisingly, fails to meet

utopian expectations, suggesting instead a labyrinth of bland conventional-
ity – or conventional blandness. Although Metro Picture’s exhibition check-
list identified each, Kelley did not include this information in the work per
se.4
Educational Complex now resides in the permanent collection of
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The museum’s website
features a short clip in which Kelley explains the work:

I decided to build a reconstruction of every school I ever went to with

all the parts I could not remember left out. And then these were
combined to one super-school. They were cut apart and reconfigured,
in a kind of very formalised way that made it look more like a kind
of modernist architecture. … Educational Complexwas done directly
in response to the rising infatuation of the public with issues of
repressed memory syndrome and child abuse … The implication is
that anything that can’t be remembered is somehow the result of trauma.

So the parts I could not remember of these buildings was

the majority of them, probably like 80 per cent. So that meant
80 per cent of these buildings that I had been in for most of
my life were the site of some kind of repressed trauma. 5

Here, Kelley’s account is directive; he prompts the viewer as to how to see his
work. Through this direction, the traumatic displaces the utopic – a shift that
suggests a Benjaminian dialectic: that every document of civilisation also
records barbarism.6

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 In the years leading up to Educational Complex, Kelley had gained
a reputation for embracing vernacular culture as a formally nuanced dis-
course. His stance was dissident and transgressive; he aligned himself with
adolescence. More specifically, his practice can be construed as an out-
growth of the carnivalesque youth- and countercultures of the 1960s and
70s, exemplified by the Diggers, the Yippies, Sun Ra or John Sinclair’s White
Panther Party. Through his association with Sonic Youth, viewers identified
his work with grunge, especially with that sensibility’s anti-technique and
its gender bending. It is from this background that, rather than concealing
the disparities of social class, Kelley sought to exacerbate them. This attitude
characterised ‘Catholic Tastes’, the definitive, mid-career survey of his work
curated by Elisabeth Sussman at the Whitney Museum in 1993.7 The exhibi-
tion exposed standards of taste as an invidious social logic that stigmatises
working-class values. Its title underscored this by alluding to the status of
waves of Roman Catholic immigrants who entered the otherwise Protestant
society of the United States on the bottom rung. ‘Catholic Tastes’ linked their
history to an aesthetic of subordination.
On the cover of the ‘Catholic Tastes’ catalogue, Kelley poses as a
janitor, wielding a mop. The gesture may seem self-deprecating, but it is
exactly the extent of his acquired artistic status that authorises him to fash-
ion his public persona in this way. His father worked as a public school jani-
tor, caring for buildings and cleaning up after others. The janitor is the first
to find a mess and, often, the first to be blamed for it. In such a capacity,
Kelley's father served at the bottom end of an institution that typically cre-
ates and reproduces the terms of social inequality, one that nonetheless
irrevocably transformed his own son’s class status. Moreover, on the next
level, higher education is tied to the neoliberal information economy that
undercut the industrial prosperity of Kelley’s youth. Thus, education ulti-
mately transformed the context for his class status as well. By the early
1990s, Detroit, the city of once prosperous unionised auto workers and the
city with which he so closely identified, had become an icon of economic dis-
location: the first American ruin. In contrast, the Whitney retrospective in
New York proved to be an unqualified success, ratifying him as a major
force in contemporary art. And, just as his position had changed from char-
ismatic challenger to established authority, he turned to architecture as a
profile of institutionalisation.

