Foul Perfection Essays and Criticism

by Kelley, Mike; Welchman, John C.

• ISBN13: 9780262611787
• ISBN10: 0262611783
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-06-20
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

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, iuml;iquest;frac12;yvind Fahlstriuml;iquest;frac12;m, 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.

Author Biography

Mike Kelley is a Los Angeles-based artist, noise musician, and writer. He is a member of the graduate faculty in the M.F.A. program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.

John C. Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is the editor of Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, a collection of writings by the artist Mike Kelley (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

Preface	viii
Introduction by John C. Welchman	ix
SECTION I
Urban Gothic (1985)	2	(12)
Empathy, Alienation, the Ivar (1985)	14	(6)
Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature (1989)	20	(20)
Hollywood Filmic Language, Stuttered: Caltiki the Immortal Monster and Rose Hobart (1992)	40	(10)
Filmic Regression: The Baby and Baby Huey (1992)	50	(8)
From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Mike Kelley in Conversation with Thomas McEvilley (1993)	58	(12)
Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993)	70	(30)
Cross-Gender/Cross-Genre (1999)	100	(22)
SECTION II
Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh: Survival Research Laboratories and Popular Spectacle (1989)	122	(16)
Death and Transfiguration [on Paul Thek] (1992)	138	(12)
Dyspeptic Universe: Cody Hyun Choi's Pepto-Bismol Paintings (1992)	150	(4)
Marcel Broodthaers (1992)	154	(4)
Myth Science [on Öyvind Fahlström] (1995)	158	(20)
Shall we Kill Daddy? [on Douglas Huebler] (1997)	178	(16)
David Askevold: The California Years (1998)	194	(12)
Go West [on the art of John Miller] (1999)	206	(14)
Artist/Critic? [on the writings of John Miller] (2002)	220	(7)
Index	227