Mike Kelley / Day is done

"The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series is a projected group of 365 videotapes or video installations related to the sculpture Educational Complex (1995), an architectural model made up of replicas of every school I have ever attended. In this model, all of the architectural sections in the original buildings that I could not remember were left unfinished. I rationalized my inability to recall these spaces through reference to the pop psychological theory of Repressed Memory Syndrome, which postulates that extremely traumatic experiences are repressed and forgotten. Thus, I designated the blank architectural zones as sites of personal abuse. The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series was designed to fill in these memory lapses with video narratives of standardized abuse similar to those found in the literature of Repressed Memory Syndrome. Details are provided by material taken from my own biography, intermixed with recollections of popular films, cartoons, and literature. Personal and mass-cultural experiences are treated as equally true; I'm postulating the equivalence of art and memory. My purpose in refusing to differentiate between personal recollections and the narratives of mass media is to make these works not only representations of my own abuse, but also ones of culturally shared group abuse. The Projective Reconstruction videos are restagings of photographs of "extracurricular activities" found in high school yearbooks. I then construct narratives around these found images. I purposely choose photographs that are ambiguous in meaning. Outside the context of the yearbook, they would not necessarily be recognized as school-related activities. Many of these images have artsy, cultish, or sexually perverse overtones. They are not standard school events, but carnivalesque productions, symbolically at odds with the ordered world of education. I am not interested, specifically, in the aesthetics of high school or of the age group associated with it. Rather, I am interested in common socially accepted rituals of deviance, such as, Halloween activities. Unlike traditional sports activities, for example, which could be considered propagandistic events designed to inspire in the general population the values of group cooperation and the competitive spirit of capitalism, these events serve no productive function other than being nonsensical escapes from institutional daily routine. They carry within them a subtle critical subtext. Yearbooks were utilized as a common source for such imagery, but similar photographs may be found in other sources. For a different project, Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972 (Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001), I used photographs taken from local newspapers.1 To escape the tendency of the viewer to understand the Extracurricular Reconstruction series as reflecting a teenage mind-set, I have used actors of a variety of ages in the video restagings." from Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts