SOD AND SODIE SOCK | Marc Jacobs Heaven

Sod AND Sodie Sock, a book published on the occasion of the legendary collaborative exhibition between Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy at Secession in Vienna in 1998. Responding to Sad Sack, an American children’s cartoon figure that reflects everyday life in the army, the book documents the two artists’ nightmarish experiments in installation, video, and performance that dealt with the power play of the US Army with the aid of Sad Sack, as well as further associations with Georges Bataille, Wilhelm Reich and Clement Greenberg. “The exhibition created by the two Californian artists confronts the viewers with those units on the scales of our civilisation which only turn them into actual participants in their own culture as they introduce us history to knowledge from memory and a present that is still without shadows,” writes Secession president Werner Würtinger in the book’s preface.