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 Despite – or perhaps because of – this official recognition, Kelley
conceived Educational Complex against what he claimed was a misreading
of his Arena series (1990), the work that comprised the core of his Whitney
retrospective. This series typically featured second-hand stuffed animals in
quasi-formal arrangements; two or three, for example, might face off on a
knit afghan placed directly on the floor. This rudimentary form of theatre
dramatised what he saw as their primal allure: ‘For the very young child a
stuffed animal is not simply a model of some agreeable object, a friendly
animal or an object to weave fantasies around like a doll. It is primarily a
tactile object that promotes great physical pleasure.’8 In short, these once-
cherished-but-now-discarded objects, worn and sometimes soiled, were
explicitly bound to corporeal, and thus libidinal, gratification. Kelley
claimed that viewers took them to be evidence of sexual abuse.
When the Arena series debuted at Metro Pictures in 1990, the
reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Most of the critics were uncon-
cerned with traumatic abuse and none of them suggested that Kelley had
suffered any himself.9 Even so, Kelley complained: ‘The critical reception
always tended to be about nostalgia and trauma. I finally got so pissed off
about this that I just said, “I’ll give people what they want.” I invented this
pseudo-biography and started doing “biographical work”.’10 This amounted
to taunting his viewers. In 1990, he produced Nostalgic Depiction of the
Innocence of Childhood and Manipulating Mass Produced Idealized
Objects, two photographs that feature the S&M performance artists Sheree
Rose and Bob Flanagan in what looks like a plywood storage room. Rose
straddles a large bunny and Flanagan uses a smaller animal to smear him-
self with what appears to be excrement. Kelley described these images as
‘fake-pornography’.11 The following year he inserted a mug shot of himself
into a motley line-up of seven stuffed toys and knit figures. This was Ahh...
Youth! (1991, fig.23), featured as the album cover and liner art for Sonic
Youth’s Dirty (1992). Taken together, these photos suggest an unwholesome
subtext, one that Kelley characteristically disavowed by ascribing it to his
viewers.
The antagonism between Kelley and his audience, both real and
imagined, concerns the dynamics of projection. If he trumped some of this
up, it nonetheless advances his ultimate goal of pitting his art not above the
world (as in transcendent, Bretonian Surrealism) but against it.12 Because

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he considered art to be primarily a belief system in which viewers will make
of artworks what they will, he feared that the artwork – his own especially –
would devolve into a morass of arbitrary biases. Thus, his antagonism was
pre-emptive; he abused his audience on account of ideas it had not yet voiced
and perhaps had not even considered. Conversely, according to a convention
Brian O’Doherty once called ‘the reciprocal semiotics of the hostility ritual’,
his audience may have come to expect, or even desire, this abuse.13 Either
way, Kelley courted the inherent arbitrariness of projection as a way to
qualify, even surmount, empirical reality. Projection, then, could function as
a fundamentally aesthetic process – one not without utopian prospects.
Even before the trauma question, Kelley liked to exact revenge on
social hierarchies through self-caricature. The supplementary disclosures
he made about Educational Complex in interviews and artist’s statements
caricature psychoanalysis. Stripped of these, however, it is his most imper-
sonal work, one that purports to reveal his past, but yields only a blank
structure. If these blanks are correlated with trauma of some kind, this
entails an imaginative leap. Thus, conjecture becomes key, and he under-
scored it as such.
Must everything that cannot be remembered go back to trauma? In
Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, 1901), Sigmund Freud postulated that slips of the tongue and the forget-
ting of names can be understood as parapraxes, or symptoms of repression.
From this standpoint, absences, voids, lapses and even empty space all lay
claim to significance, raising the question of what warrants analysis and
what the terms of that analysis should be. With this, Kelley confronts an
architectural absolute with liminal conditions of subjectivity. Even so, his
trauma is a pretext in every sense of the word. On this basis, Educational
Complex functions as a subterfuge, ostensibly limiting any criticism aimed
at it to projection.
Despite the series of feints with which Kelley confronted his public,
the underlying forces are real. For many artists, the retrospective, as a seal of
institutional approval, is the kiss of death. In an exchange of cultural capital
for financial capital, it can lock them into a signature style. Right after
‘Catholic Tastes’, Kelley began painting over his student works. He tried to
replicate painting techniques he had learned as an undergraduate so that his
intervention would be invisible. Likening this remedial exercise to ‘going

