Artist: Mike Kelley
Publisher: Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern
Year: 1994
Pages: 40 with b/w and fullcolour reproductions of some of Kelley’s works
Size: 200 x 150 x 4 mm
Offset printed and softbound
Language: English/German
Condition: fine
This bilingual edition contains the transcript of an interview of Mike Kelley by Thomas Kellein, then director of Kunsthalle Basel, before an audience at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 1992. The English conversation is printed in black, its German translation in red. Several landmark works and installations that Kelley put together in the late 1980s/early 1990s (e.g. Lumpenprole, Pay For Your Pleasure, From My Institution To Yours) are discussed and clarified in this meandering discussion, so are briefly Kelley’s performances: “Because my work started in conceptualism and was based on systems of logic, the best way of ending a work was to present it live, as theater”, explains Kelley, “The theater is the traditional way of presenting a false belief system live. At the end of a project, I would do a performance where I would perform the system of logic to the best of my abilities, to convince people that it was true. Then it was over, I could get rid of that system of beliefs and work on another one.”
Only one copy of this edition has been made available from the Sea Urchin archives.