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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