KOGELNIK

KIKI KOGELNIK

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

LEAVING AN IMPRESSION: THE ART OF KIKI KOGELNIK

Dana Miller Kiki Kogelnik wanted to leave an impression. Not just with her unforgettable performances and inventive attire but quite literally—a perceptible trace left through the application of pressure. One of the defining characteristics of Kogelnik’s art is the numerous and idiosyncratic ways she incorporated indexical representations: stamped images, stenciled letters and traced objects. Most of these impressions are corporeal in nature: fingerprints, anatomical stamps, outlined body parts or full silhouettes. Each image takes its lines from real life, marking something or someone once physically present but no longer. And now, as we trace the contours of Kogelnik’s career more than two decades after her death, the enormous impact she left behind becomes vividly apparent.

LIFTOFF Kogelnik is typically described either as ’s preeminent Pop artist or one of a cadre of historically under-recognized female Pop artists. Both characterizations identify Kogelnik exclusively with , which is a misrepresentation of her work. This typological casting has persisted in part because Kogelnik first gained critical recognition within the Pop vernacular of New York in the 1960s, but it ignores the nuances of her work and the three succeeding decades of her individualistic output. As fellow artist once put it, “She was not Pop, she was strictly Kiki.”1 Kogelnik began her career in 1954 in , where she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, she studied with Albert Gütersloh and was deeply affected by the teaching of Herbert Boeckl, whose life drawing classes she assiduously attended. By the time she completed her studies in 1958, however, she was working primarily in an abstract, gestural manner, experimenting with aspects of the European movements Taschisme and Art Informel. Kogelnik was among a predominantly male group of artists associated with the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, run by the charismatic Catholic Monsignor Otto Mauer. Her travels through Europe in the late 1950s and her contacts with fellow artists in Paris, London, Venice and elsewhere convinced Kogelnik that she needed to leave Vienna to further her growth. After her first solo exhibition at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in late 1961 she moved to New York. As she reflected in highly pictorial language years later: “Vienna was the center of the world—one hardly ever went away because everything of any importance took place there. This city has formed the life of my youth—it was here that I first began to breathe. Until one day I ate something forbidden and suddenly grew wings. I climbed to the highest point of St. Stephen’s Cathedral and flew away.”2

7 LOVE AND ROCKETS With the encouragement of artists she met abroad, the American in particular, Kogelnik settled in Manhattan in late 1961. She was enthralled by the surfeit of commercial goods and the vibrant metropolis that greeted her, so distant from a Europe still struggling to recover from World War II. “When you come here from Europe, it is so fascinating…like a dream of our time,” she explained. “The new ideas are here, the materials are here. Why not use them?”3 Kogelnik’s response to New York aligned her with other artists looking for a way out of , and among those she befriended were Marisol Escobar, Billy Klüver, , , Patty Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and Tom Wesselmann. In December 1961 Claes Oldenburg “ran” his landmark work The Store in the East Village, selling Space Angel, 1965 handmade plaster and paint replicas of the mass-produced items he saw displayed in neighborhood shop windows. Kogelnik similarly prowled the stores and restaurant supply companies downtown looking for cheap source material. She often embedded her findings in her : a bright orange toy boat in Untitled (Still Life with Hand and Objects) (c. 1964, p. 39) and a baking mold in Untitled (Heart-Shaped Pan) (c. 1964, p. 41). In the hybrid human–machine of Space Angel (1965), a plastic egg container stands in for female reproductive organs. Perhaps most dramatically, Kogelnik bought shell casings of inactive ordnance from army/navy surplus stores. For her 1962 work Bombs in Love (p. 27), she connected two shell casings with metal fasteners and containers, painted a pair of brightly colored splayed legs and then festooned them with Plexiglas heart pendants. The resulting effect was to temper and satirize the phallic aggressiveness of the weaponry. If artificial hearts were being developed for humans at the time, then why couldn’t Kogelnik project human emotions onto military technology? Echoes of a similar macabre humor surfaced throughout American art, music and literature as a generation reckoned with the possibility of total nuclear annihilation. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was published in 1961 and Stanley Kubrick’s filmDr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released in 1964. Just a few years later the slogan “Make Love, Not War” would become a rallying cry at anti-war protests. At face value, Kogelnik’s statements from this time suggest an embrace of consumer culture and a faith in technological determinism. “What’s the matter with people? Why [are] we not happy to live today?” Kogelnik wrote. “There are airplanes and chewing gum, there is plastic and movies. There are computerdarlings and rockets. There soon will be the joy for all of us floating in space.”4

