From Publishers Weekly
The 17 essays of this collection may prove the most significant set of artist’s writings since Robert Smithson’s posthumous Collected Writings appeared in 1996. Kelley, a Los Angeles-based artist, is best known for his ironic, politically acidic, often hilarious reconfigurations of cultural tropes, particularly as they have filtered through art and commerce (as when Kelley added breasts to the Native American icon of Land O’ Lakes butter). From the brilliant juxtaposition of a still from On the Waterfront with one from Blade Runner to a trenchant discussion of Douglas Huebler’s riff on Edward Hicks’s early 19th-century painting The Peaceable Kingdom, Kelley is rarely short of inspiring in his willingness to follow the consequences of artistic choices, formal and otherwise, into unexpected places. For example, in his essay "Death and Transfiguration," Kelley declares that Paul Thek’s "amazing wax effigy of himself: a striking hippie in permanent fixed decay" is "a pink raspberry shitsicle" made in response to the "porcelain-white vanilla bar" of Walt Disney’s own frozen corpse. A theory of the Uncanny; commentary on everyone from Marcel Broodthaers and Öyvind Fahlström to Baby Huey and the New York Dolls; an analysis of the use of Pepto-Bismol in the work of Korean-American artist Cody Hyun Choi; a comparison between what he sees as the art world’s control of art history and the Reagan/Bush capture of the corporate media—with 34 black-and-white illustrations to help support these and other arguments, this collection makes a strong case that the best art is "not interested in what’s not us."
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending. This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, Öyvind Fahlström, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy.
