Direct, Current

Robin Rice on Visual Art

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Published: May 2, 2007

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In 1992, the Institute of Contemporary Art organized "Scatter Art," Karen Kilimnik's first major museum show. In it, awkward trails of fabric and kitsch objects projected the chaotic, self-absorbed ambience of a teenager's bedroom, inviting exploration or deconstruction. Or, depending on one's attitude, maybe just a good spring cleaning.

Eschewing developed ideas, swathes of curated cultural detritus knit together imprecise feelings: yearning, repulsion and daydreams. A black boot with a string of pearls draped over its edge stands out in an early 1989 tableau (not in Kilimnik's ICA debut) celebrating "The Hellfire Club episode of The Avengers."

Copied images of fashion and fetish-y news figures like Patty Hearst are imperfectly but obsessively rendered � each icon richly emaciated but oddly devoid of underlying bone structure. Drawings, such as a recent one conflating Leo DiCaprio and Rudolph Nureyev, are glossed with Dear Diary-like handwritten text.

Flash forward 15 years: Kilimnik, now internationally successful, returns to the ICA with her first major museum retrospective. It reprises motifs and tropes from the earlier show. To those strategies, she's added video, painting and two major installations in free-standing structures. Music and sound are consistently integrated. Appropriation remains paramount. On the wainscoted walls of The red room in the modern Architecture hang many paintings, mostly copied from British Romantics.

The bluebird in the folly (2006) is a gazebo for viewing a video in which tiny borrowed ballerinas pirouette in a synthetic wood. A truncated glimpse of a man's foot outside the set was the high point for me.

It is an oddly anorexic oeuvre: thin but intense, ritualistic, blurred, encrypted and always, always all about "me." What risks Kilimnik takes by embracing those iconic girlish preoccupations: ballet, horses and gothic crime.

In the traditions of cartooning and fashion illustration, the outsides of things are what count: fake eyelashes, the Manson family's blood graffiti, and Kilimnik's marker-enhanced photographs of herself as various heroines. Yet the best of the work clearly is about all of us with our inevitable self-preoccupation and fetishistic cultural interests. Kilimnik is 50. In 50 more years, the transitory specificity of referents will render her work largely opaque. Now it's transparently relevant.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Karen Kilimnik

Through August 5Institute of Contemporary Art118 S. 36th St., 215-898-7108

 

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