Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler – Poetics Country

Poetics Country (1997) is a collaborative limited edition artwork by Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, produced on the occasion of documenta X. Realized as a silkscreen on a baked enamel American road sign, the artwork adopts the standardized visual language of a pedestrian crossing sign, a form associated with public instruction and collective legibility. Kelley and Oursler appropriate this familiar civic object and disrupt its authority by overlaying it with hand-drawn imagery, fragmented texts, and schematic figures drawn from their notebooks, transforming it into a psychologically charged surface.

The graphic style recalls late-1970s and early-1980s “new wave” design, a period both artists associate with alternative visual languages and countercultural communication. The inclusion of real bullet holes situates the mixed-media work within the Antelope Valley in California, where the artists shared a rehearsal space, grounding the piece in a specific social and geographic context rather than symbolic abstraction. Positioned between sculpture, printmaking, and conceptual intervention, Poetics Country reflects Kelley and Oursler’s shared interest in subconscious processes, media saturation, and the instability of meaning, while aligning with documenta X’s broader concerns with politics, memory, and representation.

“The documenta edition is a print in the manner of a standard American crosswalk sign graffittied with images taken from our notebooks. We are attracted to the sign because of its graphic style, a kind of international sign language which was much used in the late 70s ‘new wave’ graphic design. The bullet holes place the sign within the local ‘aesthetic’ of the Antelope Valley, an area that was the site of our shared rehearsal space.”
— Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler

Mike Kelley (1954–2012) was a highly influential American artist whose work occupies a central position in postwar and contemporary art. Emerging from the Los Angeles art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, Kelley worked across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, and printmaking. His practice interrogated themes of childhood, memory, trauma, sexuality, and the repressed dimensions of American culture, often drawing on psychoanalysis, education systems, and popular subcultures. Known for his use of found materials such as stuffed animals, textiles, and vernacular objects, Kelley developed an aesthetic that deliberately challenged notions of taste, authority, and cultural hierarchy. His work remains foundational to discussions of identity, affect, and institutional critique in contemporary art.

Tony Oursler (born 1957) is a leading American multimedia artist recognized for his pioneering use of video, projection, and sculptural installation. Since the late 1970s, Oursler has explored the psychological and social effects of media, technology, and communication, frequently employing projected faces, fragmented bodies, and disembodied voices. His works examine states of anxiety, belief, manipulation, and the subconscious, drawing on sources ranging from early television and spiritualism to advertising and digital culture. Oursler's practice has played a key role in redefining the possibilities of video as a sculptural and spatial medium within contemporary art.

Together, Kelley and Oursler share a long-standing collaborative history rooted in a mutual interest in the unconscious, marginal cultural forms, and the instability of meaning. Their joint works often merge personal mythology with broader social critique, situating individual experience within larger systems of media, power, and collective imagination.