| Celebrities live in the realm of memory, existing entirely as snap-shots in our minds. The identity of Paris Hilton, for example, is defined by its perpetual absence. Like a ghost, her existence rests always on the reality of un-reality, on the unseen and the untouched. In this way, her image is her being; she begins and ends in the photographs she inhabits. Her identity is naive because it is undeveloped. Perhaps it remains undeveloped not just because we wish it to be so, but also because we need it to remain so. Karen Kilimnik has concerned herself with this need in the past, drawing from it her stylistic inspiration. |  |
Heather Clarke
Karen Kilimnik, Marie Antoinette out for a walk at her petite Hermitage, France, 1750, 2005. Water soluble oil color on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of 303 Gallery.
Celebrities live in the realm of memory, existing entirely as snap-shots in our minds. The identity of Paris Hilton, for example, is defined by its perpetual absence. Like a ghost, her existence rests always on the reality of un-reality, on the unseen and the untouched. In this way, her image is her being; she begins and ends in the photographs she inhabits. Her identity is naive because it is undeveloped. Perhaps it remains undeveloped not just because we wish it to be so, but also because we need it to remain so.
Karen Kilimnik has concerned herself with this need in the past, drawing from it her stylistic inspiration. Her paintings depict stars like Hilton, as in Marie Antoinette out for a walk at her petite Hermitage, France, 1750, in which she is represented through slightly awkward portraiture: the eyes a little un-proportionate, the nose subtly—intentionally—off. The style is naive and basic as is the subject. There is nothing real beneath the portrait’s surface. The only sense of reality they provide is the recapitulated image itself. It is as if Kilimnik specifically critiques this reiteration by making the image awkward—and in doing so, human and real. This is not just another picture of Paris Hilton, not just another recollection of her surface image. This image represents her human presence. In the end, Kilimnik seems to suggest that though memory may be self-centered and empty, ultimately it is necessary.
Exhibiting her work in adorned rooms, and hanging her pictures on wallpapered walls, white cube galleries are transformed into stages, locales the subjects of her paintings could inhabit, were they living and breathing. One gets the sense that the paintings—and their subjects—are at home, just as celebrities seem at home on movie and television screens. It almost seems as if the rooms in her installation-driven exhibitions act like screens or canvases themselves, as they provide the best context within which to fully experience and grasp her work.
Arriving at the Cove depicts a gargantuan ship, and like Hilton, it has an expected, and oh-so-boring majesty to it, as it towers above us, occupying a fantastical reality that is clearly separated from the drone and drab of normality. There is a fairy-tale behind many of Kilimnik’s images; these are the reflections of a little girl’s imagination, of an undisturbed and uncomplicated mind.Even so, her work still discloses a mistrust of the mystical and the enchanted. Her vision is not completely uncomplicated. In fact, it is perhaps dangerous in its absurdity, corrupted in its faint invitation to cynicism. In her ongoing Me As Series she disguises herself as various models and movie stars. As an adult she role plays with the same disastrous fervor of a child. Only this time she introduces the grown-up ingredients of shame, detachment, and self-degradation.
Kilimnik’s 2007 installations at Le Consortium, Dijon locate and describe the rooms where the imagined begins and ends. Moving gracefully from one room the next, the imagined marks its path by trying on, examining, and flinging aside. These are the maps of narcissistic revelries, displays of the props of escapism. Here a blue gown hangs beside a mirror. This could be Hilton’s closet, only the dresses aren’t Prada or Gucci; they are dress-up dresses, forgotten in the attic and re-discovered.
There is martyrdom a-plenty here. Contained within the impatient appetite of escapism, there is attainment and then abandonment, curiosity, and then tedium, the novel and then the familiar. The camera’s lens captures and depicts faithfully, yet still misrepresents completely. Imaging a truth results in a lie. Perhaps, then, there is also a hint of sympathy in these works. Perhaps Marie Antoinette is an homage to what we have ingested so vigorously, and yet so hopelessly.
