Karen Kilmnic

Karen Kilimnik: Finding meaning in scatteredness

PHILADELPHIA: Karen Kilimnik has gotten the survey that her strange, still difficult achievement deserves. For one thing, her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is appropriately strange itself, beginning with a barren, seemingly empty, party's-over gallery. It goes deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all-too-American sense of emptiness. It also makes her efforts in installation art, which encompass materials as various as glitter, fake snow and blood, stuffed animals, ballet shoes and piles of party drugs, feel of a piece with her painting, photography, video and drawing.

The show tours a scrapbook's worth of the heroes, stars, victims and star-victims — both real and imagined, and from stage, screen, fashion magazine and tabloid — that are Kilimnik's obsessions (and often ours too). These form a witchy chain-link fence of intersecting identities and tales: Liz, Gelsey Kirkland, Giselle, Nureyev, the murdered family of the last Russian czar, Lisa Steinberg, Charles Manson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Moss and "The Avengers."

In all, the Kilimnik exhibition confirms once more that the Institute of Contemporary Art, part of the University of Pennsylvania, is among the most adventuresome showcases in the country where art since 1970 is concerned. It chooses its subject well, keeps things accessible through the judicious use of well-written labels and brochures, and takes risks that prove that the curatorial discipline is alive and kicking.

Kilimnik, a 50-year-old Philadelphia native, made an international name for herself in the early 1990s with seemingly random accumulations of cheap objects and materials that functioned a bit like three-dimensional rebuses.

Alternately girlish and demonic, they merged popular culture, personal fantasy, history and current, often violent events and fell under the heading of scatter art, a phenomenon whose definition and membership remains a bit blurred. The artists most often identified with it — like Kilimnik, Sylvie Fleury, Cady Noland and, to some extent, Jessica Stockholder — are women, as are those artists' most important precursors, among them Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Barbara Bloom and the photo-based generation grouped around Cindy Sherman. It could also be seen as including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jack Pierson and even Matthew Barney.

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Chris Burden in Second Life

If you thought the "game" Second Life was just for squares check out this site for more reenactments by other artist. Wrap your head around that one. "A series of reenactments of historical performances inside synthetic worlds such as Second Life. All the actions are performed by Eva and Franco Mattes through their avatars, which were constructed from their bodies and faces. People can attend and interact with the live performances connecting to the video-game from all over the world. The series started in January 2007." Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG Reenactment of Chris Burden's Shoot Synthetic Performance in Second Life, 2007

Chris Burden Shoot F-Space, Santa Ana, California, November 19, 1971

Naoko ate my cat

Darren Almond

Darren Almond’s diverse work, incorporating film, installation, sculpture and photography, deals with evocative meditations on time and duration as well as the themes of personal and historical memory.

Almond is interested in the notions of geographical limits and the means of getting there – in particular, culturally specific points of arrival and departure. Since 1998, Almond began his ongoing series of landscape photographs entitled Fifteen Minute Moons. Taken during a full moon with an exposure time of 15 minutes, these images of outstanding geographical beauty appear ghostly, bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light where night seems to have been turned into day. In Schacta, Almond filmed the activities of a Russian tin mine and set them against a haunting soundtrack – made as a field recording – of a local female musician/shaman during her performance. Other works explore themes closer to home: Traction is an ambitious three-screen projection that draws a portrait of the artist’s father, laying bare external and internal scars, whilst revealing the artist’s preoccupation with time. A similar intimacy is evoked in If I Had You, a multi-screened film installation about the artist’s grandmother – a tender portrait of youthful reminiscence and the dignity of old age. In Terminus, Almond negotiated buying back the original bus shelters of the town of Oswiecim (formerly Auschwitz) to make a moving installation about historical loss.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, UK. He lives and works in London. He has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including ‘Sensation’ (1997-1999), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), The Busan Biennale (2004) and The Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2005). Solo exhibitions include The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999), Kunsthalle Zürich (2001), Tate Britain (2001) and K21, Düsseldorf (2005).

So Hood.

God.

David Lynch "knows" crazy

Pulled this from BB,

Apparently, Mr. Lynch has the directorial ability to conjure crazy really well.

Who would have thunk it.