DEODORIZED CENTRAL MASS WITH SATELLITES
MIKE KELLEY, 1991–1999
You get the smell first. Pine. The industrial kind. The kind that means somebody has cleaned something. Then you look up, and for a second it's actually kind of beautiful. Big fuzzy balls hanging from the ceiling on wires you can hardly see. Blue. Green. Yellow. Planets. That's where your brain goes. Somebody put a solar system in a white room. And these shiny pointed things down both walls. Like pieces off a very expensive car. Kelley called it Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. The satellites are obvious. The deodorized part is waiting on the walls. Get closer. Stuffed animals. Hundreds of them, sewn into balls. Sorted by color, like laundry. And every one is facing inward. No eyes. No little noses. Nothing in there to make eye contact with. Kelley did that on purpose. He didn't want them pulling sentiment out of you. He'd been working with stuffed animals since 1987. Thrift stores, yard sales. The places objects go after they've been demoted from loved to tolerated to disposable. He thought he was making work about commodity culture. The things we buy to stand in for love. Nobody heard that. They saw the matted fur and the stains and went straight to childhood trauma. Somebody slept with this thing. Cried into it. Carried it through the worst years of being small. Then one day, gone. And they looked at the man sewing them together and decided something terrible must have happened to him. Kelley said he was stunned. Then he did the strangest possible thing. He went with it. If everybody believed buried abuse was hiding underneath the work, fine. He took their diagnosis and started working with that. Repressed memories. Buried trauma. America digging through the child to explain the adult. This one stretches from 1991 to 1999, right through the middle of all that. Now look at the ten shiny shapes on the walls. Kelley called them deodorizers. Every few minutes, pssshhht. Pine. The animals bring in everything messy. Dirt. Memory. Shame. Love. The tasteful modern objects keep trying to clean it up. Forever. Read MoMA's list of materials. Plush toys. Wood. Wire. Styrofoam. Rope. Pulleys. Car paint. And disinfectant.