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back home in shame’, he said he did it because he didn’t want to be known as
‘the stuffed animal artist’.14 This also led him to reconsider his education.
Grasping that the legitimation the Whitney Museum had conferred upon
him was predicated upon an underlying set of prior legitimations, namely
those of a gradated educational system, he seized upon these as an object of a
self-reflexive critique.
One of an artwork’s most important features, according to Kelley,
is its title. He was especially critical of Abstract Expressionist and Color
Field titles, which so often rely on fuzzy – and sometimes laughable – chains
of association. Educational Complex is one of his best titles because it com-
presses at least three meanings into a compact phrase. Here, ‘complex’
might mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome or a
political apparatus. He exploits these possibilities to test the institution of art
as an ideological horizon, linking them to a dialectic between the sublime
and the uncanny. This book follows corresponding lines of enquiry: first, by
considering the work’s production as an architectural representation; sec-
ond, by examining it in terms of education and repression; third, by interro-
gating its implied conflation of conspiracy theory with institutional critique.
Before discussing the genealogies that animate Educational
Complex, what the work is, what it represents, how it was produced and
how it was received all need to be considered. To do so is somewhat para-
doxical because the piece is fundamentally incoherent; Kelley asks his view-
ers to contemplate what is not there, the identifiable parts serve primarily to
frame this gaping absence.15 Nonetheless, how does one initially engage the
array of seemingly anonymous buildings that comprise Educational
Complex?
Kelley’s aim was to reconstruct the floor plans of seven schools plus
his childhood home entirely from memory. Even so, his preliminary
sketches fell short:

… it soon became apparent that my memories of the structures

were so poor that it was impossible to construct three-dimensional
models based on them. My attempts at drawing floor plans
resulted in incomprehensible sketches of disconnected rooms with
no information as to their spatial relationships. I was also incapable
of placing them, even roughly, within the approximate shapes of

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 the buildings’ exteriors … Thus I decided to rely on photographs
and floor plans to help me reconstruct the schools’ architectures
more accurately. In contrast to the exterior detail, I hoped that
the partiality of my memory would be rendered more striking. 16

This account carries distinct premises and implications, with the former
concerning assumptions about memory and the latter about representation.
Kelley purports to flatten these complexities into a simple equation: forget-
ting equals abuse. Yet his inability to reconstruct school floor plans ex nihilo
is attributable less to ‘poor memory’ than it is to the nature of spatial habitu-
ation. Despite gaps he anticipated and even hoped for, he essentially miscon-
strued the contextual nature of space itself. Instead of memorising every last
detail, one feels the way as one goes along, guided by familiar reference
points. As such, the apprehension of space is an ongoing endeavour, not a
final aggregate – even if the apparent fixity of architecture suggests other-
wise. If dreams seemingly promise a chance to re-inhabit spaces in full, that
sensation vanishes as soon as one attempts to recount the dream itself; in
short, the recollection hangs from a slender logical thread. Against these
conditions, Kelley turned to photographs, blueprints and site visits to ren-
der, as he said, the partiality of his memory more striking. In such a way,
these references helped delineate an allegorical opposition between inside
and outside, between surface and depth. They also entailed a more deliber-
ate selection of what he could not remember.
After extensive research, Kelley still faced the typical challenges of
the realist artist: what to include, what to leave out, degree of detail and so
on. While Educational Complex derives from a forensic conceit, such
choices further underscore the allegorical thrust of the project. Just as no
one investigating traumatic abuse could expect architecture alone to yield
credible evidence, here, the end result is a blank, namely the subjectivity
engendered by an apparatus that one feels so keenly as one’s own individual-
ity. At this impasse, Kelley in effect converted a husk of public space into an
arena for private trauma, real and imagined. In so doing, he produced a
work that is both miniature and massive. If his prior work invoked libera-
tory desublimation, Educational Complex quashes that prospect. It envi-
sions social space as a hermetic, involuted system, a scenario infused not
with cathartic release but with recrimination.