8 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE Kogelnik’s move to the United States also precipitated a shift toward the schematic figuration that would become a hallmark of her oeuvre. “She was an abstract painter until she came to . Her hand, resting on the canvas, fascinated her. She ran a pencil around it. Thus, she rediscovered the human form.”5 In this self-consciously contrived telling, Kogelnik arrived at the figure using the most ancient method of art. According to Pliny the Elder, the first instance of art was the tracing of a human shape on a cave wall. Kogelnik began making full-body tracings in the early 1960s in earnest, both of her own body and those of friends and acquaintances. She would ask her subjects to lie down on brown pattern paper spread on the floor and trace their shape with and Susan Weil, Sue, circa 1949 a long pencil.6 Kogelnik carefully cut along the outlines, which were individual but eschewed portraiture, and referred to the resulting human forms as her “cutouts.” Kogelnik was not the only one of her peers to explore literal depictions of the body in the postwar years: in 1951 Robert Rauschenberg and his then wife Susan Weil collaborated on a series of cyanotype impressions they called blueprints. Yves Klein made his Anthropometry works in the early 1960s by directing female models covered only in blue paint to deposit body prints on large sheets of paper. On the West Coast Bruce Conner made his self-portrait Angel photograms in 1975. Among those Kogelnik traced for her work were: Karel Appel, Sam Francis, Morton Feldman, Max Neuhaus, Claes Oldenburg, Patty Oldenburg, George Schwarz, whom she married in 1966, and later her son Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik (b. 1967). She referred to her subjects as people she had “taken” and kept a running list of “People I have taken” and “People I want to take.”7 This terminology mirrors the language of photography, with the implication that Kogelnik has captured something essential of her subject.

ARMS AND ARMOR Kogelnik used her cutouts as templates for her paintings but she routinely upended the one-to-one relationship between the object and its index. She duplicated, flipped, decapitated, punctured or otherwise broke down her figures as she saw fit. The tape she used to hold her cutouts in place often remains delineated in her paintings so that the figures or appendages resemble garments for paper dolls. Sometimes Kogelnik overlaid the painted figures with skeletal structures, as in Cold

9 Human Spare Part, circa 1968 Untitled (Floating), circa 1964

Passage (1964, p. 29), or she replaced the heads with helmetlike circles. In other instances, she used only the limbs or a double-sided arm she had transmuted from a tracing of her own hand. In Hands (1967–68, p. 51) Kogelnik carefully spaces arms, legs and hands across the canvas by repeating just a few stencils, each rendered in black with a hazy neon perimeter that signals the use of a spray gun. Hands emits an almost futuristic radioactive glow while also calling to mind Paleolithic caves where clusters of hand stencils were made from sprayed pigment. For Kogelnik the human body was something that could be engineered, programmed, plugged in and turned on. Parts could be swapped out and mechanical prostheses added. She made a series of by combining a polyurethane forearm with a telephone receiver, an electric plug and a light bulb in, respectively, Human Spare Part (c. 1968), Plug-in Hand (c. 1967) and Human Spare Part (c. 1968). Her exploration of bionic personages also surfaced in several rudimentary ink drawings. The body cavity in Untitled (Robot) (1964, p. 46) resembles a boiler room or car engine more than human anatomy. In the case of Untitled (Body Parts) (c. 1965, p. 47), what look like steel conduits and fittings, along with a spray-painted stencil of chair caning, are lodged inside the figure. The circle pattern of the caning relates formally to the fittings, but Kogelnik might have chosen the stencil as an ironic nod toward Picasso, the pioneer of assemblage, and his groundbreaking work Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Kogelnik’s technoid appendages and bionic bodies also recall the “mechanomorphology” of Marcel Duchamp’s Coffee Grinder (1914) and other components of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), as well as Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphs. In such paintings as Untitled (A) (c. 1963, p. 25) and Friends (1964, pp. 30–31) Kogelnik’s cutout figures seem wholly at home in an environment without gravity or intelligible depth. The seemingly weightless bodies are oriented in every direction, sometimes depicted in part, as if they are about to drift into the picture plane. Kogelnik’s spaces lack floors or horizon lines and Renaissance perspective bears no relevance. The bodies in Flight 704 (1964, p. 43) perform like cosmonauts floating toward the glowing orb at the center that remains just beyond their grasp. By 1964 space exploration had fully captured Kogelnik’s imagination and infiltrated her imagery. She referred to her style of work as “Space Art” and

10 the brochure that accompanied her 1964 exhibition in Toronto indicated that she “became interested in the dark side of the moon” in 1957 and by 1959 had “turned into a female robot.”8 Titles she bestowed on works from this time include Astronaut, Fly Me to the Moon, Liquid Injection Thrust and New Re-Entry Shape. Kogelnik even made a short 8mm film in her studio, Untitled (Floating) (c. 1964), in which she turned the camera upside down so that she looks as if she is levitating in midair. “I want other people to become aware of the beauty of space and to appreciate it with me,” she explained.9

Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

STAMPING In the years after World War II many artists found the serial appearance of ink stamps and the repetitive gesture of stamping an apposite way to encapsulate modern mechanization. The artist Arman, whom Kogelnik had befriended in Europe, began making two-dimensional “accumulations” that he called cachets using ink stamps before 1953. used hand-carved stamps in the mid-1950s, including in his commercial illustrations for companies such as I. Miller & Sons. Most famously he began using handmade stamps of Coca-Cola bottles in 1962, covering an entire canvas with a field of the hourglass shape. Kogelnik did not share Warhol’s fascination with commercial branding or the democratic heroism of the American grocery shelf. “I’m not involved with Coca-Cola,” she stated in 1966; “I am involved in the technical beauty of rockets, people flying in space and people becoming robots.”10 Kogelnik was, however, deeply interested in rubber stamps. They were a simple and direct way of creating an entirely flat impression, one that provided opportunities for repetition and slight variations within. The vast majority of Kogelnik’s stamps were the highly specialized anatomical stamps used by doctors and hospitals for pathological record keeping. Kogelnik’s first use of anatomical stamps dates to 1966, the year she married a medical resident who became a radiation oncologist. Kogelnik’s collection of these stamps included specific segments of the body, bone structure, circulatory system and inner organs. Many of the stamps were ordered from Everson Ross on Chambers Street or Barton Manufacturing Co. on Warren Street, both in New York City. A worn catalog from the latter in Kogelnik’s archives advertises, “Keep Pictorial Case Records with Barton’s Anatomical Rubber Stamps.” Kogelnik’s art often plays with the separation between interior and exterior, the liminal and subliminal, and the anatomical stamps allowed her to picture what is not visible to the naked eye. Complex skeletal structures could now be accurately conveyed with the press of a stamp. Like her cutouts, the stamps produced an imprint of an anonymous human using contour rather

11 Untitled (Robots), circa 1967 Attitude Control, 1964

than hue. But unlike her full-scale cutouts, the ink application and the smaller size of the stamps were better suited to a paper ground. Kogelnik continued to advance her imagery of “people becoming robots” in a series of stamped drawings she called Robots. The unexpectedly graceful Untitled (Robots) (1966, p. 62) shows several layers of stamped body fragments coalescing as they appear to rise from undulating waves of blue (the latter made by a patterned roller stamp). The drawing can be read as an origin story, a cyborg emerging fully formed from the sea like a futuristic hallucination of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In Untitled (Robots) (c. 1967) Kogelnik generated dramatic frisson by cleverly combining imprinted elements with her handmade marks. The stamped chartreuse body at center is separated into segments by rows of tight black circles and irregular yellow ovals, as if it were being disassembled. Upon close inspection we see that the yellow forms are in fact fingerprints.11 Kogelnik has comingled commercial stamps with the most primitive and individual imprint possible. In the ominous Untitled (Robots) (c. 1967) Kogelnik superimposed circles ringed with blue auras upon her fully and partially formed robots. Inside each ring she drew irregular clusters of tiny colored circles, like viruses growing in petri dishes. Across them she has imprinted the familiar readymade stamp fragile. Not surprisingly, there is a forensic concentration to these works, as if Kogelnik were a scientist studying a disease or a medical examiner completing an autopsy.

ATOMS, ORBITS AND OTHER CIRCLES Besides the human figure, the circle was the most frequently employed motif in Kogelnik’s visual vocabulary. In the early 1960s she attached circular objects onto the surface of her works—ashtrays, pie pans, drains, washers and strainers— and made prominent use of screws, nail heads and grommets. As the decade progressed, she used various methods of creating level circles in her paintings and works on paper: stencils, stamps, hole punches and tracing objects (including the aforementioned items). Sometimes the circles are small and linked together like a chain necklace, as in

12 Untitled (Air Mail) (c. 1967, p. 63). In other instances, the circles appear like glowing orbs or planets exerting a magnetic pull on nearby bodies, as in Flight 704. Kogelnik Untitled (New York Street Performance), 1967 often used the circle motif to convey a sense of transparency, creating overlapping images or perforating her forms. When distributed en masse across a canvas, as in Attitude Control (1964), the circles collapse figure and ground and create a connective web that undergirds everything from the inner body to outer space. The effect of this totalizing device is to remind us that the entirety of our universe is composed of the same basic elements; in essence, we are all made of stardust. Yayoi Kusama would express similar aesthetic goals in the 1960s with her infinity net paintings and polka dot environments. “I wanted to examine the single dot that Strassenbilder Wien, 1967 was my own life,” she wrote. “One polka dot: a single particle among billions. I issued a manifesto stating that everything— myself, others, the entire universe—would be obliterated by white nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots.”12

