Mike KELLEY / 2006-2009 / digital / 169min. (USA)
script: Mike KELLEY / original music: Mike KELLEY, Scott BENZEL / choreography: Kate FOLEY
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. 
　
DAY IS DONE is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that form a loose, fractured narrative. The video comprises parts 2 through 32 of Kelley’s multi-faceted project EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITY PROJECTIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS, in which trauma, abuse and repressed memory are refracted through personal and mass-cultural experience. The source material is a series of high school yearbook photographs of “extracurricular activities,” specifically those that represent what Kelley has termed “socially accepted rituals of deviance.” Kelley then stages video narratives around these found images.
In DAY IS DONE, these restagings take the form of “folk entertainments” that Kelley memorably subverts. Featuring characters such as Motivational Vampire, Morose Ghoul and Devil/Barber, much of the action—antic song-and-dance numbers and dramatic scenes, with Satan as emcee—takes place in a generic school gymnasium and a wooded landscape.
Writes Kelley: “For this project, I limited myself to specific iconographic motifs taken from the following files: Religious Performances, Thugs, Dance, Hick and Hillbilly, Halloween and Goth, Satanic, Mimes, and Equestrian Events. Many of the source photographs are of people in costume singing or dancing, so the resulting tapes are generally music videos. In fact, I consider DAY IS DONE to be a kind of fractured feature-length musical…. The experience of viewing it is somewhat akin to channel-surfing on television.”
The video reconstructions were originally seen within an ambitious, sprawling exhibition of video/sculpture installations, photographs, sets, props and drawings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2005; the videos were incorporated into 25 sculptural viewing stations. Writes Kelley, “My intention was to create a kind of spatialized filmic montage: a feature-length film made up of multiple simultaneous and sequential scenes playing in architectural space.”
　

Mike KELLEY

West Coast artist Mike Kelley was one of the most provocative and influential figures in contemporary art. Kelley’s idiosyncratic body of work includes performance art, installations, and sculptures. His works negotiate a highly charged terrain of desire, dread and sociopathology in everyday American life. With deadpan humor, he often reinvests childhood toys, kitsch, and ordinary objects with subversive meaning.
For many years Kelley was involved in video projects as performer, collaborator, and maker. Among his collaborators are important figures in art, performance, film and video, including Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Ericka Beckman, Tony Oursler, Tony Conrad, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. As a performer, Kelley exhibits a psychodramatic intensity; his collaborative video projects inhabit a peculiarly American landscape infused with irony and pop cultural debris.
Mike Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan and died in 2012. Kelley earned a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. In 2013, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam organized Kelley’s most comprehensive survey to-date, which will travel to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MoMA PS1, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1993, a retrospective of Kelley’s work was exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Haus der Kunst, Munich. A 1997 retrospective was organized by the Museu D’art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, and traveled to the Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden, and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Kelley’s MOBILE HOMESTEAD, 2010, a permanent artwork and public sculpture developed with the London-based organization Artangel, is located on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Schedule

TOKYO：5/1 20:20, 5/5 20:20　L program
KYOTO：5/14 11:00　L program
YOKOHAMA：7/18 16:00　L program