American Woman and Bad Girl: an interview with Kathe Burkhart
Mariah Corrigan: You’ve been a feminist conceptual artist for a long time. When viewing your work, it’s clearly rich in stylistic and intellectual reference to a wide spectrum of artists and writers. Where did it all begin for you, and who has influenced your development?
Kathe Burkhart: Even as a teenager I kept journals, wrote poems and plays that I directed, and made drawings and paintings, taking classes and joining collectives, so it is difficult to locate the precise moment when I became an artist, since the performative process of the work has been in development for a long time. But in professional terms, much of the work originated through my time at CalArts, from 1979 to 1984 – although I was something of an oddball there. The people I worked with there who were great role models included Barbara Kruger, Catherine Lord, Jane Weinstock, Connie Hatch, Sherrie Levine and Kathy Bigelow. Of course, most of these women were part time faculty, so I also worked a lot with John Baldessari, Doug Huebler and Jon Borofsky. Borofsky’s interdisciplinary approach to both materials/mediums and mining one’s own autobiography as the subject of art were very important for me. The foundation was on conceptual art and appropriation strategies. Nobody was painting. I also worked on my writing with Richard Howard during this time, as well as attending some workshops. In video, I worked with Dara Birnbaum and Sande McKendrick in the film school. Outside of school, the work I love comes from literature as much as art: the work of Clarice Lispector, Helene Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfried Jelinek, and the work of artists such as Valie Export, Claude Cahun, Rosalyn Drexler and Hans Bellmer, the films of Lars van Trier…and then there’s pop culture, which I am both fascinated and repulsed by.
Mariah Corrigan: You live a diasporic life - half the year in a strange nether zone in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the other half the year in de Dapperstraat, in multi-cultural Amsterdam. You’re an artist and a writer, a painter, performance and video installation artist and teacher. You live multiple lives, multiple identities simultaneously. Since your work is very personal, how has this manifested itself in your work?
Kathe Burkhart: It is true that I do live a multiphasic kind of life, permanently in a state of temporary exile from one thing or another, in a constantly shifting state of heightened alterity, although that is more clearly seen by someone on the outside. Travel became very important for me about ten years ago, and remains so. The transnational experience has given me a global perspective I would never have had if I hadn’t migrated to the Netherlands. I live in two rapidly gentrifying ethnic neighborhoods in two cities on two continents, and it is easy to see both parallels and differences. Switching between these modes keeps one on one's toes in terms of evaluating experiences and events with compassion, and allows for flashes of insight or new ideas that you might not have otherwise. Certainly this distillation led to the performance, video and burqa piece I made in response to 9/11, called American Woman and Scarecrow. In terms of my work, this kind of interdisciplinary practice, that is linked to performativity and intentionality has been a hallmark of my work from the beginning. I ask myself: What medium will suit this idea best? and go from there. Nevertheless, formal devices such as seriality, the documentary, and the diary are quite important. Since research plays a vital role in my work, as a reader, and in terms of source materials, teaching is a natural extension of these practices. The dialogue is also important to me, and I take very seriously the responsibility to introduce the works of artists and writers to my students who are important, yet somewhat obscure, work they may not otherwise be exposed to.
Mariah Corrigan:Do you feel that these complexities, these multiple locations and identities thwart a visibility as a cultural producer? And does being the original “bad girl” help?
Kathe
Burkhart: Well, I think complexity, multiplicity, is sometimes
unfortunately seen as threatening, especially in America. Perhaps it
signifies power in some way. People seem to want everything branded and
prepackaged, and when cultural production moves against this grain toward
the multivocal, it risks marginality in an market driven economy. Women
are certainly more visible today as cultural producers, we do not have
parity, sexually, racially, or in terms of class, the great unspoken. We
see an awful lot of work that looks like a man’s idea of what a woman’s
art would be: it seems to me that not a few women artists have
internalized these parameters, and reproduced objects conforming to what I
would regard as dated, essentialist notions about the body. It’s
disturbing because it’s a throwback, profiting on a culture of
victimology. On the other hand, they’re making a lot of money. But
you wonder how far that will go-when the work comes under the hammer a
hundred years from now. The market’s appetite for novelty is
voracious and all consuming. It has been strange to watch the “bad
girl aesthetic” take off and leave me, its invisible
progenitor, behind in a haze of titties and beer. Where this idea went and
how it was marketed had absolutely nothing to do with the kind of work I
was doing, or what I or Helena Kontova had in mind when she coined the
term in a Flash Art article in 1990.(1)
Mariah Corrigan:When it comes to bad girlness you take it beyond merely, simply, transgression for transgression’s sake. You deploy it as a stylistic metaphor parallel to your choice of subject matter and make it manifest in your choice of language and in the expletives used in the Liz Taylor series, for example. You’ve recently topped yourself in your new, powerful and very funny works Kiss My Ass, King Dong, and Suck My Dick. Could you explain, in your own words, what this badness means to you, and what it might be a reflection of-for your work is highly self-reflexive.
