Word: kelleyism
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...before dismissing it entirely, one should go to Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art this month to see the "mid-career retrospective" of drawings, installations, sculpture and performance leftovers by the movement's chef d'ecole, Mike Kelley. In the past few years, Kelley has become the most influential American artist of his generation. This doesn't mean that he's good all the time or even much of it -- only that he has strong lungs, a weird confessional talent and a lot of imitators...
...Kelley is 39, Detroit Irish and blue collar. He is an ex-Catholic but in some crucial respects a Catholic still, and his work is charged with religious references and rhapsodic diatribes of moral insult that verge on panic. Jesus makes frequent guest appearances, and so do felt banners that parody the soppy semiabstract devotional art of the all-but-forgotten Sister Corita Kent, a liberal nun of the '60s. I AM USELESS TO THE CULTURE, BUT GOD LOVES ME, one of | Kelley's banners reads. He is as deeply immersed in the religious aura of his infancy, pre-Vatican...
There was also Surrealism, which for many Catholic kids with artistic ambitions was the door out of orthodoxy. Kelley's work is larded with references to early eccentrics from the Surrealist pantheon, like the suicidal dandy Jacques Vache and the writers Raymond Roussel and the Comte de Lautreamont. On the other hand, his drawing is almost entirely derived from comic strips. Both confessional and obscure (why else would the museum have served up no fewer than 17 catalog essays to explicate it?), his work can nevertheless pack a flailing, provincial-surreal wallop -- now and then...
Impressed by his performance at those schools, Brown Coach Alva Kelley hired him as an end coach and as head scout for the Bears in 1956. There, he helped Brown to three consecutive winning seasons (5-4-0, 5-4-0 and 6-3-0), no small feat considering that the Bears had gone 2-7-0 in 1955 and have traditionally been an Ivy League doormat...
After the 1958 season, Restic followed Kelley to Colgate where he served as the coach's first assistant and defensive coordinator. There he served through the 1961 season in his only stint as a defensive coach (he has since dealt mainly with the offense and, in particular, the offensive backfield...