From top: Kandor 18 B, 2010; Horse Busts, Horse Bodies (detail), 2005.
Fellow Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, who became equally transfixed by Kelley’s stage presence during a performance festival in the early eighties, soon struck up a collaboration with him on a series of psychobiographic videos. Their first was Family Tyranny (1987), about an abusive father-son relationship. “We knew we had similar interests in family, architecture, low-culture objects, and this thing of costumes and pretend,” says McCarthy, who along with Kelley was a breakout star of MOCA’s seminal 1992 survey “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s.”
McCarthy remembers how his hours-long conversations with Kelley would often lead to unlikely projects. “It was a lot of laughing, making jokes, and then all of a sudden we’d see something and go, ‘That’s an idea. We should do it.’ Then it’s like, ‘Should we really do it?’ And then we’re remaking Vito Acconci performances [with models portraying porn stars] in a house in Beverly Hills like it’s a commune, like a joke.”
Kelley was in the midst of a new project when he killed himself at age 57, leaving no note. Former bandmate Jim Shaw recalls that the week of his death, Kelley sent over assistants to Shaw’s studio to borrow mannequins for pieces he was making involving recorded versions of his diaries. The pair had last collaborated on the 2011 Destroy All Monsters book and show at Los Angeles’s Prism gallery. “He was fully engaged—more fully than he ever needed to be,” says Shaw, who is still perplexed by the loss and the work Kelley left unfinished. So, too, is Baldessari: “He didn’t rely on past successes; he was always evolving and reaching for something,” he says. “We don’t even know if he was at the pinnacle of his career.”