Kathe Burkhart: No doubt. Transgression does not immediately imply abjection, and humor is an important component, to permit visual pleasure, to provoke recognition, and to provide relief from the intensity. Two of the works mentioned above are part of a subsection of command phrases. (Others are Sit on It, Go to Hell, etc.) King Dong offers a reversal, a play on the essential animality of both ourselves and the Other. Suck My Dick represents the phallic woman, and the lips and round shape of Kiss My Ass suggest the anus.
Mariah Corrigan:Regarding the answer to a previous question: where do you think this wave of essentialist art, with regard to the female subject, is coming from? What cultural mechanisms do you think are at work forming the impetus for it?
Kathe Burkhart: We’re still in a period of backlash. Regressive ideas are ones we’ve been exposed to before; they’re familiar and somehow comforting, and mythic. So there is a kind of allegorical identification. The problem is, this kind of identification is usually not critical, but simply emotional. I believe difference is much more diverse than victimhood or exhibitionism. The body can be a simplistic vehicle, or a complex one. The surface of the gendered body has been touched on, but the internal rhythm of the body much less. For me, that’s better achieved through writing and not visual art.
Mariah Corrigan: I sense that the term “postfeminism” is a word you find prematurely popular.
Kathe Burkhart: It’s a misnomer. “Post” always semantically implies something that’s over. A look at the polarized statistics in ‘The State of Women’ in The World Atlas will put that hopeful idea to rest. Even in the West, we have not achieved parity, and this is key. This term reveals the arrogance and cultural hegemony of the West, that is cracking open as we speak. Oppression is variable-yet pervasive.
Mariah Corrigan: The F-word is particularly resisted by many female artists today, and as we’ve both seen in the art departments many, many female art students recoil at the label. Why do you think this is so?
Kathe
Burkhart: I think feminism is a hard sell, for one. Also I think that
we can think of feminism as alternative, and despite fashion, there is a
rush towards the mainstream, like lemmings to the sea. I think the
depersonalization and alienation of what Deleuze and Guattari called the
schizoculture have led to a generation who desperately wants to connect -
outward, rather than inward...through the mainstream. Sooner or later,
they will find those walls are pretty narrow. I think young women want to
be liked, and accepted, and don’t want the stigmatizing label of “difficult”.
We are still socialized to please others. There is some conception of a
feminist as an ugly, angry, bitter woman who can’t get a man. On the
other end of the spectrum, we have the valorization of porn stars. These
models are inadequate by themselves. Young women know, strategically, that
they have a better chance of getting ahead by steering clear of the
rhetoric and marketing all their female assets. I think, for better or
worse, they are embracing the exploitation of their own sexuality to
advance their careers, which is something my generation refused to do.
(Although Madonna is the best example of this, and we’re the same
age.) Or perhaps they’re just rebelling against their mothers.
Mariah Corrigan: Many aspects of language are an important component of your visual work-the use of the expletive, the narrative, the double meaning, and obviously writing-as in your recent book The Double Standard, published in French translation by Hachette Litteratures this year. You’ve also recently turned to numbers-as another form of codings-as in the Authorized and Unauthorized Portraits series whereyou make portraits simply using a subject’s numbers: date of birth, social security, telephone data, and mixing these public sources of identification with single predetermined formula for size and shape in order to arrive at each work. I know these are two questions in one…
Kathe
Burkhart: As for the Authorized and Unauthorized Portraits, I’m
attempting to remain as far outside the subject’s subjectivity as
possible. It is matrix of indexical relationships. I remain in Nietzschean
alienation. As a writer I am a lover of the music of language. I am very
interested in emotional compression. There are some points of crossover
into the visual work - the layered double meanings in the Liz Taylor
series, the chocolate letter wall works, the naming in the Torture
series, the coding derived from data and preferences in the Authorized
and Unauthorized Portraits. I have always considered the writing as
important as the visual work, but there has been something of an
amputation in its visibility because it has been difficult to get it
published in America. The French don’t have any trouble with it, but
the Americans don’t get it.
Mariah Corrigan:They understand our novel to be about the East Village in New York? I suppose we Americans are a somewhat unsubtle people. You use language as a mode for self-analysis in your work. Why do you feel that this is so important?
Kathe Burkhart: That’s the set and setting only: the subject of the book is really the repetition compulsion, framed within a dialogic, parallel narrative structure using two voices of the same character at different periods in their lives – as a teenager and in their early thirties. The teenage entries are taken, unabridged from my actual teenage diaries, and given that the personal is political, it is a radical tool of empowerment. Doubling is used to evoke an Identity that is constantly shifting, a reality that is fleeting. As someone who tries to stay in the present, I need to catch it before it disappears. We can know the Other, but we can never know ourselves. I see autobiography then as a kind of fiction.
Mariah Corrigan: Gina Bellafante asserts that ‘if feminism of the 1960s and 1970s was steeped in research and obsessed in social change, feminism today is wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession.’ Where your work opens out to the latter it moves beyond the regressive tendencies of these forces through a critical self-reflexivity.
Kathe Burkhart: Because of my placement in time, I believe my work draws on both of these issues. The entertainment field has been one in which women are prominent albeit with a price – a punishingly short shelf life for a career. Hollywood’s image factory is still the source of the American dream. Stars provide role models: women who are beautiful, rich and powerful, leading exciting, glamorous lives playing themselves, doing, (it seems) what they love to do. These are the ultimate symbols of fantasy and freedom for the rest of us, for whom these options are as impossible as a weekend on the moon. In the Liz Taylor series, I have engaged in a social critique of this apparatus, as well as investigating the subject position of the dominant woman through the Liz’s persona. The Liz Taylor series has been ongoing since 1982, and consists now of about 150 paintings and numerous drawings and prints.
Mariah Corrigan: The Liz Taylor series constitutes a substantial oeuvre, and a series you keep retuning to, no matter where else you artistically roam. When and where will it end and why? Or will it?
Kathe Burkhart: Theoretically, when I run out of images and cuss words, which is no time soon! I have a huge archive of images that I continue to identity with. Liz, of course provides a identificatory structure for me to talk about my own subjectivity, while retaining a more fluid, universal alternative or a resistant container for a radical female subjectivity. Partly, too, it depends on if Liz lives a long life and I am able to continue collecting images of her. Or, of course, if she should sue me to stop making images of her. Of course, it’s also me. As I age myself, the aging Liz comes into the work bit by bit. But I don’t know how I will feel when she dies, or when my own mother dies. No doubt that will affect the work, but I have no idea how. About five years ago, I was faced with a shortage of words. I solved this by creating a subseries in Dutch, as well as several works in Italian. I resolved to use only native languages where I made the work. This also allows me to reduce the effects of the work appearing to be exotically American, to relate the work to the culture it will be visible in. Language is always the most apparent way a culture manifests itself.
Mariah
Corrigan: Still, you have this new series going as well – the Authorized
and Unauthorized Portraits – the series I mentioned
earlier that uses numbers to evoke a portrait of a material body, and a
social condition. Explain how you arrived at this body of work, why it is
important, and what you discovered along the way with regard to the power
of numbers as identity mechanisms.
Kathe Burkhart: I was trying to make a contemporary portrait. In many ways, all the work in painting – the Liz Taylor series, the Torture series, and this work has been riffing on the genre of portraiture. This work is in response to concerns I had about the depersonalization technology has rendered to social relations, and concerns about privacy and state control of the private. Our identities have been reduced to sets of identifying numbers and a few preferences. I was fascinated by how available this kind of private information was online. Cyberspace is a very seductive place invented by the US Department of Defense and the long arm of the law. Many people forget this, and willingly offer the most private of information online. All the while, Big Brother’s definitely watching, and Big Brother’s state control is maintained with everyone’s complicity. These works are made with oil paint on linen. They are “proper portraits”, installed in clusters of subjects: friends, family, enemies, etc.
Mariah Corrigan: Do you think it is possible that feminist ideas/ideals can be perpetuated without explicit discussion and explicit representation?
Kathe Burkhart: As an imagemaker, I think it is essential to avoid explicit bodily representation, falling as it does into the scopic or fetishistic. Instead, it’s far better to remain instead in a mimetic divergence that may refer to the seductive or the specular without lapsing into a reductive essentialism, or the simple reproduction of stereotypes. Discussion is another matter, we can never have enough of that.
Mariah Corrigan: And finally, in the years to come, and in the face of the formidable globalized mechanisms for popular repression and homogenization that are clicking into place as we speak, will feminism will be rejected or rejuvenated?
Kathe Burkhart: Undoubtedly, we have to believe that feminism, which it is often forgotten is a branch of evolutional humanism, will be rejuvenated, though its progress may be slow or backlogged, especially because of struggles in the second or third worlds. The subaltern subject is on the rise and is the subject of many liberation struggles today. And, in the West, despite the current state of stasis or even stagnation, as we continue to struggle towards parity, and achieve economic independence, we, as women and consumers will want to see, and, as cultural producers, to insert images of ourselves into the culture, rather than simply receiving them. And so we continue to struggle for a radical female visibility, one that represents us, embraces the diversity of humanity, and is critical of the mechanisms of power.
Notes
1) Helena Kontova ‘Bad Girl Made Good’ Flash Art (1990) pp.108-111
Copyright © : Mariah Corrigan, February 2003
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 17, 2003
