Mike Kelley’s work takes pleasure in perversion and embraces bad taste. Many of his early sculptures employ secondhand dolls and stuffed animals. Used, soiled, and discarded, Kelley’s toys violate the sentimental association of youth with innocence. Eviscerated Corpse, from his series Half a Man, is one of the artist’s bestknown objects. Its cartoonish horror presents childhood as pathology: dolls and stuffed animals lack sexual specificity, which perhaps reflects the desire of adults to maintain the chastity of children. Kelley said that “the stuffed animal is a pseudo-child, a cutified sexless being which represents the adult’s perfect model of a child—a neutered pet.” His icon of childhood is a hypersexualized monster, with the tiny doll either spilling its intestines, giving birth, or both.
