Artist, writer and musician John Miller met Mike Kelley as graduate students at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Miller explains how the concepts of school and education influenced Kelley's work, particularly "Educational Complex" (1995), an architectural model of every school the artist attended.

At eight feet wide and sixteen feet long, "Educational Complex" includes miniature versions of Kelley's kindergarten and Catholic high school in suburban Detroit; University of Michigan; CalArts; and Kelley's childhood home, which was later reproduced in "Mobile Homestead" (2010). Miller suggests that the work finds Kelley, who struggled with his own success, examining education as a form of legitimation.

Controversially, Kelley would claim that the work was about repressed memory syndrome, a condition in which the sexually abused suppress their memory of the traumatic incident. In "Educational Complex," several models appear to be unfinished. Kelley attributed the lack of information to a "hole in the memory" stemming from abuse.

Miller once wrote that "utopia is a space outside the market," a phrase that resonated with Kelley and one he would borrow for a text he authored about his friend. To Miller, it is also a phrase that synopsizes the play of forces addressed in "Educational Complex."

Directed by Emma Reeves
Shot by Jess Haas and Tom Salvaggio
Edited by Owen Schwartzbard and Tom Salvaggio

Photos courtesy of Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Göran Örtegren, California Institute of the Arts.

All Kelley artworks (c) Estate of Mike Kelley. Courtesy of Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

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