"Unnatural Cousin:” Mike Kelley’s Incomplete Drag and Feminist Pedagogies

Contemporary artist Mike Kelley's oeuvre attends to issues of the body that destabilize gendered binaries through varied material and conceptual concerns. Notably, Kelley's use of half accomplished or incomplete drag intersects with the persistent themes of emasculation, childhood shame, abjection, and quasi-subjecthood that recur throughout his work. These interests were seeded during Kelley’s education at CalArts in Los Angeles in the 1970s when he encountered the decampment of the school’s Feminist Art Program (FAP) founded by Judy Chicago.

By reconsidering Kelley’s engagement with drag in relation to his education as an artist within the context of Feminism and feminist pedagogies, I will investigate and problematize Kelley’s feminist legacy through the practices of contemporary female artists like panelist Carrie Fonder, and situate his work within hemispheric critiques of power, gender, and representation by addressing his performance of incomplete drag as it intersects with abjection through a discussion of his video Blind Country (1989), a collaboration with Cal Arts alumna Ericka Beckman. In the video, the artists’ deploy transgressive physiologies imaged through cinematic methodologies as a form of pedagogical critique. Kelley merges drag and horror tropes as his body shifts from male to female and from human to pig-hybrid with the use of low budget prosthetics that reveal the artifice of the transformation and the performative pose. This movement represents slippages of identity, bodily forms, and professional roles as he also transforms from student to teacher thus offering a critique of conceptualist art pedagogy through the subversion of identities and power positions.