Museum

In a certain sense, the museum is an unreal environment, an unusual world. Tensely, variously, intriguingly, the relationship between contemporary and classical art - heritage - is formed in this academic "dwelling of the Muses." For the artist Franceska Kirke, the museum as a concept has become the distinctive theme for a completely novel series of paintings embracing almost all of the traditional painting genres: seascape, still life, genre, state portrait, nude. Within this cycle, the artist continues to use her favorite 18th-century painting style, principles of composition, color and texture. However, typical of her recent works, contemporary accents are also present: for example, bright, unusual hair color gives a totally different tone to Vermeer's well-known portrait of a young girl. Transporting an Old Master image into the contemporary world, a bottle of Coca-Cola, a symbol of today's mass consumer culture, is depicted within an historical context alien to this object. In essence, Kirke is calling not for the aggressive contrasting of old and new art, but for perceiving this relationship as an engagement, perhaps even as a "virtual game." It is noteworthy that this alternate reality has not been simulated by a computer, but with the help of characteristic attributes of traditional painting and museums. The impression of a virtual game is created by [superimposing on a painting various gamepiece-like] circles, showing particular close-ups, small excerpted details of the overall painting, or elements and characters from different sources. In other examples, the surface and the texture of a painting - a centuries-old painting, ravaged by time - have been enlarged and transferred onto a separate canvas, the scale so increased that, in its entirety, we perceive the merging of a color scheme and its damage. In another work, a few irregular, broken, white lines that remind the viewer of cracks within the layers of paint - craquelure - are supplemented by an expressive, artificially created, tiny network of fissures. Installation elements, an integral part of Kirke's exhibition, bring the artificial even closer to reality. Pigments, retorts [distillation vessels] with solvents, and other astringents used for the restoration of paintings are placed in the gallery. Kirke plays upon this theme of imminent extinction with her characteristic elegance and delicacy. In accordance with the artist's intentions, it seems that even the museum, its halls, and the exhibition of her paintings - significantly placed within pompous museum frames - simultaneously exist in reality and become a new, virtual environment in which the ever-changing relationship between the eternal and ephemeral, always reciprocal, is effectively set into play.

Irena Buzinska,
Curator, The State Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia

- translated by Mark Allen Svede

The Kirke Effect

SoHo is like in the movies. You feel as though you're at the cinema. New York's face is so brilliant that you're compelled to adjust to it. A different rhythm of life, different pace, different gestures. You feel different in that city. More seething, more energized. Everyone's running, and you run too. And you feel you can do much more. When I was first there I thought: "This is crazy: it's like being in the fifties."

- from Franceska Kirke, "Privatas rotalas [Private games]," (interview with Daiga Rudzate) in Studija 13 (July-Aug. 2000).

As direct and informative as Franceska Kirke's comments may have seemed to readers of Latvia's principal art journal, particularly those who never experienced New York City firsthand, her words accrued complexity and significance with the exclamation, This is crazy: it's like being in the fifties. Kirke was born in 1953 in grimly, recently Sovietized Riga, so her characterization of SoHo obviously depends less on personal memory of a distant time and a dynamic place than on mediated images and sensory cues internalized by the artist. No Latvian living during the twilight of the Stalinist era could easily possess such current knowledge, even if recuperated through films, photographs or literary works. In fact, Latvians interested in contemporary American life were not given the chance to see positive cinematic images of it until 1966, when a French documentary about the United States was screened on the occasion of Charles de Gaulle's state visit to Moscow. Instead, it seems Franceska Kirke had experienced - to borrow the title of one of her painting series - an "impossible meeting" with New York sometime before her arrival there. Of course, the most intriguing aspect of Kirke's synthetic recollection of mid-century New York is that it parallels the process through which she creates her paintings, and we may safely assume that is one reason why she made this point.

Her cinematic reference is also no accident. In many recent works, Kirke has assembled imagery in much the way a film editor does, juxtaposing shots - or, in the case of her paintings, visual elements from different sources, quite often photo- or cinematographic. Typically, a film editor creates a shot sequence in order to propel narrative, but Kirke's enterprise is more allied with the experimental montagists of the avant-garde, and the legendary director/film theoretician Lev Kuleshov immediately comes to mind. Today Kuleshov is best known for his laboratory demonstrations of how an image could be interpreted contrarily, depending on the character of whatever adjacent image with which it might be shown. In one famous experiment, a single shot of an actor bearing an ambiguous facial expression conveyed different emotions when paired with shots of various objects. The so-called "Kuleshov effect" proved that the juxtaposition of two images was capable of creating, in the viewer's mind, a third image, even more vivid despite its virtual nature. Kirke's accomplishment is that she has taken one of modernism's greatest rhetorical devices, submitted premodernist material to its operations, and, as if that wasn't disruptive enough, applied film's montage principle to the essentially atemporal medium of painting.