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 Aside from the inclusion of the artist’s childhood home (presuma-
bly as the first site of learning), Educational Complex focuses on institu-
tional space. In such a system, with its observed hierarchies and enforced
social order, the mere suspicion of abuse threatens to metastasise into
trauma. Here, an abstraction of social processes enters the project: that of the
apparatus, that of the interpellation of subjectivity. If Kelley’s use of the word
‘complex’ harbours a residual joke, that humour is tainted by an uneasy
complicity. Despite this incipient pessimism, Kelley and those who helped
make the work did so with a mounting sense of excitement and expectancy.
Kelley produced Educational Complex in his Eagle Rock studio,
formerly a three-car garage, with the help of several model-makers plus his
assistants. The studio was part of the property at 7019 North Figueroa that
he bought in the mid-1980s. Moving there, to a two-bedroom house, repre-
sented an upgrade from the modest Hollywood rental where he had lived
and worked after graduating from CalArts in 1978. Because Eagle Rock was
a rough district then, the contractor, who had built the house for his own
use, had walled in the entire yard, with only the front façade – windows
barred – exposed to the street. He had also built a swimming pool, which Kelley
filled with sand and turned into a cactus garden as soon as he moved in.
During the making of Educational Complex, T. Kelly Mason, Sam
Durant and Dave Muller worked in succession as Kelley’s studio assistants. The
model-makers, with one exception, were graduate students at the Southern
California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and included Michael Cook,
Mark Skiles, Talbot McLanahan and Kim Colin. Christian Schneider, a
German art student recommended by Durant, joined them.
Although Mason was already assisting Kelley when Educational
Complex began, he never worked on it directly. During the spate of museum
shows that followed ‘Catholic Tastes’, his responsibilities were to handle
installations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Haus der Kunst
in Munich, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Kunsthalle
Basel. Mason would figure out a preliminary plan on site, which Kelley
would tweak. Kelley installed works for maximum impact, always consi-
dering the body scale of the spectator, what one might see when turning a
corner and how different pieces correspond spatially. Eventually he turned
to models to plan these relationships more accurately, and such preparation
helped pave the way for Educational Complex. 17

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 In Kelley’s oeuvre, an architectural model first appears in Oh, The
Pain Of It All (1980, fig.18), a work that concerns mnemonic architectural
space and, as the title suggests, trauma. About a decade later, two encounters
pointed him toward using models more consistently. In 1990, he collabo-
rated with Frank Gehry on a project for the Chiat/Day advertising agency,
Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy
Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1991, fig.22).18
Gehry sent him a model to help plan this project. Around the same time, he
had seen preparatory models in another artist’s studio – probably John
Baldessari’s – and soon after he started using them too, but remarked to
Mason how ‘weird’ it was to be putting miniature replicas of his work into
these tiny boxes. He began to ask himself what it meant to position his work
in exhibition spaces and what these settings did to the work itself.19
Just as his interest in architecture was growing, Kelley, in Mason’s
words, ‘killed off the stuffed animals’ with Craft Morphology Flow Chart
(1991, fig.24). That work’s rows of sock monkeys and other knitted toys lined
up on generic folding tables indeed invoke a mortuary feel. Kelley had
grown sick of the ‘double pleasure’ collectors reaped from his stuffed ani-
mals: edgy and cute.20
After Mason resigned to pursue his own career, Sam Durant
replaced him. Durant worked for Kelley for about nine months, helping to
cut foam-core parts for the models, making the supporting tabletops and
sawhorses, and fashioning the John Glenn High School’s domed auditorium
from fibreglass. Kelley obtained blueprints for at least four structures: his
high school; the old and new Art and Architecture Buildings at the University
of Michigan; and CalArts. He blew these plans up to scale and spray-
mounted them to foam-core sheets so that they could serve as cutting tem-
plates. As the project expanded, Durant had to build a second set of tabletops
to accommodate the enlarged work. He made these from varnished sheets
of ¾-inch plywood undergirded by a framework of wooden struts and cov-
ered with a layer of Gator Board sheeting.21
To Durant, the project seemed like ‘a jump in both physical scale
and scope of ideas’. The production time reflects this. Kelley initially esti-
mated that it would take three and a half months to produce the work.
Instead, it took eighteen.22 The slow pace of progress exasperated him. He

