Mike Kelley Pay For Your Pleasure Art Analysis

The presumed lawlessness of the artist becomes the focal point for Kelley’s installation. In Pay for Your Pleasure, the viewer is forced to confront the existence of evil, and neither Kelley nor the philosophers provide comfort. The “absurdity” of Gacy as an artist was hoped to be revealed through the confrontation between “our recognized creative geniuses and a recognized mass-murderer.” The exhibition asks the viewer to question what institutions are responsible for Gacy’s confinement as criminal and his freedom as an artist. Often, artists have praised violent action as a tool for social change or catharsis, even engaging in violent acts as performance art. This promotion of violence becomes increasingly problematic when the deeply horrendous

Kelley places the viewer in paradoxical positions, confronting them with deep-rooted values of society and culture. Pay for Your Pleasure works as a trap, reeling the viewer in. Walking along the hallway, the viewer is then forced to confront the final painting. The third and final component of the work is a donation box placed at the end of the installation. The donations collected during the exhibition go to support victims of violent crimes and victim’s rights organizations. The painting by Gacy “blindsides” the viewer upon reaching the end of the hallway. Accompanied by the donation boxes, viewers literally pay for their pleasure, and are “asked to not only acknowledge but also take some responsibility for a cultural legacy that validates their own perverse curiosity.” In walking through the exhibition, the viewer is giving credit to the criminal with their time. If the work were placed in a typical gallery space, the viewer could gaze upon Gacy’s work safely at a distance, without confrontation. The placement of the donation box asks the viewer to consider their own role in the commodification of violence and the exploitation of its victims. The viewer becomes implicated in the history of art and our tendency to favour genius over morality. The fact that a man is a poisoner is should reflect against his prose, but this is often not the

The viewer is able to look at Gacy’s painting with a morbid curiosity that maintains a level of distance and security. Knowing the painting’s background, the viewer can look at the “pathetic” painting of a monster without empathy. When approaching his work with condescension and disdain, the viewer’s moral and ethical well-being is asserted. However, when the thoughts and teachings of famous artists, writers, and philosophers accompany the work, our comfort becomes destabilized. Kelley states that “The critical aspects of [his] work are generally purposefully conflicted and unclear, allowing for readers to establish their own positions.” The banners and their quotes purposefully conflict with what is understood about Gacy and his work. The viewer is also asked to consider whether the work of Gacy, as an amateur, should even been placed in a conversation with the likes of Plato or Dostoevsky. Yet both intellectuals and murderers become household names, the latter perhaps even more so. In this installation, Kelley does not preach or offer his own philosophies. Pay for Your Pleasure stands alone and the artist remains relatively neutral. When viewing the work, it is unclear where the artist stands with the issues raised by the compilation. Instead, the artist simply asks the viewer to think, choosing “calculated instigation rather than reformation, troublemaking instead of problem solving.” The viewer’s own constructed