His art has been referred to as "a mixture of Ferdinand de Saussure and Sesame Street, of semiotics and theatre of the absurd". It has been called challenging and comical, but disturbing as well. Mike Kelley, born in Detroit in 1954, has experimented continually with new and different stylistic resources for many years, avidly, yet with cool calculation. He plays with expectations, which are at first fulfilled, only to be dashed in the end. In his performances and other works, Kelley concocts a confusing, brilliant, ironically disconcerting blend of theatre, comic strip, slapstick comedy, linguistic images, cloth dolls, banners, bizarre props, symbols and objects of everyday popular culture, which he commented upon during an exhibition in Bordeaux in 1992. In an interview with Thomas Kellein he discusses his documenta installation, symbols of male perversion, systems of belief, confusion as an artist's tool, Vienna Actionism, Conceptual Art, murderers as painters and the stuffed toy animal as an ideological model.
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