Fresh Inspiration, pay attention! Karen Kilimnik: currently exhibiting at 303 Gallery.

I walked into the single gallery room, a wide-open space and wished for a party. Definitely Champagne in fluted glasses. Besides the fact that it was an opening and many art world celebrities were there, there was a festive feel in the air. The celebration tittered from the work, which is light and playful, but glamorous all the while. Klimnik toys with the adult sophistication of fashion.

The room was cheap glamour, like glamour in quotes, but it was elegant and absolutely convincing. A poor-man’s Chanel fashion show. A few hints here and there to conclude style. Kitch paintings, awkward, gawky teenage drawings, a installation of photocopies, including a boot filled with crumpled plastic and fake pearls, with tinny music playing. Also some dark, amateur photographs and Ikea-esque chandaliers and music coming out of tinny speakers helped to reiterate this theme. This doesn’t sound like the scene of glamour. Isn’t glamour expensive and rich and decadent, not sparse and cheap? She achieved elegance with a surface touch. She achieved depth while entertaining (and being entertained by) the surface.

Kilimnik created a place that felt magical, even if the viewer only catches glimpses and hints, they added up to a world that one can enter into. Fantasy plays a large part in modern society though it isn’t often referred to as such. Dreaming is not something to brag about, results and progress and action are. It is now even the trend for artists, the professional dreamers, to be workaholics. But I cheer the dreamers. I understand Marlene Dumas and Agnes Martin who prefer doing nothing to always doing something. Imagination is fed by dreaming. Just the word, dreeaaming, slow and drawn out makes me think of lying in long grass, in shorts, staring at the sky while chewing a blade. Cramming for an exam does not whisper imagination, but rather screams ambitious goals of a mega-monster artist.

The reason I am drawn to Kilimnik is much for the same reason I am drawn to Ree Morton and Laura Owens. There is an element of space in the work. The work is simple but energized with something exciting, something beyond the material work. What is that? Is art adult-life dreaming? Jonathan Meese also considers art-making one big play-pen and I find this attitude freeing. It is modest and reduces art making to something a child does, rather than an ego enhancing career-choice. It may sound sentimental to wax on about innocence and purity and playing and dreaming, but the hard shells we grow into as adults could use some of this.

For the most part I tend to think of glamour as a constructed cold hard shell. One I love but have to consciously learn. It is something used regularly in urban society to protect that playful innocent and vulnerable child. So, I applaud Kilimnik for combining these two things, the cold with the warm, the adult with the child and the jaded with the innocent.

Thoughts after Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at MOMA

Warhol embraced the fallacy of a picture just as he embraced the fallacy of façade. He purposefully follows his obsession of surface appeal with the tool of video. Perhaps by investigating the exterior Warhol happened upon some interior?

Warhol’s exhibition at MOMA this spring (2011) is glamorous. Black and white large video screens confront the viewer, head on. Though the heads on the video screens are much larger than life, they transfix without overwhelming.

The sleeping video dominates the first room. It is the ultimate conceptual perfection of the limitation of what the exterior can reveal. The sleeper is lost in a rich world beyond the reach of visual documentation and we are left with a barely moving image of a head with closed eyes. There is no understanding of this person because there is no conscious communication.

In the second room each video screen shows a different approximate 4-minute filmed duration of each person. Watching these individuals you understand very quickly how they carry themselves in the world, how they consciously communicate without words. Some are tough, some are playful, seductive, artificial, calculated, serious, candid, but they all serve a purpose, to create a connection to the social world outside. Because who would we be without an identity?

Obviously we live in a visual-based culture. The exterior is valued and therefore manipulated with great care. The abundance of street-style and celebrity celebration is unignorable and imbued in self-awareness. An immaterial fantasy of oneself moves aside for a more material and true reality of oneself, based on photograph and video. Books are read less than movies and television. Celebrities are photographically sought after, face book pictures, paparazzi, everyone is looking at themselves.

A fantasy of oneself is necessary because we must learn to carry our intangible insides somehow. (Our soul?) We must learn how to operate in a society that unavoidably adheres to stereotypes and generalizations and categorizations. Are we truly ourselves only when we are alone? Where is the true self? Fantasy allows us to filter our true selves, to learn how to funnel something intangible and unverbalized into a form. We decide to lean left more or lean right based on how others react to us and our judgment of others. We become masters at playing ourselves.

Blahg Rules

These rules inspire this blog. As a painter in a solitary studio practice these rules help reassure me when doubts come to haunt. I appreciate their clarity and reason, just firm enough to be called “Rules”. While formulating a theme to help mold this misshapen mess of a blog with, I remembered these rules. Particularly Come or go to everything and Look at movies carefully and often because that is what I spend a lot of my non-studio time in New York doing. The beauty of living here are the cultural options, but I sometimes feel that my experiences come in and go out, leaving nourishment behind of course but also leaving a large portion to waste. This blog is my way of marinating my experiences…in the hope that I will extract from them even more flavor.

10 Rules for Students and Teachers from John Cage

Rule 1
Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

Rule 2
(General Duties as a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher.
Pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3
(General Duties as a Teacher)
Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 4
Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5
Be Self Disciplined.
This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them.
To be disciplined is to follow in a good way.
To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6
Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake.
There is no win and no fail. There is only make.

Rule 7
The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It is the people who do all the work all the time
who eventually catch onto things.
You can fool the fans, but not the players.

Rule 8
Do not try to create and analyze at the same time.
They are different processes.

