Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Pettibon—these Southern California artists formed a “bad boy” trifecta. Early purveyors of abject art, the trio produced work ranging from sculptures of feces to copulating stuffed animals, and gained notoriety from being perverse. Showing how their work rethinks transgressive art practices in the wake of the 1960s, Pay for Your Pleasures argues that their collaborations as well as their individual enterprises make them among the most compelling artists in the Los Angeles area in recent years. Cary Levine focuses on Kelley’s, McCarthy’s, and Pettibon’s work from the 1970s through the 1990s, plotting the circuitous routes they took in their artistic development. Drawing on extensive interviews with each artist, he identifies the diverse forces that had a crucial bearing on their development—such as McCarthy’s experiences at the University of Utah, Kelley’s interest in the Detroit-based White Panther movement, Pettibon’s study of economics, and how all three participated in burgeoning subcultural music scenes. Levine discovers a common political strategy underlying their art that critiques both nostalgia for the 1960s counterculture and Reagan-era conservatism. He shows how this strategy led each artist to create strange and unseemly images that test the limits of not only art but also gender roles, sex, acceptable behavior, poor taste, and even the gag reflex that separates pleasure from disgust. As a result, their work places viewers in uncomfortable situations that challenge them to reassess their own values. The first substantial analysis of Kelley, McCarthy, and Pettibon, Pay for Your Pleasures shines new light on three artists whose work continues to resonate in the world of art and politics.

Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon

Arts & Photography

Levine, Cary

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

A critical history of the pioneering art and technology group Mobile Image and their prescient work in communications, networking, and information systems. In The Future Is Present, Philip Glahn and Cary Levine tell the fascinating history of the visionary art group Mobile Image--founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1977--which appropriated emerging technologies, from satellites to electronic message platforms. Based in Los Angeles, this under-studied collective worked amid urban crisis, a techno-boom, consolidating media power, and ascendant neoliberal politics. Mobile Image challenged fundamental conventions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, as well as notions of power, representation, and identity. Glahn and Levine argue not only for the historical importance of Mobile Image, but also for a critical artistic process that is at once analytic and transformative. They weave themes such as embodiment and its mediation, public/private dialectics, and techno-utopian vision throughout the book, binding these projects to discourses around race, gender, and class, as well as margin and center, the local and the global. In today's world of ubiquitous digital re/production, networking, and social media, The Future Is Present shows how the work of Mobile Image continues to have profound implications for art, technology, and the politics of public and private experience.

The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (Leonardo)

Glahn, Philip

The MIT Press

Mike Kelley’s Arenas series of the late 80s and early 90s mark a shift away from the artist’s performance-oriented activity and towards a new sculptural dexterity, in which cultural resonance is elicited from an eerie reframing of everyday objects. First exhibited in 1990 at Metro Pictures, the Arenas are comprised of stuffed animals arranged around the edges of blankets (or occasionally posed isolate in their center). Ten or twenty such toys in such groupings might convey a cheery childhood picnic scenario, but Kelley rarely selects more than five or six, and places them carefully so that their cuddliness and their capacity to comfort is entirely canceled out. Instead, we encounter the toy as a commodity entity―a mass-manufactured product positioned to enter into play but far from inviting it. Skarstedt’s exhibition of seven of the eleven Arenas is here recorded in superb installation shots and with critical commentary.

Mike Kelley: Arenas

Individual Artists

Skarsdedt

Famed for her LED message boards and the declarative, politicized cast of her linguistic materials, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has in fact employed a great variety of media in her subversions of dominant ideologies. Among these media are granite and marble benches, enamel signs and even, as this handsome catalogue for Holzer’s 2010 show at Skarstedt Gallery reveals, a sarcophagus. Jenny Holzer: Retro covers a decade of Holzer’s oeuvre from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, underlining the diversity of media in some of the artist’s most iconic works. It shows how each medium elicits differing types of language composition, from the direct provocations of the ephemeral LED message boards to the horrific cracked narratives of the stone benches with their rhetoric of enshrinement and permanence. Surveying works that vary thus from the fleeting to the fixed, Retro also underscores the temporal scale of Holzer’s bold and influential oeuvre.

Jenny Holzer: Retro

Skarstedt

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levine, Cary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Levine, Cary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levine, Cary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon

The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (Leonardo)

Mike Kelley: Arenas

Jenny Holzer: Retro