A Diderot of the Low - Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism - Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals - Book Review

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Cary Levine

The recuperation of these prototypes and their social as well as personal impact exposes the narrow view of supposedly progressive historical accounts. As he writes in his Foul Perfection essay on Thek:

Contemporary American art history is spookily aligned with Reagan/Bush ideology. By excising artworks from the 1960s that mirror the social and political upheavals and counter-cultural activities of the period, or focusing on works primarily in the formalist tradition, an unspoken alliance is forged with the conservatives: both agree that these unsavory issues are not appropriate for art, and thus for society.

According to Kelley, this bias fuels the prioritization of "cool" artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol over their "hot" counterparts like Fahlstrom. In his 1995 catalogue essay on Fahlstrom, "Myth Science," Kelley contends that the artist has been shunned by champions of Pop "because he allowed the 'political' to enter his work, because he was interested in issues of narrative, and because his work was compositionally 'busy.'"

In fact, Kelley concludes, it's the art historians who have been most successful at prescribing the focus of their constituents: "Official art culture is much more effective in its control of history than Republican strategists, for it knows that the best way to treat contradictory material is not to rail against it, but simply to pretend it didn't happen." He thus reminds us that, for all of postmodernism's claims to pluralism, there are certain areas of cultural experience that remain off-limits to serious critical attention--and that this act of cordoning off acceptable subject matter is fundamentally political.

Looking back from today's vantage point, Kelley's remarks on the writing of art history are prescient, if a bit over the top. His alignment of "official art culture" with right-wing conspiracies is a blatant exaggeration, but one perpetrated as a form of resistance against those critical voices whose dominance Kelley must have seen as a real threat to the understanding of his own work, along with that of the artistic ancestors he claims. And while Thek and Fahlstrom have enjoyed a resurgence since Kelley wrote on them in the early and mid-1990s, and provocateurs such as Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon and Kelley himself are now widely respected, others who may have influenced them--rock musicians, for example--have only recently begun to receive tangential consideration by art critics.

The more egalitarian conception of art history put forth in Foul Perfection pervades the texts compiled in Minor Histories, as well as the works they describe. Employing a variety of techniques, from the fictive prose of adopted personae to straightforward explanations peppered with poetic fragments and his trademark wordplay and crude jokes, these writings directly reflect Kelley's artistic processes, as he deliberately conflates the expected with the unexpected.

In the end, however, it is the writings of Foul Perfection that actually offer the richest elucidation of Kelley's artistic approach. The book's title article includes a quote from Ernst Kris and E.H. Gombrich's 1952 study of caricature: "The caricaturist's secret lies in the use he makes of controlled regression." Kelley has made this secret his own. Reading between the lines to extrapolate the ideas he puts forth in these texts reveals the artist's expansive vision and its manifestation in works that offer a pointed, often caustic social critique.