Mike Kelley, one of the leading Californian artists of the 1990s, is a proponent of abject or pathetic art, an anti-aesthetic, anti-heroic movement, which criticizes social and artistic issues through base humour and ridiculous banality. This book, a survey of Kelley’s career, is the catalogue of a 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with subsequent stops at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other venues. The authors in this book examine the diverse influences — contemporary art, rock and roll, social commentary and pop culture — that provide the context for Kelley’s art.