"This alien [meaning John Kelly] is too close to home to be classed as a global 'other', too culturally developed and independent to be simply reassimilated... An awkward bugger, then." Thus art writer Fergal Gaynor on the hassle that is artist John Kelly.


Kelly creates great art while poking his finger in the wounds, the mistakes and gaps, contradictions and inversions, that abound in the inner sanctums of art and in writings and rituals that surround these holy sites.


Kelly has painted in Antarctica. Almost as dangerous, he has painted on the rocky slabs of County Clare while a lost bull roamed nearby and its owner watched a hurling match. He's still best known for a massive bronze cow up a bare tree, one version of which graces Melbourne harbour, another a beautiful, wild promontory in West Cork.


Kelly also writes. His texts vary from number-crunchingly factual to goadingly inquisitive to historical analysis to worryingly accurate satire to simply surreal. Kelly conjures up the trick of being a sophisticated artist asking naive questions and a naive artist asking sophisticated questions. Whether you're running an arts council in Australia or an exhibition in Venice or elsewhere, you may not want him fingering your collar.


This collection takes its title from the temporary demise of Circa Art Magazine, Ireland's 'journal of record' for contemporary art; it's both a homage and an hommage to that magazine, for which Kelly often wrote. The texts here are drawn from Circa and from many other sources. They are replete with insight, both into Kelly's own art practice and into the strange, comical, infuriating and rewarding world that is art now.

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• Publication Date: August 9, 2018
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