Mike Kelley "Catholic Tastes"

Elisabeth Sussman, 1993. Softcover. Published in conjunction with exhibition "Mike Kelley" at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches with 256 pages, color and b&w illustrations, selected exhibition history, bibliography and works.

Very light corner wear and light spine wear along front and back. Small bend on front bottom corner (see photos). Otherwise in excellent condition with tight binding and clean, crisp pages.

from the forward by David A Ross:

"A raging satirist, Kelley uses Conceptual Art to forge a series of enormously inventive works that challenge prevailing notions of taste, influence, moral authority, social responsibility and art's transcendent function. Mike Kelley's art addresses the American social and psychological condition with such exquisite precision that it often frightens or bewilders viewers"

from Catholicleague.org:

"Early in the book we learn that Mike Kelley attended a Catholic elementary school. That he now calls himself a “lapsed Catholic” is not quite right. More accurately, Kelley is a man filled with hate, and not just against the Catholic Church: he seems to hate any value structure or institutional framework that is associated with Western civilization or, for that matter, any civilization whatsoever. What he would prefer he does not say, but the self-styled “blue-collar anarchist” is not someone who is likely to find peace on earth.

Kelley is in a perpetual state of rebellion. It is from his “repressive religious education” that he seeks to liberate himself, though the results seem incomplete at best. For Kelley, no freedom that is not libidinal is hardly worthy of the name. All the kinky fixations that such a freedom affords are there in graphic detail: the proverbial phallus symbols are conjoined with displays of excrement and bodily fluids, thus proving that true art demands more than what Mike Kelley is capable of giving. If it is true that “what you see is what you get,” then from Kelley what we get are the contortions of a middle-aged man not yet released from infantile rages."