Today on the site we're lucky to feature an excerpt from an essay by Seth originally published in The Devil's Artisan, on designing The Collected Doug Wright.
In very sad news, the great Mike Kelley died on Tuesday. Mike wrote a phenomenal essay on Gary Panter for the monograph I edited, and most recently we co-curated an exhibition in L.A. He was a brilliant and generous man and one well-versed in everything from Bob Powell to the Art Ensemble of Chicago to Fluxus. This is barely related to comics, I know, but his influence on visual culture was, and will continue to be, massive, and you should know about his work and legacy. His studio and close friends released the following statement, which should be read. Then go out and look at his work.
“Our dear friend the artist Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit) has passed away. Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up—and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing in a thousand voices—Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art and the wider culture. For Mike, history existed only to be reconstructed, memory was selective, faulty and willful and life itself vibrant but often dysfunctional. We can hear him disagreeing with us. We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us.”
-Kelley Studio and Emi Fontana, Kourosh Larizadeh, Paul and Karen McCarthy, Fredrik Nilsen, Anita Pace, Jim Shaw, Mary Clare Stevens, Marnie Weber, John C. Welchman [for all Mike’s many friends near and far]
Elsewhere online, Peggy Burns has a great summation of her experience at Angouleme. Here's a fine piece on World War III magazine being displayed at MoMA. Oh, and this is an impressive 24-hour comic. Finally, the NY Times probably has the best coverage of the Watchmen debacle. It's sad and stupid and hardly worth commenting about because what should we expect from such a cynical company? We could expect better, but that's actually foolish at this point. It's outrageous but not surprising.
