A full-size model of the boyhood home of Mike Kelley, who grew up in Westland and went on to become an influential American artist, is attracting increasing attention in the art world and beyond.
The replica is a work of public art, writes Randy Kennedy in The New York Times, "which will go down as one of the most provocative and unclassifiable in America when it is opened by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit on May 11."
Kelley shepherded the details of its creation up to the final days of his life in January 2012, when he committed suicide at his home in South Pasadena, Calif. Kelley was one of the most influential artists of the last several decades. And though he made his name in the Los Angeles art world, much of the look and feel of his art came from his working-class, Irish Catholic upbringing here, in a city whose affliction he seemed to embody.
The structure, titled “Mobile Homestead,” will have a mobile part: a trailer, making up much the front of the house, which was completed during Kelley’s life and can be “docked” with the house or hitched to a truck to travel the city. But the rest of the house is permanently installed on a lot across from the museum, which built it with the London-based art philanthropy Artangel and additional financial support from the Luma Foundation, a nonprofit based in Switzerland. (The museum has not disclosed the cost.)
In its split personality, the homestead is an oddly fitting kind of public art for a tough but deeply wounded city like Detroit. How it will be received — a permanent work of anti-sculpture by one of the most famous artists ever to emerge from the city — is an open question. But it makes sense for an artist like Kelley, who more or less hated public art, calling it, memorably, "a pleasure that is forced upon a public that, in most cases, finds no pleasure in it."
