Mike Kelley’s Multiplicity
by David Mather
Mike Kelley took the 19th-century German notion of Gesamtkuntswerk and made it flourish in the Rust Belt soil of late 20th-century America. His phantasmagorical performances and multifarious installations were subversive, scholarly, and ingenious, deploying a set of compositional strategies that can be understood as an epic iteration of Kelley's reliance on multiple authorial voices.