John C. Welchman will pilot a “guidance device” probing Shaw’s crypto-prophetic journey through institutional (and disorganized) religion, runaway conspiracy theories, unmitigated Americana, identity-malformation, and symbological mayhem. (Porn cop provided.)

John C. Welchman is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego; Chair of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; and Advisor at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. His books include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (1995), Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles(1997), Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (2001), Vasco Araújo (2007), and Paul McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates (forthcoming, 2015). He is coauthor of The Dada & Surrealist Word-Image (1989), Mike Kelley (1999), On the Beyond: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and John C. Welchman (2011), Kwang Young Chun: Mulberry Mindscapes (2014), and Joseph Kosuth: Re-Defining the Context of Art: 1968–2014 (forthcoming, 2015); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now (2005); Institutional Critique and After (2006);The Aesthetics of Risk (2008); Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (2010); andSculpture and the Vitrine (2013); as well as collected writings by Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection (2003); Minor Histories (2004); Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (2005). Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art, the first of a series of six volumes of his collected essays, has just been published by Sternberg Press, Berlin. He has written for Artforum, Screen, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Economist, among other newspapers and journals; and has contributed texts for exhibitions at the Louvre; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou; MoMA P.S.1; Tate Modern; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Albertina; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Sydney Biennial; Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Edinburgh Festival; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Cuba.