Art Review: Kari Hildebrand
Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks (March 4–25)
by Joseph Futtner
It would be scary if it weren’t so damned funny. Or vice versa. Consider just one image: a Bad Boy Barney as a homespun Whistler’s Mother, a Tyrannosaurus Rex domesticated, a Jurassic twist on Little Red Riding Hood. Such are the feints and dislocations evident in the approximately forty works in mixed media done by artist Kari Hildebrand over a period of 15 years, on display at the Orlando Gallery (14553 Ventura, Sherman Oaks, March 4 through 25th).
Hildebrand’s combination of the ominous and the humorous depends on a strategy deeply rooted in the modern tradition. One technique discussed by literary critics early in the century was that of “defamiliarization,” by which descriptions of common objects, ordinary dialogue, etc., were re-contextualized, jarring the sensibility of the reader to some new understanding. In the visual arts, this technique was used by practitioners of all the great “Isms.” Braque and Picasso glued fragments of newspaper and skewed traditional pictorial devices to create a new, Cubist reality. Dada Meister Marcel Duchamp explored the consequences of a radical defamiliarization with his “ready-made” bicycle wheels and fine art urinals. As much as contemporary artists like Barbara Kruger or Mike Kelly owe to Pop and advertising imagery, their art likewise depends on this technique to give that imagery force and meaning.
Certainly, Hildebrand’s art demonstrates a “defamiliarization” we all know too well: a tract house guarded (or menaced) by fatigued soldiers (Warning: 24-Hour Armed Patrol, 1984); omnipresent firearms (Your Kind of Sport, 1984); suburban backyards populated by Dobermans and pistols along with the pool and the palms (Every Home Should Have One, 1982). The domestic terrors Hildebrand analyzed with ironic humor in the early and mid-eighties have become in the nineties a collective nightmare. (My conversation with gallery owners Robert Gee and Don Grant at The Valley, increasingly a kind of paradise lost, was the site of both different times turned to the earthquake and the latest LAPD cop shooting incidents, which speaks volumes about our own sense of victimization.)
Kari Hildebrand’s humor, while anarchistic, is never ideological or despairing. This is evident in a 1983 work, One Basic Food Group. Two cows are shown in a field the shape of which is an inverted map of the U.S. Green heartland fields, contented cows, that cold glass of milk—the memories this work elicits are visceral and satisfying. Like any number of forty-somethings, Hildebrand remembers a Golden Age in the Golden State with its Cold War prosperity and consumer promise. Postmodern irony seems momentarily suspended. In the manner of Warhol’s soup cans or the early sepia Lichtensteins (now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art), Kari Hildebrand’s work articulates another collective sense, that of an aching nostalgia.
Hildebrand did not exempt herself from such analysis, and included her own image in a number of works. Domestic Furs, 1983, is a paired self-portrait which engages the “fur debate” on both social and animal ethics planes. In Order by Mail, 1984, the artist is shown seated as though in a Talbots or a Spiegel catalogue, absurdly regaled in a falcon hat and duckhead bracelet and necklace. The artist’s physical attractiveness compounds the irony, as the resemblance to the “real thing” (i.e., a model in a fashion spread) becomes uncomfortably close.
I don’t want to focus on the “content” of the work while ignoring other features, for example, her use of a compositional grid. This is a fairly common device in the history of art, and likewise in contemporary art. In Kari Hildebrand’s work the grid, while evident and providing a compositional armature, is effaced, very nearly lost. (Consider the grid effect of graffiti “x”s crawled across the face of the private home in Warning: 24-Hour Patrol, in which content and form become, in effect, identical; or the subtle grid in Your Kind of Sport, at once a structural phantom and a ballistics target.) It is this sort of sophisticated technique and thematic nuance that might have characterized an exciting and ongoing artistic career.
I say might have, because this retrospective is unfortunately a memorial exhibition. Kari Hildebrand died last October, a victim of breast cancer, at the age of 41. The last two years of her life were spent not in creative stasis, but working, and addressing issues related to her illness. Gambling the Way, 1993, indicates the directions in which Hildebrand moved in response to the cancer. The artist shows herself frontally, nude, arms extended, and haloed by chemotherapy. Her figure, displayed like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man, is encompassed by a circular form resembling a mammogram. Hildebrand’s circulatory system melds with the background imagery, and becomes a pool upon which floats a sailboat. The four corners of the image are inhabited by a newt, a snake, a toad, and a turtle: chthonic animals, close to the nurturing earth. Her left hand supports a pearl-like sphere, and her right, a poker hand: a royal flush, in spades, both winning and ominous. The symbolic ambiguities here—lucky/unlucky, high-tech medicine/magical belief—are resolved ultimately on a spiritual plane. Her courage and determination, no less than her art, are Kari Hildebrand’s legacy. ♦