Lisa Kirk
Issue #26
This accidental curator uses spectacle and inadvertent feminism in her never-stuffy art shows
By Kara Oehler
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 4:42pm
Lisa Kirk began curating art shows to get out of a little white lie she told her friends. The artist, curator, and designer was teaching a class at New York’s Cooper Union on how to prepare to be emerging artists, and she needed samples of artists’ informational packages — slides, curriculum vitae, and artist statements. Kirk sent an e-mail to friends that read, “I’m curating a show. Could you send me your stuff?”
“Several people wrote back and said, ‘Oh, we’d love to be in your show!’” Kirk says. “I kind of felt like if I didn’t do it I’d look like an asshole, so I got stuck curating a show.”
As an artist, Kirk loathes the idea of serving as an authority figure over other people’s art. For the 2004 performance event, The Greatest Show on Earth, at Participant Inc., Kirk fabricated a cake version of the Whitney Museum, which she later blew up on her unsuspecting audience, to direct attention to the spectacle of art openings and the role of a curator as creator of theatrics. “I liked the idea of the circus, and I kept thinking about the proverbial elephant in the room — the thing that nobody talks about in the institution of art — how racist and sexist it is and how male-dominated. And [about] all the money involved and who gets to buy art,” Kirk says. “All those things are really problematic for me.”
Activism and the theatricality of everyday life inform Kirk’s paintings, performance, and curatorial endeavors. Her spectrum of work is enormous: Kirk designed and built a skate park in Tannersville, New York; made a film called Spacebooty about hookers trying to save the world from another millennium of misguided feminism and male domination. And she even stripped at a fundraiser on a self-made stripper pole, wearing a bustier emblazoned with the Halliburton logo, the grand finale involving her kicking a sailor in the teeth and him spitting black chocolate sauce all over the unsuspecting audience.
Kirk’s latest evolution is Bonds of Love, an all-female art show — with the exception of an artist who uses the male pronoun, but is female-bodied — at a predominantly male-centric gallery in Chelsea. This show investigates the historically loaded concept of an all-female exhibition, through which Kirk hopes to demonstrate that such a show does not necessarily have to serve as a vehicle for feminism. “It was more about a group show that’s supposed to just be a group show, [like when] it’s [an all-male show] and nobody notices,” Kirk says. “I knew that by doing an all-woman show, it would instantly be an issue. I wanted to take the issue out of it.”
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