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Weekly Update 1 – Kilimnik safe and unsafe at ICA
By roberta
May 2, 2007 · 4 Comments
This week’s Weekly has my review of Karen Kilimnik‘s exhibit at ICA. Below is the copy with some photos. See Libby’s post here.
Schlocked and Loaded
Karen Kilimnik’s new show brings out your inner sicko.
Karen Kilimnik painting of Prince Charming in her show at ICA.
Karen Kilimnik’s art is like an archetypal teenage girl: seductive, contradictory, messy, pretty and angry. The internationally renowned Philadelphia artist is a cultural sponge. She soaks up news and information from today, yesterday and 300 years ago, and uses it to comment on everything from art, ballet and architecture to mass murder, drugs and child abuse.
Karen Kilimnik, painting from the Red Room, downstairs at ICA.
Kilimnik’s second show at the Institute of Contemporary Art covers 20 years of drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations. Walking through the two-floor show is a hallucinatory experience, like a dream or a fun house. Downstairs in a specially made red-roomed chamber, 49 brushy and breathless old masterly paintings of pretty chateaus, pretty children and pretty animals take you to safe and fantastical places. There’s a second “safe house” upstairs, and inside it is a video loop screening clips of ballet performances. It’s all pretty, quiet and seductive.
Karen Kilimnik’s Bluebird’s Folly at ICA, a little “safe house” on the second floor.
Outside the little houses, though, Kilimnik’s drawings, photos and scatter-art offer a jolt of tabloid-fueled police-blotter shock and schlock—like the references to the Charles Manson murders and the Lisa Steinberg child-abuse murder. Outside the safe houses, this show is anything but safe.
Drawing by Kilimnik. “Lisa Steinberg, 6, battered to death. She could’ve been a model,” says the drawing.
Perversely, this tabloidesque work has a private feel to it: The drawings look like they’ve been torn out of an obsessive’s sketchbook. The installations feel created by someone whose passion for crime scenes drove her to reenact them. The sense of privacy turns the viewer into a voyeur, and I think that’s the point. We’re all worshippers, obsessives and sickos with murder and mayhem on our minds.
Karen Kilimnik, Blood Drawing (Charlie) I, at ICA.
Kilimnik shocks with her ability to move through vast swathes of territory and leave you guessing at her meaning. Blood Drawing (Charlie) I, which contains only the word “Charlie” and some smudgy fingerprints done in what might be blood (it’s ink), is icky but captivating. You want to look at it and revisit the murder—and that voyeuristic impulse laid bare in the cold light of a museum comes as a shock.
It’s been said Kilimnik considers her exhibitions theater. As you move from one station or scene to another, the effect is indeed stagy. The viewer is both the audience and the player who completes the scene.
Kilimnik installation based on schoolyard murders. As topical today as in 1991 when it was made.
A point of comparison is California artist Raymond Pettibon, a drawing artist who’s also fascinated with guns, crime, pulp fiction, lies and the shifting sands of identity. His images, like Kilimnik’s, are photographic and interiorized. The cryptic phrases he writes next to his images—while more literary and less teen sketchbook than Kilimnik’s—are nonetheless highly ambiguous, ironic and faux private.
Raymond Pettibon drawing. Pettibon had an exhibit at the PMA in 1998 and the catalog for the show is the great Raymond Pettibon Reader, a compilation of drawings by the artist and short excerpts from writings selected by him and the curators. The writings go from a rambling tract by Charles Manson to excerpts from heavy-hitters Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, William Blake and George Santayana.
If this show is a carnival, Kilimnik is the artist behind the funhouse mirror, and she’s not just reflecting the world but passing judgment on it. The world is one of terrifying slipperiness where the pretty coexists with extreme thuggery. And the real horror is that we’ve all adapted to it.
Karen Kilimnik
Through Aug. 5. $3-$6. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108.
Tags: ica, karen kilimnik, raymond pettibon
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“Drawing by Kilimnik. “Lisa Steinberg, 6, battered to death. She could’ve been a model,” says the drawing.”
Is there significance to suggesting that the victim could’ve been a model and not a doctor, poet, artist, mother, CEO, teacher, etc? Does suggesting that the girl was pretty make the viewer feel there is more of a loss than if she were ugly? Why do you think she draws attention to beauty? Do you feel there is more of an issue with that for women than men?
That Kilimnik fixates on models and glamour and movie stars is a comment on how our culture in general (men and women) fixates on those things. I think Kilimnik is critiquing our obsessed- beyond-reason, tabloid-fueled culture which places beauty and youth above all. I don’t think this beauty and youth obsession is as much an issue for men artists, but John Currin, for one, seems revolted by prettiness and that shows up in all the grotesquely pretty women in his paintings.
Kilimnik is much more deadpan about her issues than Currin, and the ambiguity in her work is part of why it is so fascinating.
I totally agree with Roberta on this. It’s pretty odd and upsetting to have someone suggest “she could have been a model” as compared to “she could have been a doctor” or “…the world’s greatest scientist.” On one hand, it’s odd and even embarrassing. On the other hand, we reward successful models for their beauty, and big-time movie stars for their beauty with ridiculous amounts of money. So saying that is really a reflection of how the society really feels, even though it pretends to have deeper values.
Thank you.