Video screenshot: a naked male body is covered with flowers and fruit

Blind Country

Mike Kelley & Ericka Beckman

  • Year 1989
  • Edition unlimitierte Auflage
  • Material/Technique Single-channel video (color, sound)
  • Dimensions Variable
  • Length 20'
  • Category Media art
  • Collection Sammlung Goetz, Medienkunst, München

Mike Kelley’s Blind Country was created in collaboration with filmmaker Ericka Beckman. The video work refers to H. G. Wells’ story The Country of the Blind (1904), one of the Kelley’s favorite childhood stories. It concerns a man who must lose his sight to live in a strange, blind society. Metaphorically, it is a castration story filled with more or less overt sexual and racist fears.
Blind Country contains no explicit reference to H. G. Wells’ story although it plays with its subtle underlying themes. The designation of sight as a male attribute in contrast to all other senses is the starting point of the video work. Symbolically castrated and robbed of his authority, Kelley plays a buffoon who is led through a dark, female-connoted “realm of the senses,” which stands in contrast to the male world.

Mike Kelley

271 pages, 150 ill., hardcover.
German/English
2008, Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz GmbH, Hamburg
ISBN 978-3-939894-11-7
€ 25,00

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