130 MARCH 2016 IN THE STUDIO
ing survey of the “Liz Taylor” series [LTS] in Fribourg, Swit-
zerland. Moving from her desk to a black wooden rocking
chair, she slings a leg over one of the arms and rocks as she
talks.he chair was left to her by her great-aunt Grace, whose
love letters from the late 1920s to another woman form the
basis of Burkhart’s novelBetween the Lines(Paris, Hachette
Litteratures, 2006). She leafs through a copy, reads the open-
ing line, “I was born into a closet full of skeletons,” and shows
me photos of Grace and her lover. Burkhart, a proliic writer
in addition to being a visual artist, has completed four novels
to date. Her latest book,DUDES(New York, Participant Press,
2014), is a short-story collection that, like some memoirs, blurs
the line between truth and iction, as does much of her art.
We move to the bedroom, where Burkhart’s ornately
framed “Torture” paintings (1992-2001)—images of torture
devices, ranging from medieval dunking stools to lethal
injection beds, named after ex-boyfriends—surround her
wrought-iron bed. “Always sleeping with our past, aren’t we?”
sheefortlessly puns.
In the main studio, we look at a painting she made
as a teen. It’s a surrealistic scene of a nude woman with
penises chained to her backlevitating aboveire. We shift
to drawings from her California Institute of the Arts days
(1979-82) that clearly preigure the Liz Taylor works, and
Burkhart talks about how the school’s post-studio program
helped shape her practice: “Everyone was interdisciplinary at
the time, and because Neo-Expressionism and New Image
painting were largely dominated by men, I adopted a Situ-
ationist approach to painting.”
When she complains how her approach, exempliied
by parodies of media slogans, has led to misreadings of her
work as raw, or quickly made, it seems the perfect place to
begin our interview.JANE URSULA HARRISYou’ve cultivated a dis-
tinctly illustrative aesthetic in the LTS, which is, as you sug-
gest, just as conceptual in aim as it is expressive. Why do you
think people misconstrue it as formally simplistic or “raw”?
KATHE BURKHARTSome people have a stick up
their ass about painting. hey’re hung up on formalism like
it’s 1945, stuck on some outdated idea of form in a content-
based world. Form is a slave to content. Always. It’s the
relation of a tool to a thing made.
HARRISWalk us through your process. How does an
LTS painting get made?
BURKHARTUsually the [ilm, production and
publicity] stills I work from are already on the studio wall.
hey come from an archive I’ve built over the span of the
whole series. I sit and look at them until I gravitate toward
one, and then I eventually match it up with words. Or it
could be the reverse, starting with a word I am ixated on
and connecting it to an image. I also have a list of words that
I add to, like my ever-expanding trove of ilm stills, movie
magazines and tabloids. Also, the text has to be designed and
printed out. Usually I set it in ive or sixdiferent fonts and
choose one when I’m ready to project. I like to say that theKATHE BURKHART is best known for her “Liz Taylor”
series (1982-ongoing), a self-portrait project in which the
late iconic actress serves as the artist’s double. Speaking
about the paintings, artist Cady Noland once described
Burkhart’s surrogate, a sexually dominant woman, as a
“living repudiation of the fallacy that appetites are the
province of men.”^1 Combining appropriated film stills and
autobiographical collage elements with provocative slurs
and double entendres (hole, beaver, up yours!), these large-
scale works, with their ribald humor and feminist-punk
attitude, earned Burkhart a “bad girl” reputation early on.
Whether brandishing a whip, screaming obscenities or pos-
sessing a dick, Burkhart’s Liz presciently explores femdom
fantasies and evokes the artist’s genderqueer identity as an
intersex woman.
Over time this was expressed throughS&M-inlected
themes, which soonextended to other bodies of work.
“Hardcore” (1999-2013) is a series of digital photos on
canvas that present sex shop window displays shot from the
street in Amsterdam’s red light district. heXY Portfolio
(2012/14), a photographic homage to Mapplethorpe, Hans
Bellmer and Unica Zürn, features the bound and corseted
body of Burkhart’s former lover, a transgender woman,
engaged in fetishistic S&M play.
Taylor once infamously quipped,“I’ve been through it
all, baby, I’m Mother Courage.” Similarly, Burkhart’s work
embodies a life lived on the edge, one fueled as much by
stamina as bracing wit. I’m reminded of both when I visit
her 3,000-square-foot Brooklyn loft under the hulking
shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s a space she’s fought
hard to keep since she moved in almost 30 years ago.
In fact, when I arrive, she’s at her desk, inishing an
e-mail to her lawyer because she no longer has access to the
freight elevator or loading dock. “I can’t get two of my girls
out,” she tells me, referring to shipping works for her upcom-Aphotofrom
Kathe Burkhart’s
XY Portfolio,
2012/14, inkjet
print, 19 by
24 inches.
Opposite,Wanker:
from the Liz Taylor
Series (Taming of
the Shrew),2008,
acrylic, decorative
papers, strip poker
cards, composition
leafandglueon
canvas,90by 60
inches.