HANG-UPS In 1967 Kogelnik created two street performances, one in New York and one in Vienna, in which she took her cutouts into the real world with somewhat madcap results. Documentary photos of what is known as “New York Street Performance” capture Kogelnik overwhelmed by the white foam body forms wrapped around her shoulders and the appendages spilling out of her arms. It’s as if a set of chalk drawings from a crime Claes Oldenburg carrying Giant Toothpaste Tube, 1964 scene suddenly took on a third dimension. In Strassenbilder Photo by Hans Hammarskiöld, 1966

13 Left: Hanging, 1970 Above: Vietnam, 1970

Wien, the cutout forms were flattened and suspended from a length of cord by clothespins, like laundry put out to dry. In a sequence of pictures Kogelnik carries the line through the city to the consternation of the matronly ladies gathered around her. The photographs are reminiscent of the 1966 Hans Hammarskiöld images of Claes Oldenburg transporting his Giant Toothpaste Tube down a London street as startled passersby stare at him. The pictures record the sparks generated when art that is usually confined to the semiprivate spaces of museums and galleries encounters the unprepared public. This friction was increasingly evident in Vienna, which was ground zero for the ferocious performances of the Viennese Actionists and the radical actions of VALIE EXPORT, all of which Kogelnik surely kept apprised of during her frequent travels back to her home country. In 1968 Kogelnik began her Hangings series, which appears to be directly descended from the Vienna performance. She fabricated colorful vinyl silhouettes from the templates of her cutouts and draped them over metal armatures or coat hangers like flayed skin. She also produced vinyl versions of organs, bones and the vascular system. Kogelnik attached the hangers to painted canvases or hung them in groups on garment racks. She said the Hangings were inspired by the racks of clothing she saw being pushed along the streets in the Garment District neighborhood of her New York studio. Besides being a literal interpretation of the traditional “hanging of art,” the Hangings depend upon the laws of gravity, making them the earthbound counterpoints to her space-traveling cutouts. The human body was the site of contestation for much of the social upheaval that roiled the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The skinlike silhouettes that comprise the Hangings reflected the politics and activism of their time and place more explicitly than any of Kogelnik’s previous works. Conversations about race and the legacy of slavery were brought to the forefront by the Civil Rights Movement and the term hanging summoned the not so distant practice of lynching as a means of inflicting violence on and instilling terror in African Americans. Hanging (1970), composed of one

14 Untitled (Hanging with Hands), circa 1969 Laundry Day in Manhattan!, 1970

black sheath and one sheath the color of Caucasian skin, hanging side by side on separate hangers, seems to embody the “separate but equal” language used in the fight over desegregation. Kogelnik also situates these works within America’s anti-war protests in a number of provocative ink drawings from the same year. Vietnam (1970) shows torsos and legs strung up on a line, each body fragment patterned with military camouflage, with helmets adorning the heads—the suggestion being that the soldiers, whose bodies have suffered the ravages of war, have been abandoned, hung out to dry like laundry, so to speak. In using laundry as a trope, Kogelnik necessarily inscribed gender dynamics into the works as domestic labor is still linked almost exclusively to women. As if to prove the point, Chandelier Hanging (1970) features smaller, female silhouettes hanging daintily by their heads from a circular pink lingerie hanger. The implication here is that women have been given lesser treatment or are regarded as requiring more delicate handling. In other works Kogelnik emphasized the clothes hanger, which had become a potent visual symbol in the fight to make abortion legal. In Untitled (Hanging with Hands) (c. 1969) a purple and yellow double-sided arm drapes over a hanger atop a stamped female body. The composition is a visceral reminder of the bodily harm inflicted upon women who used hangers for self-induced abortions. And in case it wasn’t clear who was to blame for all this carnage, Kogelnik made several drawings vilifying politicians. Laundry Day in Manhattan! (1970) shows Hangings stretched on a laundry line running from the Empire State Building to a water tower atop another building. The title is inscribed beneath the image, along with “Suspicious Politicians Are Being Hanged Out for Drying—After the Cleaning Process.” By 1970 the technological optimism Kogelnik professed at the beginning of the prior decade had become decidedly vexed. Or perhaps her thinking was always more nuanced than her buoyant and colorful works of the 1960s led one to believe, and her earlier statements about the wonder of computerdarlings and robots in love should never have been taken at face value. One can reasonably assume that, as a young girl born in Austria in 1935, World War II must have had

15 an enormous impact on Kogelnik. Auschwitz and Hiroshima had demonstrated technology’s horrific capacity to brutalize the human body—allegations of human skin lampshades and people vaporized leaving only their “shadows” burned into stone. With the hindsight afforded by her works from 1970, one can reread Kogelnik’s 1960s works in a different register, one of greater irony, critique and pessimism that is quite distant ideologically from canonical Pop art. What emerges is the discomfiting certainty that at the heart of Kogelnik’s works is the disfiguring of figures.

SUPERWOMAN Throughout her career Kogelnik demonstrated a willingness to test the mutability of socially constructed gender roles. She refused to separate her art from her life and experimented with a cast of characters in her public outings. “I really wear what you’d call costumes. I play parts when I dress up to go out,” she explained.13 But in the 1960s the critical scaffolding to understand these sartorial labors as valid forms of artistic expression was not yet in place, and, like Kusama, who similarly used attire as a form of creative expression, Kogelnik was sometimes derided for her efforts or regarded less seriously. Many of the contemporaneous reviews of her work focus on her personal appearance or her frequent mentions in the social and fashion press. Even upon her passing, testimonials from her peers mentioned her “Marlene Dietrich legs”14 or how early on she “had begun to place faith in her beauty and sex appeal.”15 Female attractiveness was a double-edged sword, however, and without it one might be denied entrée to the inner circle of the art world, as her friend and studio neighbor Carolee Schneemann explained with characteristic candor: “You really have to have been considered beautiful to have been accepted by the male art club. And I called us the ‘cunt mascots.’ You know, like the sex mascots. It’s very nice to have this beautiful sexy woman who’s at your openings, at your parties, at your dinners. And maybe, maybe you’ll mention her work to your gallery dealer. But maybe you won’t. So we were constantly observing the threshold of male achievement. And how the art world wanted to valorize the male artists and they wanted us to decorate that world.”16 Although Kogelnik cultivated a distinctive visual persona, she knew the trap of relying on sex appeal. An undated note in her archive laments, “A woman can seduce one man to come—she can even do it with 2 or 3. But she can’t seduce all men to come—and­­ even women…to see her paintings.”17 Kogelnik regularly participated in gallery shows, primarily outside New York, and found critical success in Europe, but sustained support from a New York gallery eluded her during her lifetime. As Kogelnik was wrestling with society’s gender expectations, the larger culture was witnessing the first stirrings of the feminist movement and a new generation of female scholars and critics began advocating for a feminist agenda. The extreme example was Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968, one year after self-publishing her SCUM Manifesto, SCUM being an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men. Although Kogelnik professed no adherence to any particular doctrine,

16 Womans Lib, 1971 It Hurts, 1974–76

much less Solanas’s, the scissors had become a feminist statement by association. In the print Womans Lib (1971) Kogelnik presents an image of herself in sunglasses, trench coat and a large hat, wielding oversize scissors. The open scissors are situated between her legs, echoing the shape of her body and calling to mind both a phallus and a jackhammer. Beneath her are what appear to be tatters of her cutouts. In a related 1973 , Superwoman, Kogelnik asserts the same posture with the scissors but now wears sunglasses, an aviator hat, combat boots and a jumpsuit with a zipper down the middle. The bodily fragments beneath are gone but blood-red gloves hint at the potential for violence. In each of these images, the scissors, an essential tool in Kogelnik’s artistic arsenal, are the source of assertive female power. When the punk movement first came onto the scene at the end of the 1970s, Kogelnik found affinities: “My work has been related to their movement for many years: the aggression, the scissors, cutting things up.”18 About the time she made Womans Lib Kogelnik began sourcing her models from advertisements or fashion editorials rather than real life. She was adopting strategies of appropriation before the term became normalized and several years before the 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space crystallized the approach. Moving away from the androgyny and non- specificity of her cutouts, she focused on the archetypes of femininity circulated in mass media. Kogelnik was attuned to the body shapes, the fashions and the makeup, but also to the staging of these women. They frequently appear in pairs, caught in moments of surprise, vulnerability or ecstasy, their mouths open and their eyes shielded by sunglasses. Her women are subject to the male gaze but their own view is interrupted. No longer interested in penetrating the superficial layers of the body, Kogelnik made the highly sexualized female facade her subject. They are surfaces just like her Hangings. Although sourced from photography, Kogelnik refined the imagery through a process of elimination to create a flat, streamlined style. The various parts of the body are treated separately; hair looks applied like a wig or helmet, and areas of exposed skin are rendered with patterns or marbling. In their original context these models might have stirred arousal, but in Kogelnik’s hands

17 they have become otherworldly, almost alien, with simplified features and unnatural coloring. The “darling” in Dynamite Darling (1972, p. 57) has purple lips and eyes and a green blush upon her cheeks. Perhaps the faces of her mid-1970s women became more masklike as a consequence of Kogelnik’s newfound interest in ceramics and her playful use of opaque surfaces and bright glazes in heads such as R = R (c. 1975, p. 61). Kogelnik was fond of saying, “Art comes from artificial, because it is not nature,” and in these women paintings she asserts the artificiality of the female ideal.19 To further emphasize their unnaturalness she often juxtaposed her mannequins with small animals: butterflies, frogs, snakes and so forth. Kogelnik’s women were constructed by culture, not born from nature. And yet these fashion models were not so removed from her cutout cosmonauts as might be initially thought. “Fashion imagery relates directly to our fantasy expectations of the world,” she explained.20 These fantasies belonged to both men and women and shaped the way women perceived their own bodies and identities. “My paintings are about women—about illusions women have of themselves,” Kogelnik clarified.21 In at least one case, Vienna Summer (1975, p. 59), she based the figures on photographs of herself and a friend, begging the question whether these paintings aren’t all autobiographical projections. As if to emphasize the danger of these illusions, Kogelnik made a group called It Hurts, in which her women go about their pantomime seemingly unaware of the menacing knives, hammers and tools that she has integrated into the compositions.

FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON In July 1969, at Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna, the gallery where she had her first solo exhibition, Kogelnik created Moonhappening, a performance designed to coincide with NASA’s landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon. Kogelnik made silkscreens as the event aired live on televisions in the gallery and to millions of people all around the world. She printed the stenciled words “I can see my footprints” over an image of the moon, a partial quote from astronaut Neil Armstrong’s communications from the lunar surface.22 Kogelnik’s print combines the apex of human technical achievement, the lunar landing, with the most primitive form of leaving an impression: the footprint. Armstrong seemed to have reacted with the same shock of recognition that Kogelnik experienced when she traced her own handprint all those years before. The astronaut’s footprint was an unconscious and mirrorless reflection of his presence, but also a reflection of mankind. As he most famously said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”23 Kogelnik’s tracings of her friends and acquaintances were similarly self-reflective; the final forms were manifestations of the larger society that shaped them. “The human shape did not need to be exact with all details,” she wrote. “But it is essential to me that it has real life size. And that it gives us the impact like a footprint in the sand. The footprint of us.”24

18 I Can See My Footprints, 1969 Kiki Kogelnik, 1967

For her show at the same gallery two years before, Kogelnik fabricated a promotional poster with an image of herself wearing a mechanized helmet, Kiki Kogelnik (1967).25 The helmet, emblazoned with a “K” at the center, is labeled as equipped with solar cells, antennae, storage battery and receiver. Like almost every important artist, Kogelnik functioned as a receiver and transmitter. She had a unique capacity to identify and illuminate that which was hidden, or we didn’t yet recognize about our world. Her works take us on artistic journeys that plumb the inner workings of our bodies and map the outer cosmos of the universe. Kogelnik was the intrepid heroine in the poster, always pushing boundaries in both her art and her life. As she wrote, “I always want to do what I am afraid of. Like when I climbed up that high tower on that worldfair, and I jumped down: Not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid.”26 With the distance of several decades we see just how high Kogelnik climbed. She accomplished the remarkable feat of expanding the coordinates of our imaginations and probing the profundities of existence while demonstrating that the most potent images can be found close at hand or even underfoot.

19 NOTES

1 Tom Wesselmann, August 20, 1997, quoted in Kiki Kogelnik: Retrospektive 1935–1997, exh. cat. (Vienna: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, 1998), 170. 2 Kiki Kogelnik, “1995 City of Vienna Prize,” acceptance speech, ibid., 183. 3 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in “The Fashions: Kiki is Kicks,” in Women’s Wear Daily, June 22, 1966, 12. 4 Kiki Kogelnik, “Katalog,” typescript, c. 1966. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. This quote and several others from Kogelnik’s typescripts and manuscripts have been corrected for spelling. My thanks to Anna Sauer for her help in accessing the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation Archives and for answering many of my questions. 5 Kiki Kogelnik, “Kiki Kogelnik,” typescript, c. 1965. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. Related handwritten notes indicate that this text was intended for Kogelnik’s 1965 exhibition at the Austrian Institute, New York, and that it was published in the accompanying exhibition brochure. In the brochure, that text was signed H.K., which may have stood for Herwig Kogelnik, her brother. 6 Kogelnik describes this process in a typescript titled “How I Work,” 1970. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 7 Kiki Kogelnik, manuscript, c. 1970. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 8 Kiki Kogelnik, “Biography,” World Premiere: Kiki, exh. brochure (Toronto: Jerrold Morris International Gallery, 1964), n.p. 9 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Philomene Ezack, “It’s Space Age Art and Kiki is a Robot (She Says),” New York World Telegraph and Sun, December 23, 1965. 10 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in “The Fashions.” 11 Interestingly, Kogelnik made a series of abstract works composed entirely of fingerprints, entitled Fingermalerei [Finger painting], in 1956, while still in Vienna. 12 Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 23. 13 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Ezack, “It’s Space Age Art.” 14 In Karel Appel’s 1998 remembrance of Kogelnik, he recalled, “She was all showing her legs. In the style of Marlene Dietrich. She had Marlene Dietrich legs! Was famous for that!” Belvedere, 179. 15 Maria Lassnig, ibid., 169. 16 Carolee Schneemann, quoted in Kiki’s Cosmos – The Art of Kiki Kogelnik, television documentary by Ines Mitterer, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF, 2010, 5:20. 17 Kiki Kogelnik, untitled typescript, c. mid-1960s. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 18 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in the New York Post, September 29, 1979, Belvedere, 42. 19 A longer statement found in Kogelnik’s papers reads, “Art comes from artificial, because it is not nature—this idea comes into my head during eating a watermelon.” Untitled typescript, c. 1966. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 20 Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in Jack Gallery solo show press release, April 21, 1977. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 21 Kiki Kogelnik, unpublished diary excerpt, quoted in Kiki’s Cosmos. 22 Neil Armstrong’s precise words were as follows: “I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” This was not Armstrong’s first utterance upon stepping onto the moon but part of a longer conversation about the geologic composition of the surface. “One Small Step,” Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, updated April 18, 2018, https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html. 23 Ibid. 24 Kiki Kogelnik, “Kiki Kogelnik,” typescript, c. 1966. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. 25 Imitative postal stamp versions of this image are found on envelopes from around the same time in Kogelnik’s archives. Presumably Kogelnik had them fabricated. 26 Kiki Kogelnik, “Wednesday,” typescript, c. 1970. Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

