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Kilimnik’s self-portraits, often ensconced in the life narratives of others, are characterized by huge eyes heavily coated with a mask of mascara. These big Keane-like doe eyes we associate with the waif/naïf have a specific meaning in the very origins of sense. All humans are born with eyes far too large for the proportion of the face. Adults always read those overscaled eyes as the child’s first expression: “I am very vulnerable.” This serves the species in Darwin’s sense, we are drawn into protecting the baby. It also has a Freudian meaning: I have a narcissistic identification with “His Majesty the Baby”—that is: I indulge this being.

That is why we are drawn in by Kilimnik’s quasi-self-portraits, why, amid all the poses, we still sense a person. Her partial identifications with a princess here or an anorexic actress there, lets her practice her own life through another’s public face which reveals vulnerabilities similar to her own.

Kilimnik’s is a space where an image is more familiar than the presence of the real, an imaginary space beyond class, race, etc.—the realities of the world. Hers is a utopian space drawn from what surrounds her; if celebrity dominates Kilimnik’s imagination, it is because it abounds in the world. Refusing to be passive, she takes up the position to see if she can warp it, distort it, or shape it to her own ends. Would any of us trust someone who claimed: “I am always myself: I have never pretended!” Presented with infinite scenarios, she prepares for a life of multiple possibilities, not a single role.

I want to make it clear that I do not believe her images reveal the negativity of a crushing culture industry that manipulates her warped self-consciousness. There is much to be gained in pretending, as the subject is neither transparent nor transhistorical. Authenticity is always a mask of vice not virtue, to live is in part to rehearse, to prepare for the vagaries of existence, it is to refuse the social order’s prescription of who you are in the world. French workers have a wonderful word for this activity, la perruque, the wig. Faced with crushing demands, people invent tactics of evasion, diversion, and deviation. It is to take up a ruse, an “art of practice,” or, as Michel De Certeau claims, simply a worker disguising his own creative labor while on the boss’s dime. Kilimnik evades the power of the social structure to name her precisely by taking up different names and letting them twist in the wind.

—Maureen P. Sherlock

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