Ahh...Youth!

Mike Kelley

1991 · Silver dye bleach prints · Photographs

A kitsch klatch of thrift-shop yarn dolls and stuffed animals gets the yearbook photo treatment alongside the genuine article (featuring the artist himself) in Mike Kelley’s lineup of misfit mugshots. The artist’s self-caricature compares his apathetic, acne-scarred, adolescent self to the cuddly but creepy castoffs in a fractured fairy tale about youth. Early viewers of the work assumed that it conjured the artist’s traumatic childhood, but Kelley insisted that such conjectures were informed more by projected anxieties than by any repressed memories of his own. Still, he admitted that such symbol-laden toys and similar cultural objects wield unnerving control: "You are them, whether you like it or not." The iconic series is widely recognized from the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty and a 2018 drop from streetwear label Supreme

Artist

Mike Kelley

Date

1991

Medium

Silver dye bleach prints

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Helena and Per Skarstedt, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019