Mike Kelley and Surrealism: monkeys, frogs, dogs and Mauss

This paper reads the 1980s and 1990s soft toy and sock-monkey installations of multimedia artist Mike Kelley in relation to surrealism. Using Hal Foster’s comments on abject art - of which Kelley is often considered an exponent - I consider the extent to which Kelley’s work desublimates and makes available as ‘affect’ some of the structures of feeling, and structuring feelings, of the capitalist lifeworld. I compare Kelley’s work to its surrealist antecedents and judge the political efficacy of that avant-garde against his postmodern practice. While this essay uses writers like Freud and Marx, alongside Breton, Bataille and Kelley himself, it is Marcel Mauss’s well-known theory of the gift that takes centre stage in reckoning the social and political significance of Kelley and his use of surrealist discourse.