The Bitch is Back: An Interview with Kathe Burkhart

By Brian Curtin

Kathe Burkhart is credited as the original ‘bad girl’. Usefully, if not thankfully, the continued provocation and intelligence of her work as a visual artist and writer spurns the more puerile implications of that designation. Particularly famous for her Liz Taylor Series of paintings, a monograph of the first 25 years of these is due out in November with Regency Arts Press, Burkhart’s other works include ‘portraits’ of ex-lovers as medieval torture instruments and photographs of window displays in Amsterdam sex shops. Two novels by Burkhart are in print and she is about to complete a manuscript titled Dudes (“almost pornography”). As my interview ended she told me she has been encouraged by movie people to work on a screenplay of her novel Between the Lines, based on 79 love letters her great aunt received from a woman. “It really could be the female Brokeback Mountain…”.

There has been a resurgence of interest in feminist art with high-profile shows at various institutions. Is your work included?

No! I was not included in either WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution or Global Feminisms. Can you believe it? I guess I am too young for one show and too old for the other. My initial outrage was followed by happiness not to have been dumped into some kind of gender ghetto, which in the end might be limiting for my work. However, I was included in Shared Women at LA’s LACE, a sort-of answer show to WACK!

What is your opinion on this resurgence?

I guess there is always a lag in historical time from the time art is made until it is received by the mainstream, and this is reflected in the fact that these shows are happening now.

I see ‘feminism’ as being marketed now, as a subculture like punk or gay. What bothers me is the terrible conflation between femininity and feminism, which are two entirely different things. It is particularly problematic when essentialist notions of ‘the feminine’ are manifested as girlishness, victimization or a preoccupation with biological functions, and then get passed off as feminist. Also, being a woman doesn’t automatically make you a feminist, just like being a man doesn’t automatically make you a misogynist.

Kathe Burkhart, Cocksucker from the Liz Taylor Series. Courtesy: the artist.

I am thinking of Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings now.

I hate Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings. I think they do a lot of damage in confusing people about what feminist content in art is. She has been lucky to trail along on this misunderstanding for so long. The fetish of painterly-ness and preoccupation with ‘craft’, the fat girl self- loathing, the Keen doll/Norman Rockwell qualities, I see as retro and profoundly anti-feminist.

So you use a medium you essentially hold in contempt?

Well, painting is the ‘master’ medium, historically, isn’t it? All that’s left to do with painting is to detourn it. If it’s verisimilitude you’re after, take a photograph.

Please expand on your understanding of essentialism in terms of visual art.

I think the relationship between the artist and their output is a highly individual question. I think we always have to judge a work by the artist’s intentions. And I don’t think we can divorce a person’s identity from their work entirely. It may be more or less apparent in the work, depending on what the work is about, but in a relativistic sense, all work is autobiographical (in the performative sense anyway). That someone bothers to make something –anything– attests to the importance of memory, and memory is connected to identity, to subjectivity. If the artist obfuscates his or her intentionality, or there isn’t any meaning other than the way the thing looks or reads or whatever, the work then becomes a tabula rasa on which the viewer can project their fantasies. And that’s called formalism. I myself am most interested in work, whether literary or visual, where the self and the social collide.

You once said that writing is a better medium than visual art ‘to explore the internal rhythms of the body’. This is a fascinating statement.

I might have been referring to Helene Cixous’s notion of ‘writing the body’, she’s been a big influence. But to be more specific, conceptual art is all planned out; while writing is immediate and spontaneous, even if it has to be edited. Once you get the word out, it’s physically there on the page. Poetry and journal entries and notes pour out in uncontrolled streams when they feel like it, and aren’t ever planned. A poem that comes out whole, that’s the best example. Drawing can be like that, but less often. I guess notation is the key here.

Brian Curtin is a visual artist and writer based in Bangkok