I recently wrote a review of three sushi restaurants in Evanston for the Weekly -- the (ahem...creatively-named) weekly culture section of Northwestern University's student-run paper, the Daily Northwestern. I was supposed to write 50 words for each restaurant but ended up writing 250. So keep in mind that you're reading a super-condensed version of my text. Like eating frozen orange juice concentrate. Also, because my writing is not especially journalistic for the Daily's taste, they rewrote the intro. I am absolutely not responsible for all the alliteration that takes place therein. The following is a pdf of the article as it appeared online, copyright the Daily Northwestern.
Hello again, fair readers. Jake recently reviewed the Chicago one-night creatively-named festival Looptopia for a blog he is conspiring with, the Windycitizen. (article.) He also put together a video covering the debauchery. I wrote the background music. An extended version of the song is available here.
This black and white print by Kristyn Alizé Armour is one of my favorite photos of late. The abrupt juxtaposition of emotion with uncanny is reminiscent the work of Richard Kalvar. I'm also really keen on the interplay of imagery and the textural richness of the photo. (This is a very large image, click a few times to appreciate in different sizes.)
Dustin and I are visiting Nathan and Blake in St. Louis. Everything is going well. Dustin and I have been exploring a lot while N&B are at school/work. Currently we're in Nathan's studio at wustl. He just shared the above youtube by Imaginary Forces. It's a video on what Los Angeles might have to look like in about a century. Chlorofilia reminds me a lot of the type of thinking that the Archigram was doing several decades ago. Organic. Responsive. Adaptable. Flexible. Intelligent.
Urrgghaahhhh. I just finished my last paper for the quarter. This is John Cage telling the story of his experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard. Intention? The Absence of Intention? Spring break?
Democratic Presidential Nominee 2008 Hillary Clinton was talking with Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh at the diner next to the coffee shop that is my office while I'm in Indiana. I'll write more later...oh wait, there's not really anything to write about. It was all canned campaign-trail speech delivery. But you know, good for what it was. It was interesting to be at a rally like this in such a small town.
crappy videos I took on my phone (click for more editorial writing):
Karen Kilimnik's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago displays a wide range of styles and concepts from the past three decades. I was at first struck by the variety of pieces in the show. As I came to know the body of work––the MCA claims the show is the "first significant survey of the work...of Kilimnik"––I became absorbed by another element of Kilimnik's work, kitsch [MCA]. Upon further review, what at first comes off as merely saccharine soon imparts a strange feeling of uncanny unto the viewer.
Art critic Holland Cotter has written that Kilimnik is "one of the most resourceful bricoleurs around" [Cotter]. Her preferred method is not the carefully-placed, vertical bricolage (à la Rachel Harrison) but the haphazard piling of disparate, often loose or light-weight, materials on the ground of the exhibition. Thus, the scatter work. Two major scatter pieces created the furthest resonance in the show. The first, Drugs, 1991, is an assemblage of hundreds of blue and yellow pills falling out from the center of the piece, a large pile of cocaine spills from a mirror, a syringe and a blue lighter sit helter skelter amidst the capsules. The piece, for me, is the most outright statement of excess in the exhibition. Drugs also seems the most obvious in its point and perhaps least indicative of Kilimnik's insight as an artist. Am I overlooking something?
The second piece, I don’t like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre, 1991, is a loaded statement on the intensely cross-referential quality of contemporary culture. I don't like Mondays first refers to the excuse given by Brenda Ann Spencer, age 16, for opening fire in 1979 on an elementary school across the street from her house. This excuse was used by the Boomtown Rats as inspiration for their song by the same name:Kilimnik's scatter work incorporates a large blow-up of a newspaper article on the shooting. The article explained the senselessness of the shooting (what sense is there in any school shooting?) and included a large black-and-white grainy photo of the shooter and of a child who survived the event embracing his parent. This article and a larger blown-up photo of the shooter are pasted onto blocks in the assemblage. Straw is littered about the ground and several bulls-eyes are propped against the back wall of the gallery. The bulls-eyes bear evidence of target-practice and blood is spattered around certain parts of the work. A boom-box sits to one side of the exhibit, next to a backpack. Everything seems to be pulled straight from the shooter's subconscious––Spencer claimed that the shooting was unpremeditated. The piece suggests the elements of preparation involved in the shooting, the iconic images of schoolchild youth (the backpacks, the boombox). The newspaper articles tie in the infamy of aftermath of the event in the shooter's mind. This piece and Drugs shed light on a darker critical side of Kilimnik's work. The artist is adept at juxtaposing scenes of ballet, models and moviestars, with harsher commentary on drugs, self-destructiveness, and death.