Of course, atemporality is relative when one considers that Kirke routinely causes centuries to elapse-perhaps collapse-within the confines of an individual painting. Creative anachronisms abound: Albrecht Dürer sports dreadlocks in a reworking of his Self-Portrait, and Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring gets a post-punk makeover with an ultramarine buzzcut, both referring to millennial fashions among young Latvians (with neither masterpiece looking untenable in its modernized form). In most works, however, the encounter between centuries is not so seamless and seemly. In her painting Air Forces, the angel from Rembrandt's Holy Family drafts behind an interplanetary spacecraft abducted from some sci-fi movie, each impugning the credibility of the other, yet gamely coexisting for the audience's edification, much the same reason each had existed independently. Elsewhere, a Coca-Cola bottle is couched within a seventeenth-century Dutch still-life, but the pairing of this updated still-life with a fragment of a Coke billboard - an updated landscape painting, after all - articulates something beyond the respective pictorial elements: global commodification, the branding of artists, and, with Kirke's addition of a blotch of actual Coca-Cola, resignation to the fact that there's little sense in crying over spilled Coke.

The dialectical limits of montage are implicitly acknowledged in A Square and a Rondo, in which an Andrea del Sarto quotation counters a Suprematist geometric motif, their basic incommunicability (inconvertibility, incommensurability ... ) signaled by an intervening scribble and another blotchy stain. Nevertheless, even this collision of elements opens a space for interpretation, although necessarily inconclusive. Today museum-goers move from del Sarto to Malevich to Basquiat in a matter of minutes, but Kirke spares us the footwork so we can redouble our efforts at making sense of the visual cacophony assaulting us. Another commentary on this assault, The Death of the Genre, shows Donald Duck's head, flattened by virtue of offset printing, interposed within a Flemish merry-company scene. Despite the dour title, the party isn't particularly dampened by aesthetic, chronological or even zoological incongruity. However, like any film editor, Kirke is more likely to structure her work according to visual congruities, preferring those less obvious. For instance, the punningly-titled triptych State Portrait. Restoration was occasioned by Kirke's discovery that Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV and Watteau's image of Pierrot contain nearly identical silk slippers, and this minor, equalizing detail inspired Kirke's reverie of a "crazy restorer" who substituted Pierrot's head for that of the Sun King. Placing the beheaded monarch at the clown's feet, Kirke plays the true court jester here, spoofing majesty with impunity.

The levity endemic to Disney cartoons and silky slippers belies the deeper resonances found in other juxtapositions. The diptych, A Marine, combines two manifestations of the Sublime - one, nature's, the other, culture's - and here Kirke succinctly illustrates how we might fix our position while standing transfixed before scenes of the Infinite (or at least infinite horizontality), whether it's relating ourselves to the scale of canvas sails punctuating a boundless sea or noting the irregular drips that disturb the austerity of a Post-Painterly Abstraction canvas. As with the Kuleshov effect, the Kirke effect opens the associative floodgates. With its dripped figuration and maritime theme, are we looking at the constituent elements of Pollock's Full Fathom Five? Are we shown a marine analogy of Daniel Buren's striped canvas panels? Neither exists in A Marine, of course, yet neither lies beyond its expansive horizon.

It's tempting to puzzle over every painting, a challenge issuing as much from Kirke's clever appropriations and witty juxtapositions as from the ellipses and lacunae that thwart easy solutions. One senses that these gaps are growing in importance for the artist, as she devotes almost as much attention to describing the ragged edges of the quotations as she does their contents. This tendency seems less perverse and more ironic when we recall that insurers of valuable paintings carefully record the unseen edges hidden by the picture frame, in order to identify originals from forgeries by virtue of the ragged, unfinished edges. One particularly self-defeating forgery, A Battle Scene (A Tale about a Cavalry Officer Who Cut Off His Horse's Hinder Part), is pure rupture and discontinuity (despite the swatches of modern military camouflage to the cavalier's right, feigning integration with the background). The works Animalism and Flowers (A Floral Motif) are even more intently incomplete, revealing not only the skeleton of a horse, but also a skeletal equestrian and floral painting. The undoing of pictures, whether by such mechanical dissection or by destabilizing their original meaning or identity through appropriation and alteration, has long inspired Kirke's making of pictures. Now the deliberate imperfections of her recombinant creations - yawning gaps of exposed underpainting, wilder symbolic dislocations of source material, et cetera - suggest that she is ready to take painting to new places.

The history of her latest gallery exhibition certainly supports this. What we see before us in SoHo was previously displayed on the walls of The State Museum of Art, Latvia, though for Kirke's solo exhibition in Riga these canvases were placed within grandiose, gilded frames from the museum's collection, frames long bereft of their original contents. Given Kirke's practice of pulling masterpieces from their historical framework and reframing them within the ever-expanding, hyper-mediated world of visual culture, I suspect that she was especially sensitive to the vacancies in those golden frames. Quite likely, these missing, presumably venerable paintings were forcibly removed: by Soviets looting the bourgeoisie's private collections on the eve of war, Nazis pilfering the museum's holdings during their occupation of Riga, or the private collectors frantically salvaging their most valuable, portable possessions as they fled to the West in advance of the Soviet reoccupation of Latvia. When I first heard that Kirke's works would arrive in SoHo, denuded of the genteel, institutionalizing frames, uprooted and ready for a new domestic existence pretty much unavailable to them in Latvia proper, I thought, This is crazy: it's like being in the fifties. That's when my grandparents arrived here as refugees, their suitcases containing paintings without frames, paintings that inadvertently proved the Kirke effect: Any image, dislocated and combined with other images, produces new, previously unimaginable meaning.

Mark Allen Svede
The Ohio State University