Mike Kelley "never lost his interest in the cut-rate products of American culture, work that for one reason or another ended up discounted and ignored."

"His art tried to make failure into the highest form of achievement," writes Richard B. Woodward in the Wall Street Journal about the artist "who died last week at the age of 57, reportedly a suicide."

His most identifiable body of work (late 1980s to early '90s) are the thrift-store stuffed animals that he placed on blankets in the middle of gallery floors. Their air of soiled hopes and cheerful failure became central to the critical movement of "pathetic" or "abject" art. But how should the icky pungency of these pieces be balanced against his later wish to distance himself from their popularity? "I was viewed as an infantilist, possibly a pedophile, or victim of abuse myself," he complained in a 1996 essay.

"Abject" is a great word. If you Google it, the first substantial hit — i.e., the first thing that's not just a definition of the word — is
"Introduction to Julia Kristeva, Module on the Abject":

According to to Julia Kristeva... the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk....

On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other."...The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules"... and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject precisely because they draw attention to the "fragility of the law"...

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being....

The abject for Kristeva is... closely tied both to religion and to art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion"....