Kilimnik seems to exercise a strange authority over her work. She achieves this through a sort of visual doublespeak. In the words of The Guardian's Adam Serle, "Nothing and no one in Kilimnik's world is what they seem. All of which I find both tiresome and precious" [Serle]. In many pieces she combines quickly-rendered fashion-design sketches with images of pop culture icons (i.e. Leonardo DiCaprio, British royalty) and places them within some kind of personalized narrative which Kilimnik seems to have taken part in. She portrays herself as a thin model-looking figure accompanied by text that places her in Russia with Me Getting Ready to Go Out to a Rock Concert With Bernadette in Moscow in 1977. Many of her paintings use this combination of pop-culture and personal or historical narrative, as in her portrait of Paris Hilton that is not a portrait of Paris Hilton, Marie Antoinette Out For A Walk At Her Petite Hermitage, France, 1750.
At the same time, Kilimnik evokes images and narratives that refer to Romanticism and Baroque styles and stories. Red Room is the last work in the loop of the exhibit. From the outside, the piece is a large white cube sitting inside one of the medium-sized rooms of the museum; a door stand slightly ajar on the front of the small room. Inside, the viewer finds a carefully-arranged collection of Kilimnik's paintings, much of her most mock-Baroque style comes out here. Each piece is carefully placed, in the style of Baroque picture-gallery, on a deep crimson fleur-de-lis patterned wallpaper. In the center of the room sits a plush circular velvet seat. It feels like you've stepped into a model 19th century picture-gallery on view for the potential buyers. The show features a number of Kilimnik's quickly-executed sketches which incorporate elements of text-narrative. In Image Music Text, Roland Barthes writes on the denotative and connotative meanings in the relationship of image and text: "The closer the text to the image, the less it seems to connote it; caught as it were in the iconographic message, the verbal message seems to share in its objectivity, the connotation of language is 'innocented' through the photograph's denotation" [Barthes]. By placing caption-like subplots over her drawings or by making them prominent parts of scatter-works such as I don't like Mondays, Kilimnik draws a sort of double-edged sword on the viewer's interpretative abilities. By nature, we assume that text in close proximity to an image is meant to confer some meaning to it. By placing the text on the image, especially in the context of the art gallery, the faculties must sort out what of the text has any explanatory value. The image refuses to defer to the text because the text is just another part of the picture. That is to say, it is more of a texture on the paper than a textual guide to the image.
Kilimnik's conflation of connotation and denotation place her in an interesting nexus of photographic and traditional art values. In another set of works from the show, Kilimnik has scratched in thick black crayon over photographic self-portraits. Me as Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet Before Horse Race, 1988, displays a somewhat blurry photograph of the artist dressed in a loose brown frock; straight-faced she gazes out towards the viewer, clutching upwards at her hair. Kilimnik has scrawled over her blurred figure chunky black eye-lashes and coarse crayon hair. Some strange abstraction on the edge of the picture attempts to give her form some context. I found these altered photographs both visually appealing (who hasn't experimented with drawing over photos?), and important in establishing the unique sense of authority Kilimnik has over her works. Placed in the context of the entire show, the altered photographs solidify Kilimnik's place in the plastic pastiche pantheon of contemporary art.As I sorted through the exhibition, I found it difficult to understand the depth of the cultural references within Kilimnik's œuvre. The sheer volume of work and variety of themes is overwhelming. One of Kilimnik's strengths is her ability to fight on many artistic fronts. This is a valuable asset for an artist with the 21st century breathing down her neck. At least, this is true for an artist like Kilimnik. When I viewed the survey of Kilimnik at the MCA, it was difficult to overcome the feeling of unpolished technique in much of the work. If there is one idea to keep in mind in relation to Kilimnik, in looking at the wealth of historical references, pop culture references, ballet references, etc., it is that in her work the execution is important not for its technical sophistication but as gateway to concept. In the words of critic Holland Cotter, "I think of Ms. Kilimnik as a conceptual artist first and everything else second because her art so persistently examines the idea of value without trying to be valuable" [Cotter]. Kilimnik's explorations of conceptual art echo Sontag's cries for an increased transparency in contemporary art. However, it seems that Kilimnik's transparency is merely a veil for a more complicated dialectic of art and culture. Despite this seeming variance, I am still left with the feeling that Kilimnik is bringing us one step closer to creating an "erotics of art" that enables us to see through the content, to help sharpen a sensory experience dulled by "a culture based on excess, on overproduction" [Sontag].
[+] Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Jakob and I have voyaged from Chicago to my home. We arrived by train last night around midnight. Immediately we took shelter in IHOP. Heart'n'Grain'n'Nuts Pancakes with Bananas. Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Bacon, one glass of milk from a large milk-machine. After a full night's rest, we adventured through the forests and had lunch at Bella Rossa with our friend and novelist, Dustin. Dustin currently passes his time as a rock star, one day he will become a saint. "The Vegan Way" – eggplant, hommos, sprouts, tomato, lettuce on pane bello; side of Chipotle Potato Salad. (This reminds me, I should bake bread while I am home. Mmmmm.) Jake is enjoying his visit. It's always interesting to see how people respond to this place and the people here. Tomorrow there will be more tourism and then an hour of driving to more verdant fields populated by greener peoples.