Rule 9
Be happy whenever you can manage it.
Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.

Rule 10
We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that?
By leaving plenty of room for “x” qualities.

Helpful Hints:
Always be around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
Save everything. It may come in handy later.

Pipi’s Big Adventure

Pipilotti Rist embraces the second floor of the MOMA as her own by enhancing the surrounding windows with pink tint and plopping a round couch in the middle of the room. Seated comfortably a viewer can blissfully look at the rest of MOMA through rose-colored glasses. This marks the beginning of a feminization of the space. Though at first glance the psychedelia is overwhelming. The couches made for reclining, dope-smoking or making-out create a den atmosphere enlivened by a sock waft and the disproportionate amount of squirmy teenagers. But though the images are brilliant with colors, trippy transitions and unstable camera angles, this hippy facade is just a way of directing you into Rist’s trip of feminine exploration, where tasteful restraint is banished and sensual indulgences rule.

Rist’s roots as a punk musician are obvious in her older videos where she utilizes a sexual female aggression unique in live rock music. In Pour Your Body Out, Rist still channels this energy though more subtly through the pop sensibility of MTV music videos. Strong colors (blue strawberries - didn’t Smashing Pumpkins have those in one of their videos?) and flashy transitions are visually seductive in sophisticated MTV speak, a language the majority unavoidably know. But a definite diversion from the MTV aesthetic is the pace, which moves in slow motion helped along by the soundtrack of a haunting drone. This slowness emphasizes a dreamlike haze that floats the viewer through a techno-natural landscape where life is best experienced with the senses not the brains. The images are centered around the female body, with menstrual blood, orifices and skin all in a slobbery and tactile relation to nature. By using MTV as her weapon to beat out sentimentality Rist is able to refresh the historically burdened woman/nature connection.

Categorizing work as feminist is usually limiting because it binds the meaning in stagnant clichés. But artwork by female artists like Rist (I hope) are exposing the multifaceted meaning of feminism. Rist reflects a particular angle of feminism that Vera Chytilova encased in the film Daisies (which unsurprisingly is a huge influence on Rist). The women in the movie, or girls rather, misbehave without fear of what is proper or moral. They are totally self-sufficient (as prostitutes) and consumed in their own fantastical world which they shape in unconventional ways. Because of their unexpected behavior it is unclear where their dream ends and reality begins. These women are admirable because they escape entrapment of objectification. The attention their outside appearance attracts inspires their actions rather than stifles them. In Pour Your Body Out Rist also escapes entrapment by allowing a female experience from the inside and the view of her from the outside to intertwine. Rist creates a rich dreamland where Eve thrives in the Garden of Eden and the apple she eats with gusto does not imprison her but frees her.

Q

"Style is the man when the man himself is a stylus - as in geomancy, when one's body becomes a seismic needle for registering, in ink or sand or some other substance, the signals of the cosmos. If the man is the instrument, then the figures he makes are both by him and not by him."
-Alexander Nagel, Questions of Style, Artforum, Sept 2010

Georgia O’Keefe, The Calendar Girl

Georgia O’Keefe has become an artist reduced to cliché, her images repetitively reproduced on postcards and calendars to a visually numbing effect. Her symbolic imagery of flowers reduced to a shallow sexual quip. Our eyes have become accustomed to repetitive viewing in banal contexts, sucking the juicy and complex content of O’Keefe’s work dry.

Luckily the exhibition of O’Keefe’s work at the Whitney last September
attempted to revive her, breathing fresh life into her images. The format of the show emphasized the artist’s intention by way of the interior and exterior. Her paintings were interspersed between portraits taken of her by Stieglitz, her lover at the time. Perhaps because he was privy to an intimate angle of her he was able to take arresting portraits. In his photographs her exterior demanded attention, exuding strength and character and a stubborn temperament.

Alternatively though not in contradiction her interior was made present through the energetic abstractions. Art, whether abstraction or otherwise is the intangible made tangible. The invisible visible. O’Keefe articulated frankly through shapes and color, her (though these words don’t suffice) feelings, desires and internal energies. Abstraction was simply the only kind of art, she said, that let her express her deepest feelings.1

Although secretly I curse whoever introduced her to oil. Her early watercolor paintings flowed with a freedom lost in the muddy stiffness of the oil paintings. She struggled with color and value in the oil medium when she may have breezed through shading with water-based washes. I shudder to imagine what easy power she may have released had she stuck to watercolor. Though a second thought wonders if the rigidity with which she handled oil was better suited to a stubborn, rock/bone-like character? Did her freedom of form lie in the rigid structure of line?

Articulation is courageous both if everyone understands and if no one understands. Because O’Keefe did not explain in words the origins of her artistic instigations, Stieglitz and others located meaning in sexual cliché’s of generic womanness. No doubt sexuality in a woman is fierce, but in speaking of energies in the body, it is one of many. Referred to as chakras in yoga or as spiritual reservoirs of energy which are all tangled together. There is something scarily minimizing about relating O’Keefe’s paintings to mere genitalia or singular sexual pleasure.

But how then does one address in words that interior world without sounding like a sappy fool? Is this interior world of unconscious instincts, fantasized nuances and spiritual swinging colliding with sensory information coming from outside and in, even worth talking about? The most brazen articulation of this inner sense is in O’Keefe’s paintings, as long as the viewer doesn’t think it out but rather feels it out, painting by painting.

1 Holland Cutter, In Full Flower, Before the Desert, The New York Times, September 17, 2009