Reconstructed History
Mike Kelley
1990
Reconstructed History
Reconstructed History
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A 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, ...
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Reconstructed History
Mike Kelley
1990
New York and Cologne: Thea Westreich and Gisela Capitain
Unpaginated [130 pages]
31 × 23.5 cm
Edition of 250 and 12 AP; signed and numbered 65/250

A 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.


 


“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?”


 


Kelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. Reconstructed History 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.


 


The work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in Sans Soleil (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.

New York and Cologne: Thea Westreich and Gisela Capitain
Unpaginated [130 pages]
31 × 23.5 cm
Edition of 250 and 12 AP; signed and numbered 65/250

A 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.

 

“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?”

 

Kelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. Reconstructed History 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.

 

The work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in Sans Soleil (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.

DESCRIPTION

A 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.

 

“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?”

 

Kelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. Reconstructed History 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.

 

The work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in Sans Soleil (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.

New York and Cologne: Thea Westreich and Gisela Capitain
Unpaginated [130 pages]
31 × 23.5 cm
Edition of 250 and 12 AP; signed and numbered 65/250

A 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.

 

“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?”

 

Kelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. Reconstructed History 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.

 

The work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in Sans Soleil (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.

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A 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.

 

“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?”

 

Kelley’s introduction shifts attention from authorship to omission, asking not who altered the images, but what they already exclude. Reconstructed History 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.

 

The work strikingly resonates with Chris Marker’s meditation in Sans Soleil (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.

MORE BOOKS