Mike Kelley: The Uncanny[edit]

The Andy Warhol Robot was featured in an exhibition, "Mike Kelley: The Uncanny", by American artist Mike Kelley at the Tate Liverpool and Mumok in 2004. Frieze (magazine) writes, "Taking its cue from the resurgence of figurative sculpture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' (1919), the exhibition brings together mannequin-related artworks, mostly from the 1960s onwards," including from ancient Egypt to the early 2000s.^[29] In Freud's 'The Uncanny,' he writes, "It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it."^[30] Kelley explores "memory, recollection, horror and anxiety through the juxtaposition of a highly personal collection of objects with realist figurative sculpture."^[31] Kelley remarks in his essay for the exhibition, "works develop a life of their own by virtue of their existence in the world outside of my control," and "I had intended to rework the original essay for 'The Uncanny,' "Playing with Dead Things," into dialogue form for a theater piece but never got around to it," akin to Warhol's urgings for his robot theater piece with Allen and Sellars.^[32] Kelley also makes reference to Jack Burnham who writes, "the liberalizing tendencies of modern art and the discoveries of archaeology finally compelled historians to consider the aesthetic merits of [substratum figures as a fine art] and an increasing range of other anthropomorphic forms,"^[33] and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel who shares, "lying between life and death, animated and mechanic, hybrid creatures and creatures to which hubris gave birth, they all may be liked to fetishes."^[34]