The Effect of Isidore Ducasse's Poetic Bestiary on Artist Mike Kelley

Comte de Lautréamont's famous book-length poem, Les Chants de Maldoror, influenced artists and writers from André Breton to Mike Kelley, says Gabriella Pounds at Frieze. The French Lautréamont, who was born Isidore Ducasse, had "a literary corpus as slight as a will o’ the wisp," writes Pounds. "A strange soul, he wrote only at night, seated at a piano, reciting draft sentences interspersed with chords." More:

…Ducasse’s bestiary seems to whip around Kelley’s oeuvre, snarling. Kelley’s hermaphrodite drawing, Chrome Goddess (2006), seemingly gestures to the only soul Maldoror admires: a sleepy hermaphrodite in the Tuileries, described as ‘a body splitting in two’. In a 2007 interview, printed in California Video: Artists and Histories (2008), about his stratospheric high-school opera, Day Is Done (2006), Kelley states that Ducasse was ‘very important’ to him, especially his ‘inappropriate metaphors’ and ‘nonsensical shifts’ that somehow retain a ‘narrative flow’.…

Find the full reflection at Frieze.