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Guess Who's Coming to Dinner #3 ― John C. Welchman

― ARTIST TALKS AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY ―
23 October, 18:00h → John C. Welchman on the life and work of Mike Kelley
→ at Aula Pand, Royal Academy, Mutsaardstraat 31
In the context of Mike Kelley's 'Mobile Homestead' screening at De Studio (October 27th), the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp is organizing a lecture by John C. Welchman on the life and work of Mike Kelley.
→ FREE entrance ― BE WELCOME!

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Lent Felt: Initiations of his mind’s fall
A valedictory lecture on the life and work of Mike Kelley—artist, noise musician, writer, actor, benefactor, teacher and Catholic misfit. Kelley was a wholehearted and cantankerous sage with an indelible blue collar background who was sometimes so wired-in to the elemental stakes of the American vernacular that during certain on-song weeks he generated enough ideas and imaginings to last another sort of artist an entire career. While his day job transformed him inexorably, sometimes painfully, into a high end artist, even into a minor celebrity, he never relinquished his preferred role as a counter-culture warrior fighting for the release of the voices and skills he always felt that mainstream institutions kept in positions of muteness or invisibility. He tried to understand his culture from the bottom up, scouring thrift stores and yard sales for its refuse and cast-offs, addressing with an inimitable mix of caustic skepticism and what I can only describe as temporizing honor, the languages and assumptions of education, adolescence, crafts and DIY, holidays, pop psychology, parades and rituals, fandom, newspaper reportage, public address and a thousand other conditions of daily life.

The lecture exams three aspects of his powerful contribution to contemporary art: his influential body of critical and creative writings; his special brand of parodic humor, fired up by a life-long commitment to caricature, irony and bathos; and the special investigation offered by his work into the aesthetics, social circulation and abusively coercive powers of religion—an arena suffused with personal agonies that touches on his tragic death by suicide in 2012.

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history at the University of California.
His books include Modernism Relocated (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997), Art After Appropriation (Routledge, 2001), Catching Mayhem by its Tale [vol. II of Paul McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates] (2019); and the first two volumes of his collected writings: Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art (2016) and After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse (2019). He is editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), Institutional Critique and After (2006), The Aesthetics of Risk (2008), Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (2010) and writings by Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism (2003); Minor Histories (2004); Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1988-2004 (2005). 

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