statements perfection institutional conversations

books:

Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism
Mike Kelley

The MIT Press, 2002

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 ...

Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s

1 review
John Welchman

Routledge, 2001

About time
I can't say I've been delighted about much art-writing the last 5 or 6 years. Welchman gets 5 stars for doing the foot-work while not misplacing his head. His book looks at an interesting mix of artists, takes some risks, and cobbles together an interesting theory... and, quite frankly, much of what he says is not only correct, but has really needed to be said for some time now. It seems that ...

Mike Kelley

3 reviews
John Welchman

Phaidon Press, 1999

If you do not know Mike Kelley, with this book you will.
I have nothing but praise for Phaidon's publications. Each of their artist's books contain great documentations of the artwork, plus detailed writings by the artist and critics. If you are going to read a description of an artist's work, who better to explain it to you than the artist. This is especially true with Mike Kelley. He is well known for the writings he does for each of his works ...

Tapies
Alexander Duttman, Manuel Borja-Villel, ...

Actar/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Aldeasa, 2001

The work of Antoni Tapies offers a unique case of the artist-as-shaman--that is, the artist as an alchemist who is capable of discovering the nature of materials, transforming their substance, and bringing meaning to life. A self-taught painter, Tapies began his career in the lively and exciting period directly following World War II: in 1947 he founded, along with Joan Brossa, the journal ''Dau al Set,'' which championed Surrealist aesthetics. ...

Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Writing Art)
Mike Kelley

The MIT Press, 2004

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 ...

Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook

36 reviews
Anya von Bremzen, John Welchman

Workman Publishing Company, 1990

I LOVE BORSCHT!!!
This is THE cookbook for spoiled, Americanized Russians who never paid any attention to what went on in the kitchen because their mothers were such great cooks. Turns out we didn't need to...

Terrific Pacific Cookbook

6 reviews
Anya von Bremzen, John Welchman

Workman Publishing Company, 1995

best
I own about 200 cookbooks; this is the best.

The Aesthetics of Risk: SoCCAS Symposium Vol. III
Jane Blocker, Douglas Crimp, ...

JRP Ringier, 2008

This anthology of essays, images and dialogues exploring contemporary art's engagements with risk--physical, social, political and aesthetic--brings readers into the conference from which the book takes its title, a third annual collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS). Some content there was so intense that it came with a warning label: "Contains graphic depictions of ...

Institutional Critique and After (SoCCAS Symposia vol. 2)
Andrea Fraser, Isabelle Graw, ...

JRP/Ringier, 2006

This contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement, launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke, grew out of a symposium held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It looks at Institutional Critique's central aim, the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries, and recent developments that engage with and echo it. IC has been raised again by Andrea ...

Interviews By Mike Kelley: 1986-2004
Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, ...

JRP/Ringier, 2005

What do Mike Kelley and his cronies and sometime collaborators Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy, and Tony Oursler talk about when they talk about art? You'll have to crack this book to find out, but expect a heady mix of pop culture, sex, violence, politics, and, as always, a strong dose of humor. This volume brings together for the first time Kelley's major interviews with those artists and others over the past 18 years. Kelley is naturally a ...

Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles
John Welchman

Yale University Press, 1997

In one of his sparkling aphorisms on the end of "optical" art, Marcel Duchamp suggested that the title of an artwork was an "invisible color." John Welchman now offers the first critical history of how and why modern artworks receive their titles. He shows that titles were seldom produced and can rarely be understood outside of the institutional parameters that made them visible-exhibitions, criticism, catalogues, and even national politics.

Paul Mccarthy: Lala Land

1 review
Elisabeth Bronfen, Stephanie Rosenthal, ...

Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005

The perfect coffee table book for the slightly perverse and artistic...
I saw this show when it was in London but I didn't want to fork over sixty pounds for the catalog at the time. Two years later, I track it down here on Amazon and I am very happy I did. The book is wonderful object on its own. It has a thick, padded cover that is very unique and interesting. I have had it sitting on my coffee table for a month now and it has started many stimulating conversations ...

Rethinking Borders

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Mike Kelley: "Day Is Done"
Mike Kelley, John Welchman

Gagosian Gallery, 2007

Mike Kelley’s burlesque masterpiece, Day Is Done, is a work in progress conceived in three hundred and sixty-five separate chapters. Chapters 2 to 32 were staged as a complex and spectacular mixed-media installation—which Kelley scripted, scored, shot and sculpted—at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2005. To mark the first stage of this ambitious project, Kelley has edited an elaborate visual catalogue of Chapters 2-32. This ...

John Baldessari: Music (Art)
Christina Vegh, John Baldessari

Walther Konig, 2008

Highly influential artist and teacher John Baldessari became known in late 1960s Southern California as a conceptual painter, and since then he has worked in a variety of other media, including photography, artist books, video and printmaking. Baldessari has engaged the theme of music off and on throughout his career, but until now, those investigations haven't been seen in one cohesive volume. With more than 50 color images of paintings, ...

Recent Pasts: Art In Southern California From The 1990S To Now (Soccas Symposia)
Dennis Cooper, Brian Butler, ...

JRP/Ringier, 2005

This first volume of a series of anthologies, each based on a symposium held in Los Angeles by a consortium of the art schools of Southern California, brings out some heavy hitters for its inaugural number. A cross-disciplinary endeavor, the contributors include Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant; novelist Dennis Cooper ("the most important transgressive literary artist since William S. ...

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