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complained that a single staircase might take a day. Yet the reason for this
was his own mandate for consistent craftsmanship and detail.
When he started working for Kelley, Durant was already making
his Abandoned Houses (1994, fig.42), which consist of foam-core models of
Case Study Houses childishly mutilated with pencils and markers. Durant
credits Kelley for the insight that ‘architectural cleanliness, order and geom-
etry is about repression’. 23 In this, Kelley had grasped a façade-like aspect of
the social order that activist-writer Jean Genet identified as a sign system: ‘I
was astounded by so rigorous an edifice whose details were united against
me. Nothing in the world is irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the
stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary.’ 24 From
this perspective, while an architectural façade may conceal a site of abuse
within, on the outside it conspires to act as a repressive signifier. Thus, recon-
structions of the schools' exteriors harbour twofold political implications.
Kelley recruited SCI-Arc graduate students by faxing a ‘want ad’ to
the school’s library. Michael Cook saw the fax as it was coming in and
applied immediately. Having studied art as an undergraduate, he knew
Kelley’s work well. He showed up at the studio with models in hand and
Kelley hired him on the spot. After Kelley outlined the project, Cook realised
it would take an entire team and recommended that he hire more workers.
Mark Skiles joined next, followed by Christian Schneider and Talbot
McLanahan. McLanahan worked only for one month.25 To replace her,
Cook contacted Kim Colin, a recent SCI-Arc graduate who, impressed by
‘the depth of [Kelley’s] thinking’ in Craft Morphology Flow Chart, was
eager to join the project.26 Skiles eventually left to complete his master’s
degree, but later invited Kelley to lecture at SCI-Arc. He and Colin also inter-
viewed Kelley for the school’s journal, Offramp.27 After Cook left too, Colin
headed the model-making team.
Colin recalls that a general vision inspired Educational Complex
and that it grew ‘accretionally’.She wasstruckbyKelley’sdecisiontouseconven-
tional materials for unconventional ends.28 Initially, however, he had
assumed this would be just ‘a foam-core and hot-glue exercise’:

I was totally naïve about the process of model-building … I didn’t

realise what a craft it is. I thought architecture was standardised
enough, especially the kind of institutional architecture that

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 the majority of the buildings in Educational Complex represent,
that if I brought in professionals … we could just whip them out,
and I could chop them up without any second thoughts. 29

As a result, Kelley became involved in every step of the model-making process.

On the one hand, he wanted enough detail to create a realistic effect; on the
other, he was after simple, straightforward structures. He decided what to
eliminate on an ad hoc basis. If parts didn’t seem right aesthetically, he
remade them. (While preparing for ‘Catholic Tastes’, he had discussed the
work with Sussman. According to her, the foam-core version was to be a
prototype for a wooden model that was never realised.) 30
Kelley initially presented Cook with a sheaf of architectural draw-
ings. Cook selected plan (overhead) and section (side) views, and worked
from these. Sometimes, the choice of materials determined a model’s scale,
such as that representing the University of Michigan’s old Art and
Architecture Building whose detailed façade Cook rendered in 3/16” chip-
board. Kelley varied the sizes of other models as well, in part to make them
all fit onto a single rectangular base.
The models’ foam-core edges required special attention.
Architectural model-builders typically finish these by either folding over
and gluing the lips of paper left at the cuts or just leaving them ‘as is’. Kelley
wanted to conceal the foam layer but considered the fold-and-glue tech-
nique too time-consuming and impermanent, so he spackled over the
exposed foam and lightly sanded it for more crisp edges.
To work out the interiors, Kelley would sit with Cook and draw the
floor plans based on narratives, associations and emotional affect, some-
times ‘massaging’ them for formal reasons as well. Cook, in turn, would
redraw the sketches with a T-square.31 This working method shows that the
process of ‘remembering’ was hardly spontaneous or straightforward:

The project wasn’t about [memory]. It was fiction to begin with;

I wasn’t interested in remembering anything. There’s not much
to remember anyway – my biography is fairly dull. It’s much better
to fill in these empty spaces with fiction than the boring truth.
I filled in the blanks with pastiches of things that had affected
me when I was a child: cartoons, films and the kinds of stories

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 one finds in the literature of repressed memory syndrome – horrible
stories of sexual abuse. I just mixed all that up. 32

