Abstract

The artworks by Los Angeles based contemporary artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley can be considered a post-pop that turns pop art's appropriation of high and low cultural materials into a fixation on the psychosocial effects of culture on the individual. Creating a frenzied web of associations that develop pop, performance, and postminimal art strategies, the artists elicit audiences in a critical inquiry into our structures of meaning. Appropriating film, television and urban life with performance and installation art practices McCarthy and Kelly reveal the social construction behind cultural values, our notions of gender, and architectural spaces. This thesis sets out to address McCarthy and Kelley's work through three categories: post-pop, performance and architectural space, arguing that McCarthy and Kelley implode high and low cultural materials in order to reveal the repressive social conditioning of American culture at large. Works that will be considered in particular include: McCarthy and Kelley's collaborative project Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (1998), McCarthy's work Caribbean Pirates (2001-2005), and Kelley's Half a Man (1987-1991) series and piece Educational Complex (1995)