Mike Kelley

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin
1987

A horizontal canvas covered in stuffed animals and afghan blankets in muted colors.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid is a chaotic assemblage of handmade dolls and blankets that Mike Kelley found in thrift stores. Kelley does not designate to whom more “love hours” are owed, but simply puts forward the condition of loving something too much, or of receiving too little in return—like the cast-off items that make up the sculpture. The title also conjures associations of guilt: when parents and relatives create these toys and blankets, are the countless hours of stitching, knitting, and crocheting a kind of penance, and for what? Do we expect children to repay the time and love lavished on them? Using Jackson Pollock’s large drip paintings as his compositional model, Kelley transformed the orphaned handicrafts into a swirling mass of unrequited affection that is beyond human reciprocation. Similarly, the collection of melted candles in the related work, The Wages of Sin, becomes an altar to the power of teen angst and implies a child’s rite of passage into the adult worlds of labor, debt, and atonement.

Visual Description

The work consists of a horizontal canvas about 7 feet wide and 6 feet tall. The surface of the canvas is covered in a busy arrangement of colorful stuffed animals and knitted or crocheted afghan blankets, tightly packed together and protruding from the surface. The canvas is predominated by shades of brown, and muted blues, greens, and yellows with spots of red, pink, and white.

Not on view

Date
1987

Classification
Sculpture

Medium
Stuffed fabric toys and afghans on canvas with dried corn; wax candles on wood and metal base

Dimensions
Overall: 120 3/4 × 151 3/4 × 31 3/4in. (306.7 × 385.4 × 80.6 cm)

Accession number
89.13a-d

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

API
artworks/7317

Audio

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 (Spanish)

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Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

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Narrador: La obra More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid de Mike Kelley está hecha de peluches, mantas de crochet y otros objetos artesanales.
Mike Kelley: Eran todos objetos usados que compré en tiendas de segunda mano y ventas de garaje. Y son todos objetos hechos a mano. No son el tipo de cosas que se venden, son el tipo de cosas que se regalan.
Narrador: La superficie de la obra está repleta de objetos amontonados, lo que indica un deseo casi compulsivo de llenar el plano del cuadro. A Kelley le interesaba la enorme cantidad de tiempo que le llevó a la gente crear estos objetos artesanales.
Mike Kelley: Genera un efecto acumulativo. Si te parece que estas cosas representan el amor, entonces es una cantidad gigante de amor. Si te parece que estas cosas inducen a la culpa o a la necesidad de compensar, entonces es más de lo que alguna vez podrías retribuir. Así que, dependiendo de tu punto de vista, puedes verlo como algo súper adorable o súper espantoso. Y, la verdad, la gente lo ve tanto de una forma como de la otra. Es decir, alguna gente siente un verdadero rechazo y a otra gente le fascina.
Narrador: Kelley combinó esta obra con la pieza que está en el piso, llamada The Wages of Sin.
Mike Kelley: Es el tipo de escultura que haría un adolescente en la habitación donde fuma marihuana, o algo por el estilo. Y titularlo The Wages of Sin (La remuneración del pecado), le da ese matiz casi morboso, como una especie de seudorritual.
Narrador: En los años sesenta, muchos artistas cobraron interés en la repetición y acumulación como técnicas casi mecánicas que le restaban importancia al rol de la expresión individual. En More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid y The Wages of Sin, Kelley cuestiona ese impulso. Al usar estos materiales, la acumulación no se ve simplemente como más de lo mismo. En cambio, genera capas de asociaciones, sentimientos y significados.
Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019

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Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

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Narrator: How many stuffed animals do you have? This many?! How many are here, anyway?
Mike Kelley scoured thrift stores and scooped up handmade toys and blankets that other people had given away. Toys they had once played with, and then gotten tired of.
By giving this work the title More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, Kelley is imagining that someone who makes a toy or blanket by hand needs to be paid back. If someone’s grandma spent two weeks making her grandson a sock monkey, how much love does the grandkid owe her? Is it really possible to pay her back? Grandmas have a lot of love, what if you CAN’T? How does THAT make you feel?
Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

In Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019

0:00

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987

0:00

Narrator: Mike Kelley’s work More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid is made out of stuffed animals, afghans, and other craft objects.
Mike Kelley: They were all used items that I bought at thrift stores and yard sales. And they're all handmade objects. So they're not the kind of objects that would generally be sold—they’re the kind of objects that would be given away.
Narrator: The work’s surface is tightly packed with objects, suggesting an almost compulsive desire to fill the picture plane. Kelley was interested in the huge amount of time it took people to make all of these craft objects.
Mike Kelley: It had an accumulative effect. If you saw these things as representing love, then it was a massive amount of love. If you saw the things as being inducers of guilt or repayment, then it was more than you could ever pay back. So depending on your point of view, you either see it as super-lovable or super-creepy. And you know, so people tend to see it either way. Like, some people are really repulsed by it, and some people love it to death.
Narrator: Kelley paired this work with the piece on the floor, called Wages of Sin. Like More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid, Wages of Sin is a massive accumulation of a material we don’t usually associate with high art—candle wax.
Mike Kelley: [It’s] like the kind of sculpture that a teenager would make in their pot smoking room. And by titling it The Wages of Sin, it gives this kind of morbid teenage overtone, you know, some pseudo-ritualistic kind of thing.
Narrator: In the 1960s, many artists became interested in repetition and accumulation as almost mechanical techniques that downplayed the role of individual expression. In More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, Kelley questions that impulse. With the materials he uses, accumulation doesn’t result in just more of the same. Instead, it creates layers of association, feeling, and meaning.
Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

In America Is Hard to See

0:00

Mike Kelley, More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, 1987

0:00

Narrator: Mike Kelley’s work More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid is made out of stuffed animals, afghans, and other craft objects.
Mike Kelley: They were all used items that I bought at thrift stores and yard sales. And they're all handmade objects. So they're not the kind of objects that would generally be sold—they’re the kind of objects that would be given away.
Narrator: The work’s surface is tightly packed with objects, suggesting an almost compulsive desire to fill the picture plane. Kelley was interested in the huge amount of time it took people to make all of these craft objects.
Mike Kelley: It had an accumulative effect. If you saw these things as representing love, then it was a massive amount of love. If you saw the things as being inducers of guilt or repayment, then it was more than you could ever pay back. So depending on your point of view, you either see it as super-lovable or super-creepy. And you know, so people tend to see it either way. Like, some people are really repulsed by it, and some people love it to death.
Narrator: Kelley paired this work with the piece on the floor, called Wages of Sin. More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid, Wages of Sin is a massive accumulation of a material we don’t usually associate with high art—candle wax.
Mike Kelley: [It’s] like the kind of sculpture that a teenager would make in their pot smoking room or something like that. And by titling it The Wages of Sin, it gives this kind of morbid overtone, you know, some pseudo-ritualistic kind of thing.
Narrator: In the 1960s, many artists became interested in repetition and accumulation as almost mechanical techniques that downplayed the role of individual expression. In More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and Wages of Sin, Kelley questions that impulse. With the materials he uses, accumulation doesn’t result in just more of the same. Instead, it creates layers of association, feeling, and meaning.