Kim Dingle at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Art Review
The artist Kim Dingle housed 4 exhibition series at Susan Vielmetter, with the best works radically experimenting with the audience’s foreground space and investigating the nature of aesthetic reproduction. When speaking of “reproduction”, it is meant that the nature of originality with art, or with anything for that manner, is examined. We take a picture, for instance, of a “Kodak moment”, but we often times ignore that the reproduction hardly can capture the sublimity of the experience as it was felt in the present. The photograph, then, is Platonic in the sense that the highest truth can never be represented, only realized.
Our contemporary technophilic society has become drunken with such shadows, however. There is more upkeep in manufactured digital socializing than the real thing. Paying visits to people can take an unfortunate backseat to a Facebook like – the latter is easier to commit to after all. So it is interesting to see Ms. Dingle provoke such disagreements with her collection of diptychs and how they bleed out of the canvas into corporeal reality. It augments the suggestion that the highest beauty is always present in the real, in nature, rather than anything manufactured. Of course, good art utilizes the tools of fabrication to elevate the senses toward experiencing this beauty, and therefore acts subservient towards the task. While this series is to intellectual to create similar reverie, it nevertheless is a strong reminder of the proper task of art.
Also exploring reproduction and challenging our conception of artistic spacing is an installment titled The Afterthought wherein Ms. Dingle creatively destroys her old work through fusing a new idea into an old one. The fact she physically destroys her old work is tremendously courageous and signifies a significant evolution of the artist from the person who brought it into being in 1994. We may ask if it has lost meaning to her, but it is better asked if more meaning is imbued through its thrashing spectacle. And it is a spectacle akin to a toddler temper tantrum, of a little child cognizant their actions are destructive but they find catharsis in the active scribbling and tarnishing of the environment.
This hostility may insinuate something political, ostensibly because of the stern-faced baby black boy and the constant contemporary media overtones of racial inequality. Yet we have no appearance of an American flag; no symbolism of rebellion against a political order per se. instead, the racial dichotomy in the piece can be thought of as universally humanizing the task portrayed. And is that task to disembowel what has already been created? That the very act of desecration is a positive activity?
Clearly, we do not see the nursery rage as an end in itself, but a means. A means toward reacting against artistic matter, that works of art should not be held so lofty that they are above being discarded. It is a positive message portrayed, that one must never rest on one’s laurels, and that creation will necessarily involve destruction of the old. The luminosity of the new will fade the old and it is senseless to hold what has been as precious for its very sake. Of course, there does exist the eternal, and also the eternal in art. It is a very delicate balance, then, which all too often is overlooked when the zealousness for creation is an obsession. Temperance, then, is a proper conduct within the creative process. But it is unfathomably difficult to achieve when the creation of art is often times such a Dionysian process, and hence contradictory to its very pursuit by artists. Perhaps only an afterthought.