Monday, May 29, 2017

Karen Kilimnik at Eva Presenhuber


(link)

Untold reasons why 600 telescopic install shots and 6 of the paintings; there's more on Presenhuber's website here.

But so, Last time on CAWD we heard arguments for and against the presence of critique in Kilimnik's rococo ostentation, sleeper cells or upstanding citizens of the gentry.  Hainley said critique, but Leiberman's struggle to ascertain where it may have lain railroaded by Kilimnik herself's swearing against.
Which of course the whole thing an expression of artworld assumption that art must critique, particularly the presence of wealth it must interminably distance itself from melting into. Assuming artists all smiling ascetics happy with their pay in high nourishment of art's gas, the beautifully ambiguous and ideal, Art, as opposed to any of the dirty ruses of social capital, vanity, or symbolic violence that art somehow totally aligned but distinct from by some high plane of intentions, the whole art world lacking some undergraduate Bourdieu.
But so for Kilminik the superfluous rococo absorbed, the paintings as lighthearted brushstrokes connoting but not being the 18th century's most unchecked privileges. Like Simon Denny making his panel mates bristle at aligning himself with enterprise's most valued assent, content, we seem to refuse to believe that Kilimnik might just like depictions of wealth, the vain objects we understand implicitly that 200 year old versions connote while objects of art today don't - who sells for more Kilimnik or van Loo, we flatly refuse to believe it, write dissertations spreading pesticides against, no matter how many time she says it.


see too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery