Mike Kelley

Educational Complex
1995

A modern gallery interior with architectural models on display tables and art on the walls, large window overlooking a building.

A representation of every school Mike Kelley attended, as well as the house that he grew up in—with all parts that he has since forgotten omitted—Educational Complex is a reconstruction of the artist’s past in the form of a tabletop architectural model. Elaborating on his earlier works—frequently made with stuffed-animals—that critique the sentimentality with which American culture regards childhood, Educational Complex presents a return to one’s past as a subjective, perhaps impossible proposition. As the artist himself estimated, the spaces he depicted from memory represent only a small fraction of the actual structures on which they are based. According to Kelley, Educational Complex was intended to evoke not only his own memories, but also broader social issues concerning childhood. As he remarked, it “was done directly in response to the rising infatuation of the public with issues of Repressed Memory Syndrome and child abuse. . .and the popularization of. . .therapy which was predicated on the idea that certain traumatic events. . .are repressed and only removed later through therapy.”

Not on view

Date
1995

Classification
Sculpture

Medium
Painted foam core, fiberglass, plywood, wood, plexiglass and mattress

Dimensions
Overall: 57 3/4 × 192 3/16 × 96 1/8in. (146.7 × 488.2 × 244.2 cm)

Accession number
96.50

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee

Rights and reproductions
© The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/10293

Audio

Mike Kelley, Educational Complex, 1995

In Human Interest

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Mike Kelley, Educational Complex, 1995

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Narrator: Mike Kelley.
Mike Kelley: I decided to build a reconstruction of every school I ever went to with the all the parts I could not remember left out. And then these were combined to one super school. They were cut apart and reconfigured, uh, in a kind of very formalized way that made it look more like a kind of modernist architecture.
Narrator: Educational Complex explores how we remember spaces—and how much of them we forget.
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex was done directly in response to the rising infatuation of the public with issues of Repressed Memory Syndrome and child abuse. It led to a rash of similar kinds of cases. the popularization of this certain kind of-of therapy which was predicated on the idea that certain traumatic events, that especially sexual abuse are repressed and only removed later through therapy. The implication is that anything that can't be remembered is somehow the result of trauma.
So the parts I could not remember of these buildings was the majority of them, probably like eighty percent. So that meant eighty percent of these buildings that I had been in for most of my life were the site of some kind of repressed trauma.
No one's going to think that when they look at it. It looks completely orderly. It doesn't look dysfunctional at all. But seen through the theory of repressed memory syndrome, that's what it means. Like, why can't Mike Kelley remember like all these rooms in the schools he went to every day for, you know, most—like, half of his life. Well, nobody can.
Narrator: Mike Kelley died in 2012.