Mike Kelley: 1999 - September 19th, 2024

“Mike Kelley” (1999) features an interview with Isabelle Graw, survey by John C. Welchman, essay by Anthon Vidler, and extracts from George Bataille’s “D.A.F. de Sade” (1929) and Charles Fort’s “The Book of the Damned” (1919) selected by Kelley. 

The monograph also includes extensive artist’s writings: “Some Aesthetic High Points (extract)” (1992)*, “Destroy All Monsters: Liner Notes for 3 CD Box Set (extract)” (1994), “Foul Perfection: Notes on Caricature (extracts)” (1989), “In the Image of Man (extract)” (1991), “Heidi (excerpted from ‘Playing with Dead Things’)” (1992), “Timeless/Authorless 4” (1995)**, Thoughts on the Aesthetics of Ufology (excerpted from Interview with M.A. Greenstein)” (1997), and “A Stopgap Measure” (1998).

160 pages
29 x 25 cm
Softcover, with dust jacket
ISBN: 0714838349
First edition

*In a catalog made by Arts Recourses Transfer (1992), Kelley wrote sarcastically “Some Aesthetic High Points”:

“When I was in junior high school there was a contest sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to design a patriotic poster. I decided, along with a guy I shared a chemistry-class lab with, to enter the contest. [...] We agreed to collaborate on the poster so that neither of us would be responsible for the final outcome. Secondly, we were not close friends so we did not care about making each other look talentless. We couldn't have spent more than fifteen minutes on the poster, and we each took turns painting on it. We picked the most insipid subject matter and statement we could think of: a portrait of George Washington in front of the American flag with the motto, ‘Your Land and Mine’. We used the cheapest materials: poster board and elementary-school poster paint; and painted it as poorly as possible. The flag was depicted as a crude series of stripes with one sloppy star and a totally unrecognizable Washington was painted in a garish combination of chartreuse and green. We won.”