On the beyond

On the Beyond is a far-reaching conversation between the Los Angeles-based artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw and art historian John C. Welchman. Touching on religion, dreams, hallucination, UFOs and other forms of experiential or speculative transcendence, the trio also discusses the American landscape and the sublime, utopian and memorial architectures, and the defiantly complex capacity of art itself to «go beyond.» By turns passionate and humorous, off-beat and far-out, the dialogue posits no faith in and little hope for the beyond itself. It takes stock instead of some of the extraordinary ways in which paranormal and «divine» states are found or invented, willed or perverted in so many registers of American culture; and of the genres and forms of social authorship in which they are inscribed. Kelley gets to the heart of the matter when he notes his enjoyment of what Welchman describes as «perversity, fiction, fantasy, and projection»-«maybe that is what art is» he suggests, «all of the stuff of the transcendent with the transcendental taken away.»