20 21

PLATES UNTITLED (A) circa 1963 Oil and acrylic on canvas

71 x 47 3/8 inches (180.6 x 120.6 cm)

24

BOMBS IN LOVE

1962 Mixed media with Plexiglas and acrylic on bomb casings 48 x 10 x 25 inches (121.9 x 25.4 x 63.5 cm)

26

COLD PASSAGE

1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas

59 3/4 x 48 inches (151.8 x 121.9 cm)

28

FRIENDS

1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas

114 7/8 x 143 1/4 inches (291.8 x 364 cm)

30

UNTITLED circa 1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas 23 x 16 inches (58.5 x 40.8 cm)

32

BLACK FRIEND

1963 Mixed media on Masonite board, enamel on card stock

19 5/8 x 29 1/2 x 1 inch (50.1 x 75.1 x 2.5 cm)

34

UNTITLED (STILL LIFE WITH BABIES) circa 1964 Mixed media with enamel, metallic foil and plastic on canvas panel

16 x 12 x 2 3/8 inches (40.6 x 30.4 x 6.3 cm)

36

UNTITLED (STILL LIFE WITH HAND AND OBJECTS) circa 1964 Acrylic and plastic on board 14 x 10 x 3 inches (35.6 x 25.4 x 7.6 cm)

38

UNTITLED (HEART-SHAPED PAN) circa 1964 Acrylic on baking pan

9 x 9 3/8 x 1 3/8 inches (23 x 24 x 3.6 cm)

40

FLIGHT 704

1964 Acrylic on canvas

71 3/4 x 71 3/4 inches (182.5 x 182.5 cm)

42

UNTITLED circa 1963 Oil on canvas 12 x 12 inches (30.7 x 30.7 cm)

44

UNTITLED (ROBOT)

1964 Ink and color pencil on paper

22 3/8 x 14 3/4 inches (57 x 37.5 cm)

46 UNTITLED (BODY PARTS)

circa 1965 Enamel and India ink on paper

28 3/4 x 22 7/8 inches (73 x 58 cm)

47 UNTITLED (STILL LIFE WITH GLOBE)

1964 Enamel, India ink, metallic foil and collage on paper 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

48

HANDS

1967–68 Oil and acrylic on canvas 70 x 50 inches (177.9 x 127.1 cm)

50

DIVIDED SOULS circa 1986 Sheet vinyl, chromed steel hangers and chromed steel garment racks

100 3/8 x 52 x 24 1/8 inches (255 x 132 x 61.5 cm)

52

UNTITLED (BREAST) circa 1968 Enamel on fiberglass

7 7/8 x 5 1/8 x 4 7/8 inches (20 x 13 x 12.5 cm)

54

DYNAMITE DARLING

1972 Oil and acrylic on canvas 72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm)

56

VIENNA SUMMER

1975 Oil and acrylic on canvas

107 7/8 x 72 inches (274.1 x 183.1 cm)

58

R = R circa 1975 Glazed ceramic

13 x 10 5/8 x 16 7/8 inches (33 x 27 x 43 cm)

60

UNTITLED (ROBOTS)

1966 Acrylic and pencil on paper

25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (64.8 x 49.5 cm)

62 UNTITLED (AIR MAIL)

circa 1967 India ink, ink and color pencil on paper 23 x 14 inches (58.6 x 35.7 cm)

63 UNTITLED (ROBOTS) circa 1967 Acrylic, color pencil and ink on paper 15 x 23 inches (38.2 x 58.6 cm)

64

UNTITLED (SUPERWOMAN) circa 1973 Photographic print and color pencil on paper 10 x 8 inches (25.5 x 20.3 cm)

