Revenge of the mouse diva: Karen Kilimnik's favorite things

ArtForum, Feb, 1994 by Rhonda Leiberman

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

Rumi, Sufi poet

Karen Kilimnik and Madonna are in my dream, not together, and I'm their friend. Karen is wearing this cone bra like Madonna. We're in junior high school and we're going to a strip mall one afternoon to buy art supplies (this really happened). We go into a hardware-type store or a K Mart. There's a feeling that we both have to go home to our parents. I ask her "Do you have to ask them every time you buy something?" ... Then I go out with Madonna. I keep on wanting for her to realize I'm not her type but she doesn't. She tells me she wants a Libra girlfriend. I tell her Watch it, deep down Libras are very stubborn. For some reason I have an album of hers--not a real one. She signs it, "As Always, Libra."

Lately I've been having a lot of celebrity dreams. While they're not prophetic or objectively true (e.g., we know that Madonna is a Leo), they are indispensable evidence of how contemporary experience is arranging our desires. Rather than a Dali montage sequence from a Hitchcock film, my unconscious is starting to look like a psychic dumpster for Entertainment Tonight. The media have always been the privileged site for economies of stupid enjoyment (power) in our culture; rather than diagnosing them, and trying to "cure" them, rather than psychotically closing itself off from media scariness and pretending to be "above it" and more "pure," shouldn't art act more like politicians and ask how best to work it (to give power to the people)? Whenever art and thought truly reflect the affective state of the media and do not pretend to take an "objective" moralizing position outside it (which instantly makes them irrelevant), they begin to look like the work of the devil. By taking glamour particles at face value and reproducing them in their psychotic disconnectedness, Karen Kilimnik is being an incorrect consumer. The correct consumer is supposed to internalize incoherent glamour fantasies--fill in the blanks, shut up and buy the product--act them out, and walk around and hope that she seems as worthy of them as the people in the magazines (while at the same time quasi-cynically disavowing this). By consuming the shreds of glamour, setting them up as dumb props for her own fantasies with the most minimal intervention, Kilimnik is tapping into the same hot line to power as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, who, also, refuse to reassure us by providing a free moral judgment with every art product. Maybe she has no fantasies at all. Her somewhat zombielike presentation of the froufrou spills onto other subject matter as well, like a faux Manson-family attack scene. In the installation Paris is Burning/Is Paris Burning?, which looks like some kind of occupied Nazi boutique adorned with a swastika dress she made herself, real evil is alluded to as decor. By her total abdication of a critical or moralizing position, we are reminded that good art never judges or moralizes, it expresses. What is being expressed here? The trappings of fantasy, the sensationalism and glitz of the tabloid, the glamour of fashion--minus the subject who is supposed to interiorize, digest, and form an identity around them ... like a pearl forming its lustrous surface around the founding trauma of the germ. In this case the germ is culture; the "girl" or consumer who is supposed to swallow and ingest it instead vomits it back in wrecked desubjectivized tidbits, strangely desexed into glamour molecules, in pretty colors. Her stuff looks like the mise-en-scene for a character, but there's no character. Instead we see the seductive germs, the infection, around which one is supposed to sprout. The installations look like a collaboration between a psychotic shut-in, a star-struck teen, and a witty manipulator of faux naivete. I especially like the ones with sketchy "trompe-l'oeil" backdrops, like Fashion Shop, 1991, in which ratty garments are displayed on wire hangers against sketchy theatrical "curtains." In The Correct Way to Kill Dolls, 1992, Barbies hang out in front of two pieces of paper with architectural facades drawn on them; they don't look more dead than usual. In the "Jane" series, each drawing is like a different episode consisting of a handwritten scenario: "Jane falls asleep at the undertaker's and is mistaken for the next client." They look beautiful framed with moire mats.

The installations seem like the aftermaths of violence. It is as if she had been gently traumatized, impacted by frivolous and important events, enough to want to get closer to them but not inside them. To be traumatized is to be unable to get inside the founding event of the trauma, but, rather, to become it. Me as Sean Penn, 1992, is the perfect trauma scene, composed of a smashed camera, in which the artist is identified with the temperamental actor identified with the camera he smashes because he hates the press. In the installations and in the drawings, it's as if she's trying to get closer to these events, to enter or own them by reproducing them herself. The results are as hysterical, flat, and as strangely distanced as they seem in the media. At the same time, the effort at "re-creating" them injects in them a weird memorial pathos, honoring their banal mystery by the very inadequacy of shedding more light on them. Just told Stephano just died, 1990, is a sketchy drawing of Caroline of Monaco: we see a profile of the freshly bereaved princess surrounded by lots of blank space. We know her gilded life has been pierced by tragedy and her suffering must be great. She is accompanied by Ines de la Fressange, ex-Karl Lagerfeld muse, now a talented shoe designer. This fa-fa Euro-death is treated in the same way as Mary McFadden; in a work subtitled The city's most exciting estranged couple, Mary McFadden, 51, appears with her ultrahigh forehead, bob, and Kohle Yohannan, 22, her much younger spouse. As in a magazine, the lady designer's distinctive head is then repeated in a close-up below. "Within days, members of her social set were whispering that her marriage was unconsummated." Disjointed copy floats around them: "Who's he? gay? holding hands...." In Father Ritter (No Love, No Affection), 1990, we expect the drawing to be about the Father, already famous in 1991, on the cutting edge of the priest-sex scandals; instead it's about Carolyn Warmus, the Westchester murderess "hungry for affection," who "even paid someone $100 to set up a date for her in high school." The two cases are linked in the headlines, and in Karen's head, by the phrase "No Love, No Affection."