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

ArtForum, Feb, 1994 by Rhonda Leiberman

Things we discussed. Her cat, named Tabitha, after the daughter of Bewitched. Photos of her old workroom at her parents' house in Philadelphia, painted in three beautiful shades of pink, inspired by Natalia Makarova's house as seen in a magazine. She lived at home until just a couple of years ago, and used to walk dogs and feed cats professionally. She was always embarrassed to be Jewish. We discussed having bat mitzvahs. She said, I had to have one, but my sister didn't. I said why? She said, She said she didn't want one! She made these snapshots of herself and "gave herself a nose job" by modifying her nose with a pen. It worked: she looked a Little like Amy Fisher. On my second visit, as if she had given it further thought, she said, "I'm always really happy to find out that people I like are Jewish. I think that it's really good that Calvin Klein is Jewish because I like him a lot." Her current inspiration: "I'm working on all these Church statues, part of my wanting-to-be-Catholic thing ... I didn't want to get known for just pretty fashion things. I wanted to do something nice and gloomy ... baroque tombs, skeletons, religion, but I hate the word...." I admire her courage not to have her vision pigeonholed (and marketed) as the art world's version of the waif look. To me, her work seems more rigorous, as we see it spread beyond explicitly girly subject matter to cover the less explicitly girly but also profoundly superficial question of the baroque, the occult, the spiritual, the macabre. Proust observed that people of fashion and beauty can't see the poetry or philosophy in their lives and seek it rather elsewhere, placing "those much stupider than they who profess to despise 'society' (or fashion and glamour) and like instead to hold forth about sociology and political economy" on an infinitely higher peak than artists who make work about glitz. His remarks are equally true about people in the art world today.

I keep on thinking of this Wallace Stevens poem, "After the leaves have fallen, we return to a plain sense of things," totally unmediated experience--through borderline psychic dissociation. If Proust said that the great artist is not the extraordinary personality but the one most able to mirror a commonplace society, rendering, by the very precision of his or her vision, the clarity of perceiving the obvious, Karen's extreme openness, her readiness to agree with anything I said, made her very tentativeness the outward sign not of spinelessness but of her superiority as an artist. Her very unoriginality, her tendency not to interpret or synthesize anything conceptually, but to take things at face value, paradoxically manifests itself as the originality of her expression--while I would contemplate brood upon, and try to mentally destroy the weird spells of everything over me--only to repeat this process, perpetually. Flipping through little flowered albums of snapshots, along with documentation of her installations, I saw she had many pictures of dead animals on the street: "That's a dead squashed little rat ... I have tons of them. Here's some more...." While surfacing in odd coincidence with the recent waif epidemic in fashion, her interest in urchins seemed to run much further back. She had accumulated many snapshots of food found on the street: "What if you lived on the street like in 18th-century London, or like Dickens and stuff ... I like to pretend I live on the street, not like a homeless person ... like a waif--the new waifs. If someone left a crust of bread, that would be bread." I imagined Kate Moss, the leading waif, sniffing over a sandwich found on the road, or dumpster-diving for pizza crusts. She pointed out a package of raw liver still wrapped in plastic: "That would be food. There were two of them left on the street in front of a well-known French restaurant." It was hard to see the liver since it was shot at night. Pointing out a marquee with the Les Mis logo from the Broadway play, she continued: "Like the new waifs ... I read in a magazine that it could be part of the trend." She showed me a shot of a tarp lying on the ground: "I like to pretend that it's a cloak left by the fairies--the folds of drapery are like baroque folds...." Thus, in a half-baked kind of way, this cosmic welter of attractions was coming to stand for the real thing.