This paper reads the 1980s and 1990s soft toy and sock-monkey installations of multimedia artist
Mike Kelley in relation to surrealism. Using Hal Foster’s comments on abject art - of which Kelley is
often considered an exponent - I consider the extent to which Kelley’s work desublimates and makes
available as ‘affect’ some of the structures of feeling, and structuring feelings, of the capitalist lifeworld.
I compare Kelley’s work to its surrealist antecedents and judge the political efficacy of that
avant-garde against his postmodern practice. While this essay uses writers like Freud and Marx,
alongside Breton, Bataille and Kelley himself, it is Marcel Mauss’s well-known theory of the gift that
takes centre stage in reckoning the social and political significance of Kelley and his use of surrealist
discourse
