Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

The first properly posthumous retrospective on the artist, this paperback exhibition book highlights the significance of Mike Kelley’s influential four-decade career on the development of art since the 1970s.

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. 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 exhibition catalogue captures the complexity and persistent relevance of Kelley’s extraordinary practice.

Edited by Catherine Wood and Fiontan Moran, the book includes contributions from Mark Beasley, Marie de Brugerolle, Robert Cozzolino, Hendrik Folkerts, Jean-Marie Gallais, Jack Halberstam, Suzanne Lacy, Mark Leckey, Laura López Panigua, Fiontan Moran, Grace Ndiritu, Glenn Phillips, Cauleen Smith and John Welchman.

Catherine Wood is Director of Programme at Tate Modern, and curator of contemporary art and performance.

Fiontan Moran is Curator of International Art at Tate Modern.