To be clear, Kelley’s imaginings are what constituted the ‘filling in’; these are
not represented explicitly in the model, except as blank, foam-core blocks.
They are otherwise unknowable to the viewer.
One morning Colin arrived at the studio and found sheets of glass-
ine placed over some of the models, with ‘fanciful’ (Kelley’s description)
organic shapes drawn on them in marker. They indicated openings Kelley
wanted to cut to reveal the buildings' interiors. Later, he also decided to lift
the roofs on several other models for the same reason. He took the latter
approach from exploded axonometric drawings that show interior and
exterior spaces together.33 These reveals owe something to Dan Graham’s
Alteration to a Suburban House (1978, fig.37), a model that proposes to
replace the front façade of a ranch house with a floor-to-ceiling picture win-
dow. Kelley took special care to expose the CalArts sublevel (fig.16) by cut-
ting a hole in the approximate centre of the platform and placing a mattress
(visible in fig.17) for viewers below it, likening the perspective to ‘looking up
a skirt’. Because the underground can represent the unconscious, this par-
ticular view inflects all the others.34
The Kelley family home was a late addition. Colin drafted a plan
from a freehand sketch Kelley made from memory. They decided to place
the house at the very front of the layout.
Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the
Modern Unhomely (1992) served as an unexpectedly direct inspiration for
Educational Complex. Kelley had been engaged with concerns similar to
Vidler’s for some time, culminating in ‘The Uncanny’ (1993, fig.25–26), his
tour-de-force exhibition-within-an-exhibition at ‘Sonsbeek 93’ in Arnhem.
After reading Vidler’s book, Kelley contacted him, and Vidler, in turn, went
on to write about Educational Complex. 35
Rudolph Steiner's first Goetheanum (1920, fig.35) in Dornach,
Switzerland served as an important reference for Kelley because it ‘func-
tioned as a macrocosm mirroring the aesthetic laws of individual artistic
productions held within it’.36 Construction began in 1913, and when it
opened in 1920 the Goetheanum was to be a summer theatre for the

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Anthroposophical Society. Steiner intended it as a Gesamtkunstwerk that
would synthesis diverse artistic media.
As a compositional paradigm, Hans Hofmann’s ‘push-pull’ theory
drove, first, Kelley’s renderings of the schools’ interiors and, later, the layout
of the complex itself. Push-pull had been a central part of Kelley’s artistic
training at the University of Michigan. This theory postulates that contrast-
ing blocks of solid colour create painterly space. Hofmann once declared:
‘To sense the invisible and to be able to create it – that is art.’37 Perhaps in this
vein, Kelley joked that he did not want his arrangement to resemble Henry
Ford’s Greenfield Village, the historic architecture collection that includes
the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, a replica of Thomas Edison’s laboratory,
Luther Burbank’s office, Rosa Parks’s home, Noah Webster’s Connecticut
home and, tellingly, Ford’s own childhood home.38 Instead, Kelley just grid-
ded out the various models, heedless of what their logical architectural
relationship otherwise might be, equating his blocks of ‘repressed space’
with Hofmann’s blocks of colour:

I wanted to play up these repressed areas formally. That’s why

I decided not to chop up the individual models too much.
My initial conception was to remove all of the forgotten spaces
and to radically reassemble what was left over into completely
new structures. But I changed my mind; this would have
completely dispensed with the forgotten spaces when I really
wanted to fetishise them. 39

Since Hofmann’s theory concerned colour in painting and since Kelley was
making a monochromatic sculpture, he could apply this theory only by way
of analogy. Vis-à-vis the Goetheanum, push-pull would replace Steiner’s
metaphysical system: ‘The model is a kind of über-architecture proposing
Hofmann’s compositional theory as a worldview – a religion.’ 40 Much as he
might mock Hofmann’s impact, it was there all the same. Was he not staking
everything on his ability to sense the invisible and to create it?
After receiving a teaching offer from CalArts, Sam Durant resigned
and recommended that Dave Muller replace him. Muller was a natural
choice since he was already playing bass in Super Session, the band Kelley
fronted with Ann Magnuson. Like Durant, Muller also had already used an

