The first thorough look at Mike Kelley's riotous, irreverent and colorful paintings Featuring paintings from series that span a 15-year period, 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley's (1954-2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley's distinct return to painting in color, and which he described as "mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann's compositional theory of 'push and pull'"; the Horizontal Tracking Shots series; as well as works made under the umbrella of his expansive and ambitious Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, a series related to the Educational Complex artwork. Kelley's seminal mixed-media installation Profondeurs Vertes, his ode to the influential paintings in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts that captivated him as a young person, is also featured. The publication includes texts by various contemporary visual artists responding to Kelley's art: Edgar Arceneaux, Carroll Dunham, Daniel Guzmán, Richard Hawkins, Jay Heikes, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Mary Reid Kelley, Christina Quarles and Laurie Simmons.

Critical writings and commentary by the Los Angeles based artist Mike Kelley. 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.

Harald Falckenberg, one of the most important collectors of Mike Kelley's works, gives in his essay a detailed overview over the various periods in the development of this artist.In detail Falckenberg investigates the influences of the art-market on Kelley's production and the reasons for the suicide of the artist in January, 2012.Beside documentary photographs of important exhibitions of Mike Kelley between 1982 and 2011, and reproductions of seminal works from various periods the book offers numerous stills from the legendary videos by and/or with Mike Kelley, such as Banana Man (1983), Heidi (1992) in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, EVOL (1984) by Tony Oursler, and Sir Drone (1989) by Raymond Pettibon.This book is published on the occasion of a tribute exhibition to Mike Kelley in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation at the 19th Annual Watermill Centre Summer Benefit, Long Island, New York, 28 July – 16 September 2012.

Erweiterte Neuauflage des legendären Arnheim-Katalogs von 1993 in zwei Auflagen: Im März die rein englische Ausgabe anlässlich der Ausstellung in der Tate Liverpool, im Juli 2004 eine Ausgabe mit deutschem Textanhang mit einem zusätzlichen Interview mit Mike Kelley anlässlich der Ausstellung im Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien. Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Wien, Juli 2004

Published on the occasion of the major exhibition of the same title, this catalogue is the first to place the practices of artists Mike Kelley (1954-2012) and Jim Shaw (b. 1952) alongside each other in historical context, approaching their work as parallel visual meditations on Midwestern culture in particular and on American culture more broadly. The catalogue begins with their meeting at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and early collaborations, branching out to present major bodies of work from each artist with a specific interest in tracing the lines of influence as rooted in the vernacular visual cultures of Michigan and the Midwest. Illustrations of the artists' source material, their individual works, and installation views from the exhibition feature prominently throughout the publication, and essays by exhibition co-curators Marc-Olivier Wahler, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Steven L. Bridges also unpack the many narratives layered in the exhibition, including an interview with Jim Shaw.

An illustrated examination of a 1995 work by Mike Kelley that marked a significant change in his work. One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art—relentless examinations of subjectivity and of society that are both sinister and ecstatic. With a wide range of media, Kelley's work explores themes as varied as post-punk politics, religious systems, social class, and repressed memory. Using architectural models to represent schools he attended, his 1995 work, Educational Complex, presents forgotten spaces as frames for private trauma, real or imagined. The work's implications are at once miniature and massive. In this book, John Miller offers an illustrated examination of this milestone work that marked a significant change in Kelley's practice. A “complex” can mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome, or a political apparatus, and Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of inquiry, considering the making of the work, examining it in terms of education and trauma (sexual or otherwise), and investigating how it tests the ideological horizon of art as an institution. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands his political and aesthetic focus, including not only such artifacts as generic forms of architecture but (inspired by the infamous McMartin Preschool case) popular fantasies associated with ritual sex abuse and false memory syndrome. Through this archaeology of the contemporary, Miller argues, Kelley examines the mandate for education and the liberal democratic premises underpinning it.

The second volume of writings by Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, focusing on his own work. What John C. Welchman calls the "blazing network of focused conflations" from which Mike Kelley's styles are generated is on display in all its diversity in this second volume of the artist's writings. The first volume, Foul Perfection, contained thematic essays and writings about other artists; this collection concentrates on Kelley's own work, ranging from texts in "voices" that grew out of scripts for performance pieces to expository critical and autobiographical writings.Minor Histories organizes Kelley's writings into five sections. "Statements" consists of twenty pieces produced between 1984 and 2002 (most of which were written to accompany exhibitions), including "Ajax," which draws on Homer, Colgate- Palmolive, and Longinus to present its eponymous hero; "Some Aesthetic High Points," an exercise in autobiography that counters the standard artist bio included in catalogs and press releases; and a sequence of "creative writings" that use mass cultural tropes in concert with high art mannerisms—approximating in prose the visual styles that characterize Kelley's artwork. "Video Statements and Proposals" are introductions to videos made by Kelley and other artists, including Paul McCarthy and Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose. "Image-Texts" offers writings that accompany or are part of artworks and installations. This section includes "A Stopgap Measure," Kelley's zestful millennial essay in social satire, and "Meet John Doe," a collage of appropriated texts. "Architecture" features an discussion of Kelley's Educational Complex (1995) and an interview in which he reflects on the role of architecture in his work. Finally, "Ufology" considers the aesthetics and sexuality of space as manifested by UFO sightings and abduction scenarios.