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

ArtForum, Feb, 1994 by Rhonda Leiberman

John Ashbery, "The System," 1972

"We admire in her what we do not at all admire in ourselves." Kafka observed of the mysterious esthetic effect exerted by Josephine, a mouse diva, upon her fans. A representative of the mouse community is called upon to explain the power of her art: not only is she not a very good singer, Josephine's "singing," it seems, is really only "piping," and as piping, it is indistinguishable from "our people's daily speech." Her people are so busy, so oppressed, they could barely develop the faculties necessary to appreciate really good piping, let alone song, so Josephine "gets effects which a trained singer would try in vain to achieve among us and which are only produced precisely because her paeans are so inadequate." What emerges is a poignant defense of slacker art, reflecting, by its very inadequacy, a culture "without making the slightest demand upon us," absurdly demanding, in fact, the most heightened sensibility, precisely because it seems to make the slightest demand. "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" is an allegory or precursor of so much of the greatest recent art that is indistinguishable from the usual whining and wretching of everyone: "many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while." In an epoch when the artist is the genius loser who best expresses his or her exclusion from the scene, the loser becomes a participant by being an observer, by being left out. To be the witness of these types--the witness of the witness--puts you in a strange position. One recalls reading the passages at the end of the Search, when the narrator finally accepts the futility of the work he has prepared all his life to begin tomorrow (and you're totally identifying with him, after he has written like 3,000 brilliant pages of his supposed paralysis). I look at what Karen's doing--her fanhood, her copying, her desire to be other people--and experience pay own desire to be her, to have her thoughts, not as esthetically poignant but as stupid! Just when it seems that losers have become winners (and everyone is even), the weird magic of art kicks in; one considers one's perspective on one's own experience and it somehow falls apart. When she wants to be someone else, she's a genius; when I want to be her, I'm a mess. Yet expressing my parasitic relation to others has to be as valid as her parasitic relation to others, I tell myself repeatedly and am sort of saved. Having passed by great works without considering them deeply, sometimes without even noticing there, she bad retained from the period in which she had lived, and which indeed she described with great aptness and charm, little but the most trivial things it bad to offer. But a piece of writing, even if it treats exclusively of subjects that are not intellectual, is still a work of the intelligence, and to give a consummate impression of frivolity in a book, or in a talk which is not dissimilar, requires a touch of seriousness which a purely frivolous person would be incapable of. In a certain book of memoirs written by a woman and regarded as a masterpiece, such and such a sentence that people quote as a model of airy grace has always made me suspect that, in order to arrive at such a degree of lightness, the author must once have been imbued with a rather ponderous learning, a stodgy culture, and that as a girl she probably appeared to her friends an insufferable bluestocking. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, 1920-21