66

BUTTERFLY

1977 Oil and acrylic on canvas 72 x 54 inches (182.8 x 137.4 cm)

68

CITY

1979 Oil and acrylic on canvas

98 5/8 x 63 inches (250.6 x 160.3 cm)

70

ILLUSTRATIONS Page 14, left Hanging, 1970 Cover Acrylic, sheet vinyl and hangers on canvas Untitled (Superwoman), circa 1973 66 3/8 x 54 1/8 inches (168.6 x 137.5 cm) Photographic print and color pencil on paper 10 x 8 inches (25.5 x 20.3 cm) Page 14, right Vietnam, 1970 Pages 4–5 Ink on paper Kiki Kogelnik in her studio on 940 Broadway with paintings 11 x 13 3/4 inches (28 x 35 cm) Self-Portrait (1964), Miss Universe (1963), Friends (1964), Portrait of an Attractive Man (1964), Outer Space (1964), Page 15, left New York, 1964. Photographer unknown Untitled (Hanging with Hands), circa 1969 © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Acrylic, enamel, India ink and ink on paper 23 x 29 inches (58.6 x 73.7 cm) Page 8 Space Angel, 1965 Page 15, right Mixed media with vinyl and enamel on masonite board Laundry Day in Manhattan!, 1970 44 1/2 x 25 3/8 x 6 inches (113 x 64.5 x 15.2 cm) Ink on paper 11 x 13 3/4 inches (28 x 35 cm) Page 9 Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Sue, circa 1949 Page 17, left Monoprint: exposed blueprint paper Womans Lib, 1971 69 3/4 x 41 5/8 inches (177.2 x 105.7 cm) Silkscreen on paper Private collection 29 7/8 x 22 1/2 inches (76 x 57 cm) © 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Susan Weil / Page 17, right Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY It Hurts, 1974–76 Page 10, left Oil and acrylic on canvas Human Spare Part, circa 1968 72 x 54 inches (182.9 x 137.2 cm) Mixed media with acrylic on polyurethane Page 18, left 4 1/8 x 23 x 6 3/8 inches (10.5 x 58.5 x 16.5 cm) I Can See My Footprints, 1969 Page 10, right Silkscreen on paper Untitled (Floating), circa 1964 27 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches (70 x 70 cm) 8mm black and white film Page 18, right 0:37 min Kiki Kogelnik, 1967 Page 11 Offset print on paper Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962 24 x 17 inches (61 x 43.2 cm) Acrylic, screenprint and graphite pencil on canvas Page 21 © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Friends, 1964 (detail; pp. 30–31) Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Oil and acrylic on canvas Page 12, left 114 7/8 x 143 1/4 inches (291.8 x 364 cm) Untitled (Robots), circa 1967 Page 22 Acrylic, India ink, ink and color pencil on paper Kiki Kogelnik with paintings City (1979) and Aloft (1979), 23 x 29 inches (58.5 x 73.6 cm) New York, 1979. Photograph by Paul Bendorius Page 12, right © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Attitude Control, 1964 Pages 72–73 Oil and acrylic on canvas I Have Seen the Future, circa 1973 72 1/8 x 54 1/8 inches (183.2 x 137.5 cm) Acrylic and pencil on paper Page 13, top 5 3/8 x 23 inches (13.8 x 58.6 cm) Untitled (New York Street Performance), 1967 Page 76 Page 13, middle Kiki Kogelnik in her Womans Lib outfit, New York, 1971 Strassenbilder Wien, 1967 Photographs by Paul Bendorius Photograph by Joseph Tandl © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Page 13, bottom Back cover Hans Hammarskiöld, Claes Oldenburg, London, Dynamite Darling, 1972 (detail; p. 57) 1966, Gelatin silver photograph Oil and acrylic on canvas Photo © Hans Hammarskiöld Heritage 72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm) This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition: KIKI KOGELNIK

May 23–June 29, 2019

Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 212 744 7400 miandn.com

Publication © 2019 Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Essay © 2019 Dana Miller

All works of art by Kiki Kogelink © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

Design: Matthew Polhamus Printing: Phoenix Litho, Philadelphia, PA Publication Director: Josephine Nash Copy Editor: Miles Champion

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holders.

ISBN: 978-0-9986312-8-8

Available through ARTBOOK I D.A.P. 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 New York, NY 10004 212 627 1999 artbook.com

Mitchell-Innes & Nash wishes to extend very special thanks to Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik, Executive Director, and Pilar Zevallos, Managing Director, of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation for their support, without which this exhibition would not have been possible. Our thanks also to Anna Sauer, Archivist, and Taylor Hinojosa-Hayes, Assistant, of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Deepest thanks to Dana Miller for her eloquent and insightful essay.

KIKI KIKI KOGELNIK

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH