Kinke Kooi at Feature

Beautiful drawings for a cold, winter day

The Arnhem, Netherlands artist's show is up through 12/22

When I saw her 2009 show it blew me away. But she's been showing with Feature since the 1990s.
There is a good interview on Feature's website: Interview with Kinke Kooi and Mirjam Westen

From the interview, "I derive pleasure from knitting everything together, so to speak—from being close to the paper while I’m drawing. Actually, all I do is comb hair and string beads. It’s a meditative way of working. I’m also always looking for an excuse to draw things I can’t seem to leave alone, like little balls. They represent things I’m attracted to: jewellery, beads and berries. I have a kind of primeval instinct to physically unite with things as I’m gathering them. It’s a form of clinging to things and drawing them towards me, a kind of eroticism and fertility… That’s why the rubbing and polishing of circles and spheres is important to me: I can almost feel the visual smoothness tingling in my fingertips. Somehow it gives me physical satisfaction: my eyes see what my hands want to feel." - Kinke Kooi

She also says, "I come to rest in the holes of shame, as it were. I live in them for a while, I explore them. They’re no-man’s-lands. Because occupying them is so unpopular, no one wants to be there. The top is all about incisiveness and being squeezed together. Being in a high place enables you to survey things and create distance. I have difficulty with this detachment. I want, above all, to be close, to be intimate."

"My greatest wish was to one day have a low, sunken sitting area, or a couch made of the same material as the wallpaper. My eyes long to see something that fades into something else. I never bought anything like that because I was afraid it would make a frumpy impression. It also seemed a wonderful idea to use a stencil to decorate the edges of every window or door opening. The fact that I was frightened others would find it frumpy says something about the general disapproval of the decorative, the feminine. I have a large drawer full of lace pieces that I hold against new clothes to see how it looks. Still, I never sew them on, because it’s not cool. The arbiters of good taste shun decorated edges, because that suggests obedience." (As Hudson said, "a goddess.")

"I sometimes compare my way of working to water. Water has no form in itself but adapts itself to any other form. It always runs to the lowest point, fills even the smallest hole without missing a single one. So from that perspective, my drawing behavior is a perfect form of adaptation, because there’s nothing I like better than filling up the space in between things. This enables me to touch everything, and it gives me the feeling of being in contact. It also evokes something electrifying and lustful as soon as everything is touching everything else."

Smaller, collage works shown together in a Salon-style hanging

Including photos that have been treated by the artist

On left, reproduced Indian miniature with the scale of figures altered.

A beautiful show.

California Education

Chris Burden: A Tale of Two Cities, 1981, at the retrospective Extreme Measures, New Museum.

At UCLA in the late '70s, Chris Burden taught Performance I and Graduate Seminar. He was an exciting teacher, and took students around LA--Miracle Mile, Topanga Canyon--to see artists in their studios and important exhibitions, such as the Michelangelo Pistoletto show. He took us to visit Bob White's studio, where Burden was staying for a time. In a small dark bedroom above a narrow bed, a constellation of glow-in-the-dark ships and planes hovered overhead.

Three years later he first made this work, A Tale of Two Cities, with 5,000 toys.

Darts launch over the city. So much of Burden's work is about circumstance and chance, creating structures meant to work.

All The Submarines of the United States of America, 1987. The installation brochure tells us that, "This piece includes...625 submarines, which represent all the submarines in the US fleet at the time it was made." A friend whose father served on a sub found its name and immediately connected with the work. Extreme Measures exhibits some seminal Burdens: the steel flywheel, a dangling Porsche 914, and documentary films of metal being dropped from cranes, the Volkswagen performance, the electrical cords in water performance, the glass shards performance, and the rolling name credits placing Burden with other art luminaries on prime time television--works he showed in class and that formed the core of my education as an artist, whether I used the information or not.

In the mid-80s, Mike Kelley, Roy Dowell, Carole Caroompas and Eugene Sturman taught Senior Thesis and Studio at the old Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design campus on MacArthur Park. This birdhouse by Kelley at PS.1/MoMA ( Link to show ) was made when he was a grad at Cal Arts. At Otis/Parsons, he'd been out of school five or six years and was marginally older than many of his students. He was a passionate teacher. It took years to realize the depth of his influence.

He is an amazing filmmaker. Kelley's films stun perception at the core.

Visual characterizations of individuals under social pressure sear the psyche. They go straight past analytical thought, which is surprising, given Kelley's ability to cogitate.

Work inspired by Sister Corita Kent's seriagraph prints and social messages. Let's Talk About Disobeying!

What really moves me in this work is the visual accuracy of emotional attachment,  exactly how a kid retains information.

Plenty of commentary on ways social institutions shape, and tame, perceptions through the tensions between desire and discipline.

Kelley's knack for disturbing images in nascent form, with hints of Cindy Sherman's work.

The iconic, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, first shown at Rosamund Felsen.

Houses for pets.One of my favorite works in the show. Interesting with the birdhouses, and the later project to purchase his childhood home, unfulfilled at the time of his death.

Potential inhabitants of little houses.

The 1980s sound pieces.

Empathy Displacements. A stuffed toy peeks out from a square cut into the box. That, with Let's Talk About Disobeying, prompted hysterical laughter whereas at one time I would have considered them cruel.

I did used to think this work was mean. It remains discomfitting but there is an empathy that makes it humorous.

Kelley doll drawing. He was not big on "noodling" paint. He got to the point.

The artist among other ciphers of projection.

Earlier drawings.

Scatological drawings, possibly from the Plato's Cave show.

Encrusted painting. As the works accumulate, one sees classifications emerge--and the desire to classify, control, and survey.

First saw this installation at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1987.

Sentiments of lawlessness by great thinkers paired with a Wayne Gacy clown painting. Here, a detail.

Kelley expressed impatience with process for process's sake."Why do you noodle so much," he'd ask.

Stuffed animal meteorites with rocket-ship-desigs emit fruit-flavored scents.

To sanitize sticky attachments, perhaps,

But behind every facade is what one loves in rawest form.