{"title":"Mike Kelley","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"reconstructed-history","title":"Reconstructed History","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eA collection of fifty ink drawings in which Mike Kelley intervenes on reproductions from American school textbooks—illustrations, photographs, engravings, and cartoons depicting idealised figures and events from American history. Working directly on the printed page, he introduces a note of iconoclasm through loose but well-considered doodles, echoing the vandalism of a schoolchild’s textbook. The drawings are bound in the format of a high-school yearbook, bringing reverence and disruption into the same object.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Here we have a collection of grotesqueries, defacements of some of the most cherished images of our American past. Who could be responsible for such defilements?” writes the artist in his preface, “what could be the purpose in tarnishing the heroic figures and events we hold so dear? These are questions one is compelled to ask; yet might questions be better put to the images themselves? We might instead ask, why do these pictures provoke addition? What has been subtracted from them?”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eKelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eReconstructed History\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e treats the schoolbook as an ideological construct rather than a neutral record, and its interventions as a form of counter-history that exposes the fragility of national narratives. The heroic image, in this reading, sustains its authority through what it leaves out.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSans Soleil\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (1983), where memory is described not as the opposite of forgetting but as “its lining”: we do not remember, but rewrite, much as history itself is rewritten.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Metabooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54027555930451,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1068\/8898\/6963\/files\/KelleyCover_b091cc5f-a662-4271-8625-e006aa2749a2.png?v=1789370959"},{"product_id":"the-uncanny","title":"The Uncanny","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“The Uncanny” presents Mike Kelley as artist and curator, one year after his first major European exhibition at the ICA, London, in 1992. Organized by Sonsbeek 93 at the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem, Netherlands, in 1993, the curatorial project and its accompanying artist’s book represent the culmination of Kelley's long-term engagement with the Freudian concept of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDas Unheimliche\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (1919), which describes the unsettling convergence of the familiar and the strange: \"The uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eExpanding on this notion, Kelley conceived an exhibition centred on memory, repression, anxiety, death, sexuality, and the grotesque. Prefaced by an original psychoanalytic and iconographic essay written by the artist, the exhibition brings together works by Robert Gober, Edward Kienholz, Martin Kippenberger, Sandy Skoglund, Cindy Sherman, and others, each exploring, in distinct ways, the disquieting nature of the ordinary. Through a carefully orchestrated juxtaposition of artworks and vernacular artefacts (including inflatable dolls, anatomical models, educational objects, and curiosities), Kelley stages an excavation of his own fears and obsessions, transforming the act of curating into one of psychological inquiry and liberation.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Metabooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54144516489555,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1068\/8898\/6963\/files\/TheUncanny.png?v=1782829088"},{"product_id":"why-i-got-into-art-vaseline-muses","title":"Why I Got Into Art (Vaseline Muses)","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublished anonymously on the occasion of Mike Kelley’s solo exhibition \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhy I Got into Art\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, in 1989, this publication might initially read as a pin-up sequence. Upon closer inspection, we encounter re-photographed images of 1970s feminist artists\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e – \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eincluding Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e – \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003edocumented in happenings, performances, guerrilla actions, avant-garde theatre, or gallery advertisements. To emulate the look of vintage soft-core adult magazines, Kelley photographed the original images through a Vaseline-smeared lens.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe question remains: is this really the reason Kelley “got into art”? Or, acting as the astute psychologist he was, does he play with stereotypes surrounding female corporeality in order to lure the viewer into the role of a voyeur?\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Metabooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54386085757267,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1068\/8898\/6963\/files\/WhyIGot.png?v=1784815495"}],"url":"https:\/\/metabooks.art\/collections\/mike-kelley.oembed","provider":"Metabooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}