MIKE KELLEY, Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, New City Editions / Artists Space, 1986

Mike Kelley — Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile
Designed by Mike Kelley with Patti Podesta
New City Editions in association with Artists Space, 1986
Strand Rare Book Room Copy

Approx. 14 × 20.4 cm
98 pp.
Sewn softcover
Offset printing
32 black-and-white illustrations
First edition

An important early artist's book by Mike Kelley, published in connection with the 1985–86 project Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile, a sprawling combination of performance, music, installation, drawing and writing.

Kelley brings together three apparently incompatible cultural forms: Plato's allegory of the cave, Rothko's modernist chapel and Abraham Lincoln's profile on the American penny. Philosophy, transcendence and mass reproduction become parts of the same unstable system.

The project included Kelley's fifty-five-minute performance poem at Artists Space, New York, on 5 December 1985, performed with Molly Cleator and accompanied by incidental music from Sonic Youth and Adam Rudolph. The publication translates that performance structure into prose and image, pairing Kelley's writing with black-and-white photographs ranging from caves and monuments to vernacular American historical material.

The reverse reproduces a 1982 photograph of Kelley with the Kensington Runestone in Alexandria, Minnesota — an archaeological object whose contested authenticity makes it an especially appropriate Kelley subject. Evidence, fiction, belief and historical authority remain difficult to separate.

This copy retains an original gold “FROM THE STRAND / RARE BOOK ROOM / EST. 1927” bookseller label to the front wrapper.

A subsequent classification has therefore become physically attached to the object.

An artist's book about authenticity and representation enters another system and returns labelled RARE.

The mark confirms circulation.

Condition: Good to very good. General rubbing and surface wear to wrappers, minor edge and corner wear and light creasing consistent with age and handling. Gold Strand Rare Book Room label retained to front cover as found.

The New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026