The first properly posthumous retrospective, this book highlights the significance of Kelley’s influential four-decade career on the development of art since the 1970s.
Paperback
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
The first properly posthumous retrospective, this book highlights the significance of Kelley’s influential four-decade career on the development of art since the 1970s.
Description
TATE Modern Exhibition, 2 October 2024 - 9 March 2025
Mike Kelley (1954-2012) is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time, with an irreverent and visionary practice that spanned and mixed performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound, text and sculpture.
?Ghost and Spirit looks at his dense and colourful body of work, from early performances, to his iconic stuffed toy works, and on to his explorations of history, memory and trauma as they haunt our experiences of school or family. Asking prescient questions about how to exist among a world of media images, about the role of art and the artist, and about embodiment, Kelley adopted different personas and mediums, deliberately deflating his own status, and from his own position as a white, heterosexual man in postmodern, capitalist America, he challenged assumptions about identity, class and institutional authority. Bringing together a range of diverse perspectives which summon his 'lingering influence' (to paraphrase the artist), this book captures the complexity and persistent relevance of Kelley's extraordinary practice.
About the Author
Catherine Wood is Director of Programme at Tate Modern, and curator of contemporary art and performance. At Tate she has co-curated numerous exhibitions including The World as a Stage (2007), Pop Life (2010) and A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance (2012), as well as co-directing the opening programme for the Tate Tanks in 2012 titled, Art in Action. She has programmed numerous performance works at Tate since 2003, including works by Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Guy de Cointet, Jiri Kovanda and Sturtevant, and initiated the online project, Performance Room in 2011. Wood is author of Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (2007, Afterall/MIT Press). A regular contributor to Afterall, Artforum and Mousse magazines, she has also written numerous catalogue essays, recently on Joachim Koester, Piotr Uklanski and Sung Hwan Kim.Fiontán Moran is Curator, International Art at Tate Modern.
Product Details
Returns
This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.