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architectural model of his studio in his work, namely Poster for D301 Exhibition
(1993, fig.41). He would work as Kelley’s assistant for the next five years.
Coming in on the tail end of the project, he finished it by spray-painting the
model with a coat of white latex. Clad in a jumpsuit and a full-face vapour
mask, he appears doing this on the cover of the monograph Educational
Complex Onwards: 1995–2008 (2009, fig.9). For Kelley, the decision to rent
a commercial spray gun represented a step up in production values. Before,
most of the studio work was done by hand, and Muller likened its atmos-
phere to ‘a slow-moving elf workshop’. At the end of each day, the notoriously
thrifty Kelley would ritualistically sweep up all the leftover foam-core cut-
tings into black, plastic trash bags, intending to recycle them in subsequent
works. 41
Muller describes how the effect of painting the entire model white
was to render the complex ghostlike – ‘one step away from a line drawing’.42
The surrealist connotations of this are obvious: something that is not quite
there, not quite real. This fits with Heinrich Woelfflin’s sense of the architec-
tural sublime, which, as Vidler puts it, ‘necessitates the “half-closed eyes”
that see lines more vaguely in favour of unlimited space and the “elusive
magic of light”’. This indistinct vision ‘signals the end of bodily projection in
its formed and bounded character, and perhaps the end of architecture
itself’.43 Would that be utopia?
Since Kelley had his friend, the musician and exhibition photogra-
pher Fredrik Nilsen, document the making of Educational Complex, this
indicates that a certain degree of theatre, coupled with an anticipation of its
significance, surrounded its production. Informal snapshots afforded Kelley
and his assistants an opportunity to clown around in the studio, too. One of
his favourites, taken by them, shows the model of his home perched atop
Muller’s bass amp (1995, fig.3). Muller suggests that the automobile design
programme at the Art Center College of Design (where Kelley taught for
many years) inspired him to consider the spectacle of production. Funded
largely by big car companies, it was and remains a high-tech facility, one of
the first to use 3D printers. It was also the school’s biggest draw in terms of
enrolment. For that reason, Art Center showcased this equipment along
with the students’ clay and fibreglass prototypes at the centre of the school.
No one could have missed what was going on there.

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 The immediate neighbourhood around the North Figueroa studio
impacted the making of Educational Complex as well. To one side of
Kelley’s property stood an auto-body shop where workers sprayed cars and
parts all day long. To the other lay the Optimist Boys Home Ranch, a special
education school. As Kelley acquired an adjoining apartment building (hous-
ing former students Mason and Diana Thater) and a small bungalow that
served as a combination guest house, recording studio and rehearsal space,
his home/studio compound came to resemble, increasingly, a small college
campus.Shortly after finishing Educational Complex, he expanded to a stu-
dio on York Boulevard in Eagle Rock, which he shared with Paul McCarthy,
who at the time was producing works such as Cultural Gothic (1992–93,
fig.40), a kinetic sculpture depicting a father, son and a goat – which the boy
appears to sodomise. Since McCarthy already had other facilities in Los
Angeles, he was not often there, leaving Kelley free reign of the space. With
this, Kelley continued to step up the scale of his works.44
When it came to resources, Kelley was a master of exploiting
exactly what was available to him at every point in his career. Many of his
early pieces are simply black-and-white acrylic paintings on paper. With
these, he could pack an entire show onto a roll and take it with him as carry-
on luggage. In contrast, his later Kandor installations might require an
industrial cargo container. While Educational Complex is a pivotal work
for Kelley, in terms of facture it is transitional, significantly less slick than
what was to come. Despite its painstaking modelling, some finer details, on
close examination, appear tentative, i.e. the result of pushing to the limit
what an X-acto knife can fashion from foam core.
When Educational Complex premiered at Metro Pictures, Colin
and Muller installed it. Shortly after, David Ross, then director of the
Whitney Museum, purchased the sculpture for the museum’s permanent
collection for $125,000, most likely with the 20 per cent discount customar-
ily accorded to museums.45 Elisabeth Sussman recalls that, for the time, this
was a substantial sum, especially for a work that would not necessarily find
favour among the museum’s trustees.46 The Whitney wanted to protect the
work with a Plexiglas vitrine, which Kelley agreed to and had Colin design.
Initially, he proposed a dome that would echo that of the John Glenn High
School auditorium, a structure he considered preposterous.47 Technically,
however, this proved too big to make, so he settled on a rectilinear vitrine,

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which a Plexiglas fabricator built for about $9,000.48 Given the size, even
this modified design posed a structural challenge. Colin initially considered
supporting it with cables strung from the ceiling, but instead used Lucite
posts. Although the vitrine was supposed to protect the models, it turned out
to be the most vulnerable part of the work and has been replaced more than
once. In formal terms, it offsets the complex as an impervious system. No
doubt this effect sparked Kelley’s interest in Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar
(1963), as well his subsequent Kandor series (fig.34), which refers to the
miniature, artificially preserved capital of the planet Krypton in Superman
comics. As Kelley observed, ‘Krypton is the home that can never be revisited,
the past that can never be recovered. Yet there it is, shrunken to the size of a
dollhouse – an ageless memento in real time.’49
‘Toward a Utopian Arts Complex’ received a mixed response from
the press and art magazines. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman
dismissed the show as ‘a big, extravagant joke’, plagued by a web of confus-
ing and frustrating references.50 Gary Stephan in his review opined that ‘the
baroque ambition’ of the project collapsed into illegibility.51 Taking a more
measured tone, The New Yorker characterised the project as ‘a sometimes
bewildering installation by the grunge Conceptualist’, concluding that it
offered ‘a jaundiced perspective that is as funny as it is self-serving’.52 In
Time Out, Howard Halle considered the model as ‘a wry comment on how
even that most anarchistic and perpetually adolescent of occupations – artist
– is shaped according to programme’.53 In a longer article, Peter Schjeldahl
put forward a literary analysis, casting the show as a satire of art schools,
noting that the common fault of satirists is to be seduced by the very right-
eousness they ridicule. He added that while Kelley was ‘as schoolish of an
artist as there ever was’, he deployed an irony that was ‘cruel but not patron-
ising because he patently identifies with the twisted life force of the lumpen’.
In seeing ‘Toward a Utopian Arts Complex’ as a wholesale rejection of art
education, Schjeldahl echoed his friend Dave Hickey’s attack on the ‘thera-
peutic institution’ in his 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on
Beauty.54 In Texte zur Kunst, David Reisman observed: ‘Utopian schemes
embody a desire for social harmony, but they are inevitably based on
repression’, further noting, ‘Art students may have extremely mixed feelings
about the values they are internalising. At its worst, schooling consists of the
old stealing from the young – stealing time, stealing money and providing

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a curriculum that reinforces a self-serving institutional agenda.’55 Kelley
himself proved to be the most scathing, yet also the most facetious of all:
‘Since I am an artist, it seemed natural to look to my own aesthetic training
as the root of my secret indoctrination in perversity and possibly as the site
of my own abuse. My education must have been a form of mental abuse, of
brainwashing.’56 Here, by omitting his own long-standing commitment to
teaching, he avoided having to admit how absolutely the generally accepted
teaching style he adopted – namely, a demand for the art student to ‘just
be yourself’, a demand synced with the then-emergent regime of flexible
capitalism – had overtaken the master-pupil construct of Hofmann’s era.
While none of these reviews missed the salient issues of Educational
Complex, the work’s more discursive critique of artistic legitimation went
largely unremarked upon. With it, Kelley engages education in a radical
manner – which is to say, grasping it at its roots.

2. Education: Apparatus and Experience

… one ideological State apparatus certainly has the dominant role,

although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent.
This is the School.
– Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ 57

As a means of subjective expression, the artwork promises to reveal a

utopian dimension latent in everyday life. That, at least, is the traditional
expectation. In contrast, Educational Complex grounds the very recognisa-
bility of the artwork in schooling. The school, in turn, appears as an institu-
tion that lies at the intersection between knowledge and power. Through this
confluence, it converts experience into a kind of information.
Art critics initially addressed Educational Complex primarily
from a liberal humanist bias, presuming that artistry constitutes a kind of
free subjectivity that art school can only corrupt. The bohemian represents
a kindred ideal of transcendent subjectivity. It is a figure that resulted from
universal education and developed in tandem with the Industrial
Revolution. As mass literacy produced, for the first time, an intelligentsia
that could not be employed to the level of its full capability, its surplus capac-
ity, latent and disenchanted, congealed in a form of relative autonomy, albeit

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